Hey there! Last week we talked about the lessons that Democrats didn’t learn in 2016 and what they need to learn from 2024. This week, we’re going to talk about some of the problems that might prevent them from implementing any lessons learned and what they (and you!) can do about it. Let’s dig into it.

Fewer Americans are going to college

Take a look at these two charts below:

Fewer and fewer young adults are attending college in the United States, and even fewer still are enrolling in college courses after graduating high school. The falloff has been most precipitous among young men, who now enroll in college 10% less often than their female counterparts. This trend is not good.

College isn’t a necessity for many people. But in aggregate, when average education levels are highly correlated with economic prosperity, it’s not a great trend. But that’s not what I want to focus on today. Instead, I want to touch on how changing education levels impact our media consumption and our voting patterns.

Exit polls have shown that the Republican electorate has increasingly attracted low education and low income voters, while high education and high income voters have increasingly trended Democratic:

Donald Trump’s supporters look a lot more like Bill Clinton voters than they do Bob Dole voters. And Kamala Harris supporters are closer in education and income to Bob Dole’s Republican electorate than they are to Joe Biden voters!

What’s more, education impacts not just voting patterns but media consumption. Your education and your income don’t just influence how you vote; they also influence the sources you trust. And in the age of fast-spreading misinformation, that means high education voters and low education voters are living in entirely different realities.

What We’re Searching With.

Oh, the internet. It can be a scary place… but less so with Freespoke. Freespoke is a search engine that does a few important things differently:

• News results show all sides with media biases labeled (left, middle, right)

• Their new election portal delivers unbiased election coverage so you can make up your own mind

• No adult content by default – they’re a partner in protecting your families from bad content.

Freespoke is the search platform that respects your privacy and doesn’t manipulate the information you find online.

Try searching on Freespoke, and search beyond the bias.

The new media kingmakers

Like it or not, TikTok and Twitter drive much of the political and news discussion. While Twitter is not real life and only a small population of the country actively uses the website, political discussions often quickly escape the confines of the platform and make their way onto news networks or onto the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper.

More and more, the news is about what happens on social media rather than social media talking about what’s being reported in the news:

Additionally, people are increasingly listening to podcasts for their news consumption:

And the non-college educated voters who have been lost by Democrats make up the majority of podcast listeners.

Where then, are the liberal podcasters?

Now, take a look at the top podcasts in Apple Podcasts. I’ve outlined the right-of-center ones in red and the left-of-center ones in blue:

Of all top podcasts that feature discussions of politics, only 4 in 14 are left-of center. The landscape is overwhelmingly right-wing. It’s worth noting that they are not conservative podcasts, as they focus not on conservative thought but on cultivating and wielding power for Donald Trump and the political party he has created.

Additionally, consider the types of podcasts. On the left, we see a much higher ratio of scripted, rehearsed, and highly produced news programs. But on the right, a disproportionate amount of podcasts consist of just a couple of human beings sitting down and talking.

But it’s not just podcasts: take a look at the other main medium of human beings sitting down and talking: live streaming. The most prominent live streamers who talk about politics are the far-left, Assadist Hasan Piker and the pro-Trump, sports game streamer Adin Ross.

And while there are no public statistics, the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes regularly pulls in tens of thousands of viewers to watch him denigrate women, deny the holocaust, and cheer on hate crimes.

But the broadly liberal or moderate streamers? Nowhere to be found.

Liberals are behind for a change

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the main character is asked how he went bankrupt. His answer? “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

At nearly every turn over the last twenty years, Democrats have adopted new technologies and embraced cultural changes faster than their Republican counterparts. From the Clinton/Gore ‘96 website to ActBlue and social media, Democratic strategists had a track record of embracing and leveraging new tools and new forms of media.

No longer.

In hindsight, the writing was on the wall. After the rise of ActBlue and the failure of Project ORCA, Republicans made significant investments into technology. From WinRed and Data Trust to investing in media outlets like the Daily Wire, the GOP and its prominent backers have spent the last decade gradually building a comprehensive toolkit that can win and wield power.

And now, suddenly, the right is culturally and strategically ascendant. Liberals have been leapfrogged. There is a gaping maw that has been unfilled between the Hasan Pikers of the left and the Nick Fuenteses of the right. There are very few (if any) liberals

So where do we go from here?

Well, for starters, learn the lessons that the right did in 2012. But this time, learn the right ones.

As I discussed last week, the GOP took a big step forward on campaign tactics and media utilization. But they took a massive step backward on policy. Liberals and moderates need to embrace the former while rejecting the latter. Continue to push for more free trade, more support for our foreign allies, more commitment to in the rules-based international order that America built. But be aware of your audience, and of how representative they are of the larger electorate.

I’m not saying that those who oppose Donald Trump need to go build a “left of center Joe Rogan”. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m saying. Rather, liberals and moderates need to find and support those who are already in the spaces frequented by swing voters. That means investing financially, but it also means investing time. Find YouTubers and podcasters and Twitch streamers who provide a counterbalance to the anti-American right and left, and give them your viewership.

Because it doesn’t matter if you’re right if nobody’s listening.