‘Put the posters in charge’: Inside the Democrats’ secret strategy to flood the internet with clips
Mangubat noted that the DNC had hired researchers to monitor and dig up negative material on Republicans, largely in the form of video clips from little-noticed interviews on podcasts or public channels.
Key points
- “We were mostly interested in increasing the surface area of our messaging on every single part of the internet.” While much of its focus was on X, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, the national party also began ramping up production of original longform content for YouTube.
- Mangubat said the DNC sent its video team out into the country to find farmers and others impacted by Trump administration decisions and created mini documentaries for YouTube, which it then chopped up into clips and distributed across other social….
- Instead of sharing talking points or bland DNC messaging, the national party’s communications team decided to simply share clips and let the creators decide whether or how to use them.
The DNC would distribute what it saw as embarrassing or damaging clips of Trump or other administration officials to its one-way Signal group chat, which by October had swelled to more than 700 creators.
Additional details
- Once the primaries were over, the party set up group chats with Democratic campaigns’ digital directors to help them share negative and positive video clips.
- The DNC didn’t have an online creator strategy beyond one Signal group chat with about 20 left-leaning creators, where it occasionally shared messaging.
- The organization had been shattered by a second loss to Donald Trump, in which the party had been strategically outmaneuvered by a new alternative media ecosystem that had helped Republicans circumvent traditional gatekeepers.
- Voters saw the national party as overly invested in outreach tactics of the past, as exemplified by a widely-mocked February 2025 post in which its official X account shared a long, hard-to-read list of Democratic accomplishments.
- DNC senior strategist Tim Hogan told Semafor that the committee reoriented its internal leadership structure, empowering its most online staff to make decisions with less oversight from skittish traditional political operatives.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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