Top Harris Advisor Sounds The Alarm On Democratic Party’s Emerging Blindspot
Vice President Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty stated that Democratic Party is “losing hold of culture” in a recent interview. Flaherty, who previously worked as a social media director for President Biden, pointed to President-elect Donald Trump’s successful podcast strategy and the massive shift in the world of sports as primary examples.
“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he said during a recent interview with Semafor. “You don’t get a national 8-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign cycle, both Harris and Trump made efforts to spread their respective messages through the emerging podcast and alternative media landscape. Trump was particularly active on the podcast front, as the president-elect sat for interviews with The Shawn Ryan Show, This Past Weekend With Theo Von, and the top-rated Joe Rogan Experience, among several additional appearances on popular podcasts.
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All of the aforementioned podcasts rank among the top 10 most popular in the United States, according to Spotify’s podcast chart.
Harris also appeared on some popular podcasts, including the sex-themed Call Her Daddy and Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast. The vice president’s appearances were not nearly as successful, however, as her Call Her Daddy episode has just 938,000 views as of this report. For comparison, Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan has racked up more than 53 million views in a little over a month, putting it well on pace for Rogan’s most popular podcast in the show’s history.
Vice President Harris was invited to appear on Rogan’s podcast, though the campaign ultimately declined after refusing to sit for just one hour, a sharp deviation from the usual flow of Rogan’s show. A number of Harris aides have conceded that skipping the podcast was a mistake in the wake of her defeat.
Elsewhere in his interview with Semafor, Flaherty commented on the rapid evolution of the sports world and sports media landscape, particularly on the podcast front.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty said. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”
Just under four years after NFL teams staged league-wide protests against Trump during Collin Kaepernick’s national anthem controversy, Flaherty argued that the left was losing control of its traditional hold on major sports.
“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” Flaherty said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”
Trump’s popularity does appear to have surged in the world of sports. In the weeks following his re-election win, several NFL players mimicked the “Trump dance” as a touchdown or big play celebration. The president-elect has also become a regular attendee for UFC events, where he has received standing ovations in deep blue states like New Jersey and New York.
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