The Democrats’ Content Problem Isn’t Just the Camera. It’s What’s In Front of It.

David Plouffe almost figured out what I’ve been saying since 2019

Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, published a piece in the New York Times this weekend arguing that Democrats need to overhaul their campaigns’ approach to be centrally focused on content creation. He writes:

A successful campaign in 2026 must operate like a full-time production studio.

Candidates and incumbents should center each day on content creation. That does not mean uploading the same video to every platform. It means creating output tailored specifically for TikTok or Instagram or YouTube. It means several hours a day filming in campaign offices — even candidates’ homes — offering a message that buttresses the argument they are trying to land.

A lot of people are nodding along. I am too, partly. But I also want to say something directly to David Plouffe: welcome to the party. We’ve been waiting for you.

Since the 2008 Obama campaign, Plouffe has spent significant time in the private sector, but he’s also been at or near the top of the Democratic Party infrastructure and messaging leadership, including as a senior leader on the Kamala Harris campaign. He was a board member of ACRONYM, a predecessor organization of today’s dem messaging juggernaut Courier. He is not a bystander to how we got here. He shares in the culpability for a party that spent years refusing to build the influencer and digital infrastructure that was obviously, urgently necessary.

Now he’s writing in the New York Times because, “Many progressive donors are increasingly turning up their noses at writing checks to support advertising. Yet to win tough races in tough places, we have to do it all.” I couldn’t help but wonder … who is he raising for?

I started Emily in Your Phone in 2019 as a proof of concept: you could use Instagram to reach women about politics in a way that felt human, accessible, and actually engaging. I spoke to the DNC about this in 2023. I spent years making the case that Democrats needed to build something to compete with the right’s influencer machine, that the gap was growing, and it was going to cost us. I most certainly wasn’t the only one saying it, but clearly, given that Plouffe is writing this today, those in campaign leadership didn’t believe it.

Me presenting about this at the DNC in 2023 (@motherhoodforgood on the right)

I remember when Jeff Jackson started going viral and Congressional office after Congressional office would inform me that their principal was going to make “content like Jeff.” When I told them he probably spends 4–6 hours on each video, they were shocked. One senior Democratic leader in the House once told me that he has 20 things on his to-do list every day, and the other 19 are more important than content.

And as Twitter’s reaction to Plouffe’s piece shows, there’s still a lot of disagreement in the party about how much time and energy should be focused on content. Campaign aides are arguing that votes and fundraising numbers are the only two things that matter in elections, and they say there’s no evidence that content drives those.

However, Democrats can’t win elections without a message, a brand, and a persuasion scheme. Aides are delusional if they think we can just ignore the massive messaging infrastructure that is the internet and instead cater merely to an aging boomer base that still watches paid TV ads and reads mailers.

And look, while I’m glad Plouffe is here, his voice carries weight in rooms mine doesn’t reach; his diagnosis is incomplete. He’s right that the medium has changed. He’s right that campaigns need to think like content operations.

But if the content is shitty, the messengers lack charisma, and the message is meaningless…none of it matters.

Put a camera in front of a 74-year-old senator reading talking points that were workshopped by three consultants and approved by a committee, and you haven’t built a production studio. You’ve built a very expensive way to lose. Plouffe talks about “answer engine optimization” and harmonizing messages across fifteen different platforms. That’s a real list of real tools. But a bad message distributed across fifteen channels is still a bad message; it just fails in more places at once.

Plouffe notes that he’s been working on the private side and companies run advertising 365 days a year, and Democrats should do the same. Okay… but who, exactly? The campaigns? The politicians? The DNC? The constellation of PACs and outside independent expenditure programs? The influencers who’ve built financially sustainable models by running rage-bait on YouTube? The advocacy groups?

He says content matters, that campaigns need to be producing constantly. Yes. But what’s the content? He gives examples of format — TikTok, YouTube, livestreams, podcasts — but almost nothing about substance. The closest he gets is “personal stories from local voices.” That’s fine advice, but it’s also been said in every Democratic messaging meeting I’ve been part of for the last twenty years. “Spotlight nonpolitical Americans.” Great … and talk about kitchen table issues! (I’ve heard it before!)

And then there’s the messenger problem, which is where the whole production studio metaphor collapses. Plouffe name-checks AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and James Talarico as examples of Democrats who get it, and he’s right. But then he acknowledges most Democrats “don’t have the range or talent” and moves on.

Take presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel. Could Rahm Emanuel ever be a good content machine? No, because he’s an unlikable asshole who will only ever be loved by the Bill Maher faction of the party. You can put Rahm in the most sophisticated production studio in the world, optimize his posting schedule, A/B test his thumbnails, and you will still end up with content that makes a very specific type of 58-year-old centrist feel vindicated while everyone else reaches for the mute button. The medium is not the message. The messenger is the message. And if your messenger has negative rizz, no amount of TikTok strategy fixes that.

With that, I want to re-up my own messaging prescription for Democrats: the ten-point plan I published after our humiliating loss in 2024. Some of it overlaps with Plouffe. A lot of it goes further. Here’s what actually needs to change.

My messaging prescription for democrats

1. Talk to people, not press.

Traditional comms is totally organized around the need to get covered by journalists. The stand-up outside the Capitol. The one-hour speech to a half-empty room. The Sunday show hit that the donor class expects, but nobody else watches. Democrats have to actually show up where regular people consume information. With digital comms, we have done that, but largely through paid distribution channels. Republicans won by talking directly to voters through their army of influencers and owned message distribution channels that felt like a conversation instead of a press release.

Democrats have assumed that as long as we are morally and factually right, and if we can get the media to cover us fairly, that people will vote accordingly. It’s a false prophet.

2. Authenticity and empathy are never the result of focus groups and message testing.

The consultant class has a stranglehold on democratic messaging, but every time a Democrat goes on camera and says something that sounds like it was approved by a committee, people feel it. Voters aren’t dumb; they’ve been sold polished emptiness for years, and they know what it smells like. Social media requires an extra capability: to perform authenticity in such a way that it can be conveyed through a tiny screen – it’s not as easy as it looks.

3. Invest in messengers outside of elected officials.

How can you critique the system if you are the system? Politicians are inherently tied to upholding institutions and that is critical (every Mayor should be using their platforms like Zohran and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu), but their message is not sufficient to build the relationships, movements and persuasion campaigns necessary to win elections in the modern information environment.

Every advocacy organization should be building one or more influencers in their space whose full-time job is spreading the message in ways that regular people can actually understand. The organizations funded to grow influencers should focus on building properties that reach all the audiences in the ecosystem as part of a long-term persuasion strategy. As Charlie Kirk bragged, the right has been doing this for a long time: “We made long-term investments in creators and in influential voices that we believe will be the opinion shapers of tomorrow.”

4. Learn to use good anecdote-based messaging.

Every Democratic policy briefing starts with data: “Forty-seven million Americans lack access to…” and by the end of the sentence, everyone’s eyes have glazed over. The right tells you one story, repeated until it’s lodged in the brain. Democrats have the better stories — real ones, affecting many more real people — and they keep burying them in PowerPoint slides and poll-tested abstractions. Plouffe is wrong that content should focus on letting ‘real Americans’ tell their stories (that’s political advertising 101), but rather we should have good messengers telling their stories in ways that build algorithmically pleasing conversations.

5. Stop being scared of getting criticized.

Donald Trump fellated a microphone and got elected president. You will upset a part of the coalition with every word you utter and you need a thicker skin. I’m not even sure Michelle Obama wants us following “go high when they go low” anymore. The asymmetry of this moment doesn’t reward restraint. Democrats keep taking the dignified approach while the other side posts ASMR videos of deportations and gets a standing ovation for it. The candidates who break through aren’t breaking through because they figured out the right platform mix. They’re breaking through because they mean what they say and they don’t flinch when someone pushes back.

6. Donors: stop herding together to fund the same things over and over again.

The herd mentality in Democratic fundraising is staggering, and (as Plouffe noted) those same donors are increasingly skeptical of political advertising even though winning requires it. The answer isn’t to abandon advertising, it’s to fund the experiments. Fund the messengers no one has heard of yet. Stop requiring a ten-year track record before you’ll cut a check. New ideas can’t prove themselves if they’re never given the resources to try.

7. Build an ethos of winning.

Those with the biggest power to influence voters will have the biggest influence over the platform. The intra-factional fighting takes up so much time and energy amongst democrats when the literal forces of authoritarianism are looming at our door.

We need to stop anointing heirs and start pushing for competitive primaries in which the voters choose who will go fight for their will in politics. But outside the family, we need to realize that for any of us to succeed, we must win majorities, and continually shitting on each other online destroys the brand.

8. End the gerontocracy.

Make committee chairs step down. Tell elected officials to retire. End nepo candidates. Stop hiring the same consultants who have been losing races with the same playbook for twenty years. Do not treat James Carville like he’s a messaging god when he just discovered social media recently (that’s a really bad sign! Also, he hasn’t won a campaign in 30 years!)

9. Stop compromising on principles and learn to point fingers at the people blocking progress.

Democrats have a pathological need to say “we tried to work across the aisle.” Stop. When Mitch McConnell held a Supreme Court seat open for a year and literally stole a seat on SCOTUS, he didn’t apologize for being uncooperative; he won. Democrats need to name specific people who block progress (more than just Trump if our party can win once he’s gone). Not “Republicans blocked healthcare reform.” “Senator X voted against your insulin coverage and chose the insurance companies over you.” In the modern information environment, enemies must be personal, known and consumable in an image-based format.

10. A party is just made up of people, stop treating it as an immutable object that can’t be changed.

If you think messaging is missing the mark, stop doing it. Start elevating people we like and stop rewarding assholes. We live in a time when the internet gives the worst people algorithmic megaphones but we can make choices about who and what we choose to amplify. We can stop all the fundraising emails. The party is not a fixed object handed down from on high — it is a daily set of choices about who belongs at the table and whose voice gets turned up.

David Plouffe is right that the medium matters. But if you fill the studio with the same people saying the same things and expect a different result, you already know what Einstein had to say about that. (he didn’t, but who cares about truth - this is the internet!)

Build the studio if you want. But for the love of god, put someone interesting in it.

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