The Old Campaign Playbook Is Dead

In the aftermath of the 2024 race, Democrats have been struggling to adapt to the new logic of the attention economy. On this episode of Galaxy Brain, Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s campaign, joins Charlie Warzel to talk about what went wrong and how Democrats need to embrace a new theory of attention. They discuss AI’s collision course with electoral politics ahead of the midterms and how to identify candidates who can use the internet to their advantage.The following is a transcript of the episode: Rob Flaherty: Digital content is how people consume the brand of your campaign. And I think people in politics traditionally—establishment politics—miss that all the time. [Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today, we’re going to talk about how to win elections in the attention economy.In the aftermath of the 2024 election, during their online victory lap, right-wing influencers started repeating the same phrase: You are the media.“The legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth telling is in. No more complaining about the media.” That’s what the right-wing activist James O’Keefe posted shortly after the election.A lot of this was just gloating. But behind it is the truth that the media dynamics of the 2024 race were just different. Influencers and podcasts played this outsized role in directing the conversation arguably more than traditional media did—2024 was the first election of the [Elon] Musk–owned era of Twitter or X, and Musk did his best to try to turn the platform into a political weapon.In the weeks after the election, Democrats began arguing among themselves about asymmetries between the parties in harnessing this new media environment. There were concerns about Harris’s campaign’s brand, her leaning into the “brat summer” memes, and her general cautiousness to put people lik