Democrats Can't Buy Themselves A Joe Rogan

The New York Times published a piece last week about efforts by Democratic operatives and donors to invest in liberal influencers and “find the next Joe Rogan.”

When Trump won, many journalists gave some credit to Rogan and the network of extremely popular right-leaning comedy podcasts that orbit around him. Those shows pander to the audience of low-information, low-propensity voters that Trump turned out to win the election. It follows, then, that Democrats should look to do the same.

But to attempt to replicate Rogan and his cohort by seeding money to promising left-leaning influencers gets the causation wrong. Rogan and his ilk are not right-wing propagandists targeting low-information voters; they are low-information voters being targeted by right-wing propaganda. Rogan is downstream of a pre-existing right-wing media ecosystem that targets dummies like him. He’s a proliferator of right-wing propaganda, sure, but he’s a consumer first.

For example, a couple years back Rogan repeated the right-wing conspiracy that a school had installed a litter box to accommodate a student who identi fied as a furry. He wasn’t knowingly propagating a lie to aid the Republican Party, he was repeating a dumpster-tier conspiracy theory he had seen online, because he is an idiot.

This is what many liberals don’t understand: the notable thing about Rogan’s political trajectory is that the right has built a propaganda apparatus powerful enough to capture people like him and turn them into vectors of misinformation. You can boost left-leaning influencers all you want, but Twitter/X will still be in the hands of a reactionary freak, and the algorithms will still work to favor the right. You’re finding better players, but the playing field is still uneven.

The fact that Democratic donors are spreading money across left and liberal influencers is, on balance, probably a good thing. They’re an important part of the new media ecosystem, and we should be watering those plants. But, even putting aside the right’s structural advantage on social media, it’s just not a strategy for mimicking the podcast network that helped propel Trump to victory. 

The approach seems to be simple: identify liberal influencers and invest in them. But, again, that isn’t what happened on the right. Rogan and Co. were not conservative influencers, they were a bunch of famous comedy guys who were steadily pulled into conservative politics. That means that their audiences were (1) large and (2) not very politically engaged, making them an ideal target for a campaign looking to mobilize new voters. If you run around funding smaller left-leaning creators, you get neither of those features. Their audiences are generally smaller and more politically engaged, making them a shallow well for new voters.

The other issue here is that because these podcasters aren’t committed Republicans, their allegiance is finicky. There’s no telling whether they’ll stick with the right, drift left, or abandon politics altogether. For their fans, that adds to their authenticity. But if you’re Democratic Party benefactor it makes for a risky investment. If you give millions of dollars to some halfwit influencer who just read their first book about politics, you risk them going in a different direction when they read their second.

Maybe more to the point, part of the appeal of the Rogansphere is that they are outside of the traditional political establishment, and frequently espouse views that aren’t popular on the right. Democrats, meanwhile, won’t even let arguably the most talented and popular member of their caucus lead the Oversight Committee because she’s too progressive. Are they really going to embrace a bunch of freewheeling lefty influencers?

The Democrats have a frustrating tendency to try emulating the successes of the right without fully understanding them. For example, by the late 90s it was apparent that the Federalist Society, a right-wing power center masquerading as a campus legal organization, had become a potent influence in law and politics. In response, Democrats created the American Constitution Society, intended to be its liberal equivalent. But ACS lacked the secret sauce; like the party itself, it had no clear ideological mission, and was frequently bogged down by the internecine conflicts of big tent politics. Today, twenty five years after its founding, ACS is little more than a campus student group, while the Federalist Society has hand-selected multiple Supreme Court justices. For all their efforts, Democrats were only ever able to replicate the Federalist Society’s facade.

We saw a similar story unfold when liberals attempted to counter right-wing dominance of talk radio by launching their own network, Air America. Despite identifying an array of talent, from Sam Seder to Al Franken and Rachel Maddow, the network never reached its promise; it was trying to enter a market that had already been saturated with right-wing content.

It’s hard not to see the same mistakes being repeated here. Democrats, caught flat-footed, scramble to replicate what they see on the right. But they miss the forest for the trees. They copy the outputs without understanding the inputs. The result, time after time, is a feeble imitation – and one that arguably diverts resources from more worthwhile efforts.

If the Democrats want to piece together a winning coalition, it will take more than creating a knock-off version of what Republicans have built. They’ll need to think about what their strengths are and play to them. If they don’t, they’ll be playing from behind for another generation.