Democrats 2020

Why the Uncle Joe-Can’t-Internet Criticism Is Mostly Malarkey

Joe Biden is definitely losing the internet—but the North Star of his campaign is the normie voter, which means it shouldn’t become a meme factory. The golden rule: “Does this work for Joe?”

By Peter Hamby

May 18, 2020

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On May 6, Rob Flaherty, the digital director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, found himself at the center of an interrogation on Clubhouse, the voice-chat app that’s captivated the Bay Area in recent weeks. Clubhouse allows people, strangers or friends, to talk to each other in “rooms”—while anyone else on the platform can listen in or dip out to go find another conversation. It’s something between an audio version of Twitter and a low-stakes form of podcasting, a place for Extremely Online people to hang out and riff about whatever they want: tech, sports, wine or, lately at least, what it’s like hanging out in Clubhouse. At the moment, the app is still in beta testing, the invitation-only realm of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who run Silicon Valley and have loud opinions about politics. Flaherty was invited by Katie Jacobs Stanton, a Barack Obama White House alumnus who also worked at Twitter and Google, to give an update on the state of Biden’s stay-at-home campaign, suffocated by the coronavirus and Donald Trump’s unmatched attentional powers.

Flaherty outlined the bright spots for a campaign competing against an incumbent president with infinite financial resources: Biden’s team more than doubled the size of his email list since Super Tuesday with only four digital fundraising staffers, racked up over 100 million video views in just over a month with just two video editors, and invested in a “community team” to organize various corners of a splintered internet. The campaign was in scale mode, Flaherty assured them, as any post-primary presidential campaign would be in the springtime of an election year. But what was meant to be a brief hello turned into an hour-long grilling from the left-leaning tech crowd. Some entrepreneurs asked Flaherty how they could help, others pitched their products and start-ups, and a few just outright asked why Biden is being outshined by Trump online. What kind of code does the campaign use? Does Trump’s campaign really have 30 million cell phone numbers? Why doesn’t Biden run his own Twitter account? Why doesn’t Biden try saying more “insane” things like Trump? Have you considered influencer-marketing? It was a mix of panic and pitch meeting, a chatroom version of the advice and criticism that’s been thrust upon the Biden campaign from Democrats in recent weeks, pretty much boiling down to this: DO MORE INTERNET.

The New York Times, the house organ for Democratic bedwetting, has an entire category of articles tagged “advice for Joe Biden,” bylined by staffers from assorted campaigns that Biden vanquished in the Democratic primary, without much innovation at all. The chorus began in April with a New York Times piece by Kevin Roose headlined “Biden Is Losing the Internet. Does That Matter?”, a story that called Biden’s in-house podcast “soporific” and argued that unlike Trump, Biden’s “conciliatory, healer-in-chief approach can render him invisible on platforms where conflict equals clicks.” One op-ed, penned by digital and media strategists for Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang, chided Biden’s digital footprint as “too static and packaged,” as if a 77-year-old man who likes to quote Seamus Heaney could suddenly transform himself into a phone-wielding millennial who does Instagram Lives with Megan Thee Stallion. Obama wise men David Axelrod and David Plouffe chimed in, also in the Times, encouraging Biden to spend less time on television and more time on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, six entirely different platforms with different content, values, and vocabularies—the last of which might be problematic for Biden, considering TikTok is Chinese-owned, has dubious privacy policies and is ruled by midriff-baring teenage girls dancing to Doja Cat. When Biden hosted a glitchy “virtual town hall” that was hampered by Wi-Fi connectivity issues, Trump staffers and reporters seized on the moment as yet more evidence that Biden is a digital dud, as if the glitches were something more than the obnoxious bandwidth issues plaguing most people working from home during the pandemic.

The avalanche of free advice has rankled pretty much everyone inside the Biden campaign, who are quite aware that it’s difficult to run a presidential campaign while confined to a house in Delaware. Biden’s inability to travel is robbing his campaign of precious earned media in battleground states, and the traditional work of voter contact is being replaced by DMs, texting, and organizing Facebook groups. “Voters don’t give a shit about where he’s filming from,” campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Associated Press last week, pushing back on the know-it-alls. “What they care about is what he’s saying and how we connect with them.” The Biden team is also aware, because they have a pulse, that the internet is rather essential to political campaigns, as it has been since 2000, when John McCain first exploited the web for fundraising, and that Doing the Internet with a septuagenarian at the helm is not the easiest of tasks. Biden himself acknowledged as much in an interview for my Snapchat show Good Luck America last week. “I’m sure we can do better on the internet,” Biden told me. “I’m trying to compete there. We’re getting started late in the comparative sense.”

I asked Biden about the drubbing he’s taking in the meme universe, in which he’s often portrayed as doddering and creepy. Biden laughed it off, claiming that “the vast majority of the voters out there, including young people, are not getting all their news from the internet.” Most young Americans, of course, get their news from social media, according to Pew Research—and that phone-first demo is a noted weak spot for Biden. As with Hillary Clinton four years ago, his unfavorable ratings are highest among voters under 30, who broke for Bernie Sanders over Biden in every primary and caucus state earlier this year. According to NBC News, Barack Obama recently told White House alumni that his two daughters have shown him anti-Biden videos on TikTok, where Trump and Sanders inspire more passion among teenagers. Obama urged his former staff to help Biden counteract ugly narratives percolating on social networks. “I’m a 58-year-old guy, I don’t have the answers here,” Obama said. But does anyone?

To state the obvious: Of course Biden is losing the internet. Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Yang, and Kamala Harris would all be losing the internet to Trump too, especially in the fog of a global crisis. Trump is an incumbent president who has been building a reelection campaign for almost four years. His strengths, online and off, flow from the political asymmetry he’s created for himself. Trump has little interest in the facts or decorum to which most Democrats and members of the press are still bound. His deliberate provocations lend themselves perfectly to the clickbait of the platforms and the outrage porn of cable news. Trump is such brain poison for the media that CNN prime-time hosts now devote their entire A-blocks to breathless anti-Trump harangues, which are gleefully spun by the Trump campaign into base-rallying cries of “Fake News,” email blasts, and Facebook fundraising ads that can be tested and reoptimized thousands of times over. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have combined to raise over $700 million so far this cycle, more than Obama did at this point in his 2012 reelection campaign. In 2016, the Trump campaign was held together by duct tape, Facebook ads, and a megaphone handed to them by TV news executives. But to their credit, Trump aides took a groundbreaking risk by devoting nearly half of their advertising budget to digital rather than TV ads, which proved themselves rather useless in a campaign defined by earned media controversies. In 2020, with a huge staff at his disposal, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale can afford to do much more, experimenting and expanding his online reach far beyond the field of view of most Beltway-dwellers.

Trump has more than 1.5 million followers on Snapchat, where his campaign test-drives messaging and regularly bumps his Snapchat followers across platforms into near-daily YouTube livestreams. His supporters are so loyal that they create low-grade content on their own and share it with their own networks, through podcasts, memes, or just old-fashioned handmade signs. Trump’s knack for weaponizing culture and turning politics into a contact sport means that everyone on his team wants a red jersey: The Trump campaign sold $4 million worth of MAGA merchandise in March and April alone, according to CBS News. Parscale even previewed a new Trump–Pence 2020 COVID-19 face mask on Twitter, which was promptly mocked by the blue-checkmark crowd, ensuring that Parscale will sell thousands of them. Biden’s armchair quarterbacks point worriedly to the Trump campaign’s bombastic fundraising texts and his app, which can feel like being inside a Las Vegas casino, with its point-collecting contests and huge fonts. But Trump’s digital program—indeed his entire campaign—works because it mirrors who Trump is.

Biden and his campaign are thinking about their digital campaign in the same way. “The job of a person who runs a digital team is not to be in the room saying, Use every gadget and gizmo possible,” Flaherty told me. “The job of a digital person is to build the program that is a reflection of the person they work for. The best programs that exist are the ones that do that. Trump is scammy as hell. He’s controversial and just sort of brazen. His program looks like that. Bernie’s program reflected his organization. Pete’s did too. Those campaigns have built programs to look like their candidate. For us, we’re trying to build a program that reflects the V.P.’s values, that is empathetic, that connects people in a moment when people are looking for connections. Those are things that the data show are the things that people are craving. They are also the things that the V.P. uniquely has to offer. Not every clever idea is a good idea in that framework.”

The North Star for Biden’s campaign is the normie voter—the person who might not have the most sophisticated taste or the smartest opinion but lives in an economy removed from the one occupied by most of the media. Obama won because he reached low-information voters, and Biden will have to do the same. “There were so many times throughout the primary where the internet—and by the internet I mean political reporters in the Beltway and a group of very engaged Twitter users—are talking about a specific thing,” said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. “And then we go to places like South Carolina, we would go to Detroit, we would go to Iowa. And nobody else would be talking about what the internet was talking about.” The median primary voter in South Carolina, for instance, was a 50-something black woman who didn’t have a college degree and went to church weekly. That person is almost completely without voice in the national media. Instead, cable networks beam in highly paid pundits from their open-concept kitchens and seek opinions from a rotating cast of “experts,” harvested from Twitter, who probably haven’t shopped at a Piggly Wiggly lately.

There are plenty of tactics to borrow and advice to be had, but Biden will lose in November if he chases virality and follower counts that don’t actually grow support among voters, and he’ll lose if he tries to Xerox another candidate’s playbook. Biden isn’t Trump, nor is he Obama, Sanders, or Clinton. Biden can win if he understands that he doesn’t need to “win the internet” to win the White House—and that Trump is actually losing in the polls despite being an omnipresent force online. He can win if he understands that there isn’t even much of a distinction between online and offline anymore. Everything now is just media, no matter the screen, and the pandemic represents something of an opportunity, accelerating the need to reach voters on their phones and in their feeds, rather than through door knocks or rallies. Like any successful candidate, Biden must not lose sight of his key strengths, and the message that won him the primary in the first place, and has him leading Trump in the polls. Every strategy, every tactic, flows from that starting point. “To the Biden campaign’s great credit in the primary, they were pretty damn good at tuning out the noise,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s former communications director in the White House. “The challenge gets harder in a general election because the stakes get higher, and the pressure gets greater from the outside because now you are the vessel for an entire party’s existential anxiety about the future of the planet. But they don’t have to win the Twitter conversation about how effective they are. They just have to be effective, and win the election. And if you win the election, your strategy was brilliant. And if you didn’t win the election, America’s got much bigger problems than the state of your digital strategy.”

In 2015 White House aides suggested that then President Obama create a summer playlist for Spotify. Obama liked the idea, and without deliberation, whipped out a pen and paper and told his staff that, actually, you need one playlist for day and one for night. Duh. Obama wrote down 40 songs off the top of his head for two playlists—an eclectic mix of hits and deep cuts from the Isley Brothers, Erykah Badu, and Okkervil River—and handed it off to his digital team. It became one of the most-listened-to playlists on Spotify. “The reason Obama’s playlists took off,” said one former Obama White House aide, “is that people believe that he actually curated that list of songs. It was totally believable. People know he has good taste in music, they know he is fucking cool and that he knows what Spotify is. It wasn’t some kind of digital box-checking. Everything about it just rang true.” Putting aside his mom jeans, Obama’s hipness connected to culture in a way that eluded other politicians. Even in 2007, when Obama launched his first campaign, the web was fertile territory for a young black candidate who sounded different than most politicians seeking the presidency. Before memes were a thing, Obama was the subject of hip-hop lyrics and YouTube videos—search for “Crush on Obama” if you’re bored in the house—and the darling of that quaint, long-forgotten thing called the “blogosphere.” Both of his campaigns were heralded for their embrace of the internet and data as vital political tools—for communications, fundraising, and voter mobilization, generally considered the three main buckets of digital campaigning. But as a candidate and president, Obama was good at the internet because he was good at politics. He had a clear message, a fresh point of view, and an ability to connect with people. As with Trump, his digital presence was authentic because it was downstream from his brand and his message. Obama was a community organizer who imparted that philosophy onto his campaign, which in turn thought creatively about using the internet to organize voters and raise money.

Biden had Instagram stickers and a relational organizing tool, but he won the Democratic nomination because he was already known to the public and he made the right bet about Democratic primary voters—that they were wildly detached from the daily spasms of political Twitter and wanted a comfort blanket, not radical upheaval. He ran up the score with black voters and boring white suburbanites, most of them over 40, and surfed a dominant victory in South Carolina into an earned media bonanza, helped along by some old-school endorsement dealmaking. “In an era when information about presidential politics is all-consuming, many of the political tactics that matter in other races just aren’t that important,” said Tim Miller, a Never Trump columnist for The Bulwark who saw firsthand on Jeb Bush’s campaign how Trump won without much investment in field or tech. “Biden won the primary because of his brand and positioning, not because he had a great email program or lots of door knockers.” It’s true that Biden sometimes feels like he’s on safari when he talks about the internet, and his cash-strapped primary campaign did little in the way of innovation. But did any campaign? Few Democrats, including the ones freely sharing their wisdom on Twitter, pioneered a genuinely new way of digital campaigning during the primary cycle, an entirely different enterprise than a general election campaign. “What worked in the primary is not what’s going to work in a general election,” Pfeiffer said. “Reaching Democratic primary voters is a very different proposition than reaching general election voters, with general election voters being persuadable voters and drop-off voters, not like, people who watch Rachel Maddow or go to a caucus.” Sanders expanded on the “distributed organizing” model he pioneered in 2016, empowering volunteers to lead voter-contact programs remotely through Google sheets, Slack, and virtual phone banks. Mike Bloomberg built a massive new voter file from scratch, called Hawkfish, and funded a creative team that understood meme culture as an actual language of the internet—but only because Bloomberg had a vast personal fortune to fiddle with. By March, though, Biden had defeated his tactically savvier rivals without even a whiff of a muscular digital or field program.

Biden can’t count on the same kind of scrappiness as he builds a national campaign. But it’s already becoming clear he isn’t. The campaign is in the process of doubling the size of its digital team, including the hire of BuzzFeed’s former director of video, and O’Malley Dillon announced last week the campaign is deploying 600 organizers to battleground states. Biden and the Democratic National Committee raised a combined $60.5 million in April—barely trailing the Trump campaign’s fundraising total in the same month. The campaign said they’ve outspent Trump on Facebook and Google since March. Along with organizing Facebook groups and subreddits, they’re also building a “Content Creators Corps” and say they’re organizing Biden influencers into something called “the Soul Squad,” a gesture to Biden’s hazy message of “restoring the soul” of America even if it sounds like a Spinners cover band. They’re launching a new livestream platform, called BrandLive, so Biden and surrogates can host sign-in-based live events, with supporters having the ability to start watch parties and chat privately with their friends. O’Malley Dillon will begin to release weekly video updates for supporters, akin to the popular videos released regularly by Obama advisers Jim Messina and Stephanie Cutter during the 2012 campaign. Biden’s website and logo are also undergoing a redesign. Most of these updates are tactical moves, important but not decisive. What’s the bigger strategy to reach voters? Flaherty, who worked on the Clinton campaign in 2016, said the biggest change he’s seen online in the four years since is the “smallification” of the internet, a shift from broadcast-oriented nature of social media to a more inward-facing experience, where peer-to-peer influence in text threads and Facebook groups carry immense political weight. In other words, you trust your friends more than the media, a politician, or any paid advertisement. That’s precisely what has Obama worried: a funny meme or TikTok mocking Biden, sent to you by a friend, isn’t just more powerful than any TV ad, it’s also far more likely to include disinformation or outright lies.

But Biden can’t just show up one day on TikTok with a skateboard saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?” As the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University noted in a recent study, “forced memes” from brands and politicians usually backfire—they only work when created in a bottom-up way, as they were for Yang and Sanders from his forum-dwelling die-hards. Authenticity is the coin of the realm on social networks, a lesson Hillary Clinton learned the hard way in 2015 when she said in a Snapchat selfie video that she was “just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids,” a cringey line that was mocked relentlessly on Vine. Clinton was also teased when she urged young voters to “Pokémon Go…to the polls.” Chuck Klosterman once said that supporting Clinton was “kind of like supporting Merrill Lynch”—and no one at Merrill Lynch would bother dabbling in TikTok. Biden, too, has to avoid Old Person in the Nightclub syndrome, even though he spent the Obama years as a fun meme—the aviator-wearing, Trans Am-driving Diamond Joe popularized by The Onion. “You can’t put Biden on TikTok without serious thought and strategy,” said Emmy Bengtson, who worked on the digital side of Kirsten Gillibrand’s primary campaign, and for Clinton in 2016. “At worst, it’s going to completely explode in your face. It has to work for your candidate, and I think Biden’s team is being very intentional about building a digital campaign that works for your candidate. He should not indiscriminately go on the hottest or trendy channels. It has to be, first and foremost, ‘Does this work for Joe?’”

What works for Joe, in many ways, is not what works for political insiders who, time and time again in the Trump era, have failed to grasp what resonates with the people Democrats need to win: persuadable and drop-off voters, not just the highly engaged. Biden aides, current and former, like to point to the time he went on Jay Leno’s Garage and drove his 1967 Corvette Stingray, as the kind of format that works perfectly for Biden. Lame? Sure, if you’re a millennial who spends all day on Twitter debating Alison Roman’s shallot pasta. But you’re not a target voter. A 55-year-old man in Georgia who likes vintage cars might be. Biden needs to shore up his support among younger voters and Hispanics, but his coalition in the primary strongly overlaps with the kinds of voters he needs to beat Trump: black voters and white suburbanites with a college degree, especially women and people over the age of 40 who actually go to the polls. “When you look on Facebook, the plurality viewer of videos from our page on Facebook is a 65-year-old woman. Those are people who vote too. Those are people who share our content and engage with our content and love our shit,” said Flaherty. The Biden campaign—and Biden himself—takes special glee in pointing out that those voters, like the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population, are not on Twitter and not taking their cultural cues from the Times Style Section. “A lot of Joe Biden’s strengths are often dismissed by the Washington Beltway elite group that is on Twitter and is very online,” said TJ Ducklo, Biden’s press secretary. “Look at that moment he had during a CNN Town Hall in South Carolina with the pastor, sharing a moment of grief. A lot of people vote on those kinds of feelings. [Compassion], empathy. That speaks to people in a way that is often underestimated and dismissed by the Beltway. Joe Biden knows what suffering is like. He knows what a lot of people in the country are going through. And that resonates with people in a way that I think Twitter, or writers for certain woke online publications, don’t necessarily respect or understand the power of.” Twitter has only two gears: cynicism and outrage. Those sentiments have infected prestige journalism, detaching it from much of the country’s daily information experience and emotional touchpoints. The media spaces occupied by journalists and pundits often feel immune to what Bengtson called Biden’s “superpower”—“relating to people, being warm, and caring about people.”

I first wrote about the Biden campaign’s preoccupation with “empathy moms” in early March, as Biden was cleaning up on Super Tuesday. They are the suburban women the campaign is targeting on Facebook who have been the surge voters in every election since Trump took office, powering Democratic victories in race after race. In the campaign’s telling, they identify with Biden’s tragic family story, his vulnerability, and raw emotion, and yes, the fact that he was Obama’s wingman for eight years. They are black and white. But they aren’t necessarily swiping and sharing on the hottest new platforms, or watching the same prestige dramas as the elites who have been throwing darts at Biden from the outset. Nor are they only on Facebook. Obama understood that even as he won critical acclaim for doing things like Spotify playlists and appearing on Between Two Ferns, he also needed to advertise on bus stop benches in Cleveland and Hispanic radio in Miami-Dade, to talk to people who aren’t dialed in to politics every second of every day. “Putting Biden on something like The View, black radio shows, daytime mom shows…. They have massive daytime audiences, and just because it’s not what the Twitter peanut gallery watches, doesn’t mean it’s not valid,” Bengtson told me. Biden is doing local television in battleground states almost every day, but almost one in Washington sees it.

Digital operatives from elections past, who evangelized about the coming death of television, might chafe at Bengtson’s idea of puffing up TV as a powerful medium, but that line of thinking has withered in recent years. Strategists in both parties now agree that the digital-vs.-TV argument is no longer an either/or proposition—all of it matters. Campaigns have to find the voters they need and push them a message on whatever screen they’re watching. It’s why Pfeiffer, the former Obama communications director, has long been urging Democratic campaigns to banish titles like “communications director” and “digital director,” replacing them with a single chief content officer. “There’s not digital media, there’s not normal media, there’s just content, and the question is how do you get your content in front of people, and the voters you care about?” Pfeiffer said. “Some of that is going to be organic, some of that’s gonna be paid, some of that’s gonna be relational organizing. But what is your distribution plan? How do you solve the Democrats’ ‘last mile problem’ of communications?” The former Obama aide I spoke to suggested the Biden campaign conduct an “audit of what people like about him,” then mine his best attributes to create content for discrete audiences. Celebrity surrogates and political allies could do the work for him in places where Old Man Biden might not fit in. “He has to be likable in the right way, in places where people who have a chance to like him haven’t really met him yet,” the aide told me. Another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns echoed the suggestion: “Everything today is so balkanized. Everyone has their one thing they care about. It would be completely tone deaf for Joe Biden to show up in a forum for sneakerheads and say, ‘Hey, kids, let’s talk about health care!’ But Biden has a rescue German shepherd. So go hang out with dog people and talk about dogs. You don’t need to talk about health care. You just need to connect.”

Jason Goldman, the former tech executive who ran Obama’s Office of Digital Strategy in the White House, recently wrote on Medium that Biden’s political strengths don’t run easily through the currents of the internet. “Vice President Biden has not valued or used his own online channels as his primary means of reaching people during the campaign,” he wrote. “Trump’s online presence is intrinsically tied to not just his communications strategy but his identity as a politician. The Biden campaign won’t catch the Trump juggernaut, and, yes, progress can be made, but why accept a scoreboard you can’t win?” he wrote. Goldman’s advice—more advice!—was not to Do More Internet. “Good digital strategy is not about having clever people who have smart ideas about how to make things go viral online,” he said. “That’s fun too. But ultimately it doesn’t really matter if you get out the well-timed dunk tweet. The number of retweets doesn’t matter. The number of followers doesn’t matter.” Goldman’s advice was simply to embrace Biden’s strengths—“his empathy, his ability to console, his proven ability to lead”—and push them out relentlessly through as many channels as possible, to use analytics to reach as many segmented audiences as possible. You can tweak the content, use a surrogate, clip a local news segment and repurpose it elsewhere, he said. But never stray from what’s most important: Biden’s core brand.

Ever since Obama’s first victory in 2008, the Democratic Party abided by a mythology that it was the party of innovation, of digital and data, a myth that became a burden as elections from 2010 to 2014 to 2016 demonstrated that tactics were no match for raw emotion and political waves. I’ve covered the digital side of political campaigns since 2006, and not once has an operative been able to prove that machinery made the decisive difference in a campaign, House, Senate, presidential, or otherwise. Even in 2008, Obama won in a political landslide, fueled by economic upheaval and a hunger for change, not because he had the best digital team or the most sophisticated field ops. Fundraising and machinery are lifeblood of political campaigns, but if they work, they are an outgrowth of a candidate’s persona and vision, not an end in themselves. Unlike the early Obama era, much of the Democratic tech infrastructure today exists outside the cauldron of boom-and-bust campaign cycle, owned by private companies like MobilizeAmerica, Outvote, and Avalanche Strategy and funded by accelerators like Higher Ground Labs. Any campaign, from a mayoral to a presidential, can use these platforms to text, poll, connect with organizers, or raise money. After Democrats lost in 2016, Guy Cecil, the chief strategist for the super PAC Priorities USA, memorably told me that “Democrats have micro-targeted ourselves into oblivion,” prizing the science of campaigns above the gut instincts and human texture of politics. If Democrats win in November, it won’t be because they optimized their digital tool kit or did a TikTok or modeled a thousand different voter universes out of large-scale data surveys. They’ll win because they did those things with a nominee whose message was right for the moment, a politician who has always held faith in the idea that emotional connection is a more powerful political weapon than any poll, product, or script of code.