The Internet is More Real than Real Life

A victory of online spaces over traditional institutions

Donald Trump and the Republican Party won a fairly crushing victory last night. Trump appears to have improved on his 2020 vote in virtually every state, the Republicans are on track to pickup 5-7 seats in the Senate, and also most likely keep control of the House of Representatives.

It’s not a secret that personally, this disappoints me. I’m a liberal who campaigned for Kamala Harris and I’m no fan of Trump. But I won’t get too deep into political hot takes or analysis here (if you want the super political takes, check out forthcoming episodes of the New Liberal Podcast). Instead, I want to talk quickly about how the internet played a role in this campaign.

Virtually all cycle, the Trump campaign has been far more online than the Harris campaign. While both candidates did some podcast appearances with buzzy online personalities, Trump leaned into it much harder. Trump did podcasts with Logan Paul, Adin Ross, Barstool Sports, Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Lex Fridman, Shawn Ryan, the All In podcast, and a ton more highly online personalities. For Trump, this was the podcast election. This also showed up in how the campaign spoke and what issues they focused on. They frequently got sidetracked by extremely online discourses like Haitians eating cats or squirrel euthanasia. They gave speaking slots at the RNC to social media stars and promised a government position to Elon Musk.

Weekly Scroll: The Squirrel Gestapo

Harris, by contrast, dominated the campaign in the traditional ways you’re supposed to dominate a campaign. She got far more endorsements from heavyweight politicos, including huge numbers of Trump’s former cabinet. She raised more money and spent more on traditional advertising. She hired more professional operatives to work in battleground states. Her ‘ground game’ was perhaps the largest and best campaign of door knockers and phone bankers ever.

Trump, by contrast, effectively outsourced his ground game to doofuses Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk. According to most reporting, his ground game barely existed - Kirk largely grifted the money and Elon’s PAC was incompetent. To a first approximation, there were no Trump door knockers. It just turns out that doesn’t matter.

I, as much as anyone, have criticized the Trump approach and made fun of it. I have called them weird. I guess the joke is one me in the end - Trump’s hyper online campaign delivered results and Kamala’s grounded IRL campaign did not. Podcasts matter more than door knocking. Over the last several decades, conservatives have set up a completely independent media ecosystem from the mainstream media - TV stations, radio networks, websites, etc. And in the last few years, they’ve really pushed hard into the most digital spaces. The conservative podcast landscape has exploded. Elon Musk bought Twitter. They went all in on digital and social media and it worked.

It’s possible to overstate this. To my eye, Harris underperformed virtually everywhere but she did somewhat better in swing states - those door knockers and campaign operatives probably did have some effect. And obviously voters were thinking about a variety of issues like inflation, immigration, wokeness, etc. This was just a bad environment for Democrats in all likelihood.

Still, I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like “The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.” If that was ever correct it’s certainly not any more. It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you *must* be fighting in online spaces. It’s more important to win Joe Rogan than it is to win James Mattis. It’s more important to get your hashtags trending than to knock on doors. Social media is now more real than real life, and the politicians who recognize that are the ones who will win.