Vice President Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said during an interview that the Democratic Party was “losing hold of culture” as more and more Americans look to podcasts.
“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 an interview with Semafor. “You don’t get a national 8-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”
Harris and President-elect Donald Trump both made an effort to speak to podcasts and nontraditional media ahead of the 2024 election. Flaherty told Semafor during the interview that they had a hard time booking Harris on sports podcasts.
“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.’”
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Flaherty argued that sports culture was associated with right-wing culture, and made it difficult for their campaign to reach people.
“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.”
Harris campaign aides who have spoken out about their failed bid for the presidency have complained about the media, and place some blame on their questions for Harris.
“Real people heard, in some way, that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump, that I think that was a problem,” Jen O’Malley Dillon said during a discussion on “Pod Save America.”
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She also argued that when Harris did do an interview, the questions were “small and processy,” and they weren’t “informing” a voter.
Flaherty also spoke about Harris avoiding more traditional media outlets, though Harris did do several interviews with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News ahead of the election.
“There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Flaherty said.
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