Our autopsy of the DNC autopsy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Why do you think Democrats, I think I would say, are still so unable to tap into the disillusionment the same way Republicans can?
People in politics pretend they're super data driven, but like at the end of the day, like they just do what feels good to them. We tend to actually often explicitly say if it is resonant on the Internet, it is not a good thing to be saying.
But they know like what's happened in America for the last like decade, right?
Like they know, you know, power structures in the party are real, man. And like the people in charge still like don't consume the media that most voters consume. And so therefore it doesn't feel real to them. And that includes candidates, by the way.
We are months away from the 2026 midterms, where America will go to the ballot yet again to decide our stupid country's idiotic future. But we're no closer to understanding what happened in 2024, the last time we voted, that put us into this nightmare from which we cannot wake. Well, this week we have Rob Flaherty, former deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign, who has recently written a juicy little tell-all all about everything that went wrong with the Democrats in 2024. And we're going to be asking him the questions that we've been agonizing over for literally years now. I was wondering if we could talk about how you and I first met. Yeah, sure. I've never publicly talked about this part of that story.
But basically, I received an email from you in, I believe, 2023, 2024. Yeah. And I thought it was a phishing scam. Because it was from a White House email address.
Yeah.
You were working with Biden, President Joe Biden, and you reached out to me and invited me to the White House. We didn't meet when I went, but I would love to hear why you emailed me.
I'm a longtime Garbage Day enthusiast, and I've been a subscriber for quite a bit. One of the big things we were trying to tackle at the beginning of the campaign I still think we need to tackle is the fact that so much of like political conversation happens in private spaces on the internet. And you in your piece, I think I'm not even joking. I mean, it was in, I put it in decks that we talked about with donors and like how do the campaign, the sort of breakdown of like the public internet as like a consumption surface and the private internet as sort of a discussion surface. Right. And, and that breakdown was a great articulation that was, um, like very formative in like how we talked about social and how we talked about digital strategy as we went along.
And so, yes, I did reach out.
Yeah. Well, yeah. So as I said, you weren't at the meeting I went to and I did agree for that meeting to be off the record, so I won't go too deep into it. But for me, it was instructive, I will say, on the surface level to just sort of get a sense of what people within the U.S. government knew and didn't know about the Internet. I'm always fascinated by sort of when you get to the higher levels of power, like what people are actually thinking about when it comes to the Internet. That meeting was also quite instructive for me going into the 2024 election because I was like, OK, I have a vague idea of like how we've ended up here.
when it comes to, when we get to November, 2024. A thousand percent. The point about public internet, private internet, like we came in being like, this is the, you know, this is the thing. Like people, our supporters are their own media channels. Our supporters have their own influence. They're having these conversations in places we can't see. It was a thing we super failed that operationalizing, um, and, and actually making it work. But it is,
Was that surprising? Like, I guess, like, did you go into that thinking one thing and then be like, oh, or was this sort of like you knew like this was going to be a long, long summer?
Yeah. Well, it became pretty clear that. We had – so there was – what is happening in Gaza is not equivalent to what I'm about to say, but we had some experience.
Hey, that's a great way to start off.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:44
2
What is the DNC autopsy and why are we revisiting the 2024 loss?
4:44–6:39
3
How did Rob Flaherty get involved with Biden and Harris campaigns?
6:39–10:29
4
What is the 'public internet vs private internet' problem campaigns failed to solve?
10:29–25:59
5
Did Palestine/Israel coverage and social media backlash hurt the Harris campaign?
25:59–38:36
6
How did disillusionment and branding problems shape Democratic voters in 2024?
38:36–1:06:34