Why the Democrats’ Digital Strategy Is Doomed to Fail

We can’t win the new media space while giving nothing of ourselves

We’ve all seen the video: Zohran Mamadani talking to voters along Fordham Road and Hillside Avenue in the Bronx about how they cast their votes in the presidential election. There’s no lecturing or moralizing. No patronizing or defensive tone. Just genuine curiosity from an elected official there to listen and—hopefully—learn something new.

It’s a rare thing to witness in politics: a campaign that feels bigger than any one person, that seeks to embody the hopes and ambitions of regular New Yorkers.

Zohran’s ability to speak directly to voters, to forge real human connections, left little room for opponents to pounce. Attacks on his character couldn’t puncture the trust he had built with his base. He harnessed the power of new media in a way that Democrats have been so desperate to capture.

In fact, since their election loss, Democrats have gone into hyper-drive on social media. It’s bordering on obsession. Senator Cory Booker recently boasted to Semafor about how the Democratic Caucus has quadrupled its social media engagement (on the very same day polling dropped showing record low approvals for Democrats). According to Booker, “Our caucus was not understanding that we put so much energy into going on MSNBC, but more people are on these devices.” Booker has reportedly also invited tech executives to talk to Senate Democrats about the algorithms behind the platforms.

We’re only six months into Trump 2.0 and the Democrats’ new media strategy is already starting to grate. Maybe you’ve seen one of the many videos of creators interviewing Democrats in their Capitol offices, or in the claustrophobic halls of the Capitol, or on the front steps of the Capitol. Or maybe you’ve seen Democrats pump iron, parody Street Fighter, or casually drop a curse word. But authenticity is more than just dropping an f-bomb in a speech, and virality isn’t just riffing on the latest TikTok craze (while ignoring trending topics like the starvation of kids in Gaza or deadly floods in Texas).

While Zohran turns the camera outward on the experiences of working people—halal cart vendors, taxi drivers, tenants—Democrats expect to win back favor by turning the camera inward, on themselves. It’s digital media as reputation management, divorced from any kind of ideological project or movement building.

Part of Zohran’s appeal is that he never feels like he’s trying to game an algorithm. He’s not bragging about the stats he’s putting up. His videos feel like they’re made for us—because they are.

Democrats, by and large, are making videos for themselves. Pure glaze designed to satiate a shrinking pool of Blue MAGA diehards and prove to long-time donors that they’re doing something, anything.

Why aren’t they on the streets talking to regular people? Because they know they won’t like what they hear.

As usual, the party wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want us to trust them. But they also want to risk nothing, change nothing, and be whoever it is they need to be in any given moment.

What happens when you produce content so tightly controlled? So desperate for heart emojis? It feels flat and sterile, devoid of any of the qualities that helped Zohran’s videos break through.

We can’t win the new media space while giving nothing of ourselves. Mamdani has shown that you can be a human being and it doesn’t have to come with strings attached. You don’t have to talk out of both sides of your mouth to placate one constituency over another.

Bernie Sanders has done that his entire career and he has only grown his appeal—not just to people across generations but across political ideology and class. Mamdani is an evolution of this kind of principled approach, bridging divides across generation and race. No, he’s not the messiah—he’s just a guy. But he’s a guy that doesn’t sound entirely full of shit.

Mamdani lets people decide on the merits of his arguments, whether or not they believe him. This is the clearest path forward for Democrats if they want to regain legitimacy with voters. The mealy-mouthed appeals to both sides is what got them here—and no amount of new media spending or gaming of the algorithm can dig them out of that hole.