- The New Rules with Alan Pentz
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- Tech Bros and Influencers
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I try to stay out of the day to day back and forth of politics. Much of it is kafabe but I do think we’ve seen some longer term trends confirm their trajectory in 2024 and I think it’s worth noting them now. Next week I’m going to contrast these US-centric trends in a positive light with what I see as the abject failure of politics in Europe. So here are the four key trends I’m tracking:
Politics by Influencer Becomes Politics by Transfer Portal: One of my basic theories is that politics and government eventual mimic the trends in media and whatever industry is dominant at the time. Today that means TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts on the media side and tech on the industry side.
In the case of the former, people choose their politicians so if you want to get elected you are going to have to go to where the people are. In the case of the later, getting elected requires money so the most successful industry will usually have the money. In addition, the dominate industry of an era is where the most dynamic people and ideas come from. As we face government challenges, we naturally turn to solutions from that industry.
Obama was the first to recognize the power of social media but despite Harris bringing former Obama manager, David Plouffe, and others on to her campaign, it was Trump who exploited modern media the most effectively. Trump turned it into an art form first with cable news and Twitter in 2016 and in 2024 with podcasts and YouTubers. It was Trump who stayed current with the vibes.
We see the same trends in advertising. Brands are losing cache as influencers gain it. Scott Galloway is a master of marketing and longtime tech watcher. His newsletter, No Mercy, No Malice, put it this way:
The corporate world has started to wake up to the power of the person, but the movement was started years ago by Elon Musk. From the beginning, Musk knew he was Tesla’s greatest commercial. This is why the company never ran ads. Instead, like Trump, he plastered himself everywhere — at every conference and on every network. His tweeting frequency went from mildly obsessive to clinically insane. He quickly amassed nearly 200 million Twitter followers, then bought the platform. People wonder how Tesla commands a valuation premium 10x greater than its peers while spending only four ad dollars per vehicle sold. The answer is Elon Musk.
Other companies have picked up where Elon left off — most notably, Meta. Meta’s worst rebrand happened three years ago when the company tried to wash away its sins by switching from Facebook to Meta. It didn’t work, and brand trust tanked. Its best rebrand, however, came this year, when Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward coat-and-tie-wearing Senate-hearing prop, to gold-chain-donning T-Pain-loving jiu-jitsu fighter. In addition to leaning into his personality, Zuckerberg has made himself more public. He posted 71 Instagrams this year, documenting everything from Taylor Swift concerts to UFC fights. In 2021 he posted just 29 times, mostly product announcements. The extent to which the Zuck has put himself on display this year is astounding. But more important, effective: Since the rebrand, Zuckerberg’s favorability score among what was once his most hostile cohort (18- to 34-year-olds) has increased 73%. This is what it means to choose “person” over “brand.”
What I found particularly interesting in this election is not just how Trump used media to bolster his brand but also how he went about recruiting other influencers to his cause. This was a deliberate strategy meant to target young men but somewhere post assisination attempt it really started gathering steam. RFK, Musk, the All In Podcast guys, Marc Andreesen, Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and of course WWE among others. The most striking of these were Tulsi, who served as a Democratic Congresswoman, and RFK who was running for the Democratic nomination for President as of late 2023.
This got me thinking that coalition building in politics has changed. Politicians have always had to appeal to different constituencies to build a winning coalition. You targeted soccer moms or the white working class by adopting a policy position or targeting advertising. That worked in previous elections.
More recently the Democratic Party tried to coalesce what Matt Yglesias called, “the groups.” These are non-profit organizations that profess to represent parts of the electorate-usually based on a racial, gender, or whatever other grievance category you can think of. What the Democrats learned in 2024 is that those groups weren’t elected by the people they profess to represent. They look a lot more like self appointed elites who can’t get anyone elected dog catcher in an off year cycle.
In the post 2024 world, you target the influencer. The soccer moms watch someone on Facebook. The white working class listens to Rogan or Theo Von. Influencers command attention and while not elected, they can sway votes. Trump understood that you need to target the influencers to woo them to your side, and you hope they bring their people with them. It’s a lot like the NCAA transfer portal. Go get Coach Prime and then you can stack your team with a bunch of disaffected transfers from more boring or otherwise unattractive programs. Coach Prime is an influencer. He attracts people to him. He’s a football program in a box.1
These influencers will be up for grabs going forward. Trump can’t run again and will eventually disappoint or sideline some of his supporters and they’ll be available. Note that Rogan held off endorsing until the very end hoping to attract Harris for an interview. But also note that if your influencer is Liz Cheney, you are going to lose the election.
The Tech Bros are Coming: As I mentioned above, politics and government tend to follow the lead of whatever large industry is preeminent at the time. General Motors was a template for the post World War Two federal bureacracy that is now under assault from Elon Musk’s DOGE.
This is inevitable. Tech rose to prominence first under Obama and made some initial inroads in helping to get him elected, shape some policies, and fix the healthcare.gov portal. But mostly Democrats have just looked at tech as a fundraising source rather than a driving force in how they govern.
Post 2016, Democrats began attacking big tech blaming it for electing Trump and spreading disinformation. Demonizing the most dynamic and fastest growing industry in the world is foolish. It also drove many of the tech elite into the arms of Trump who promptly brought them into his inner circle.
However, Democrats can recover. Many prominent tech leaders remain aligned with Democrats: Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, and Vinod Khosla to name a few. A successful future Democratic Presidential candidate will cultivate these people and give them real power to help shape policy and to help govern.
When people look for examples of how to organize companies or get things done, they naturally look to tech today. They are the success story that Henry Ford’s assembly line was in 1913. Both parties need these people inside government to not only win elections but to also win in the harder work of governing.
Governing is Hard: However just getting a few tech bros and gals on board isn’t going to make your problems go away. Governing the massive edifice that is the United States is hard. One of the things I’m watching most is how the quickly changing world of media is running aground on the slow changing shoals of actual government. Elections are impacted by new media trends faster than the actual work of governing is.
Two recent examples highlighted this tension for me. The first is Musk’s recent sinking of a carefully negotiated continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government until the Spring. The bill also contains a raft of other provisions including farm aid and disaster relief.
Elon was able to flex his muscle in scuttling the bill. That’s the fast moving media side but he appears to have undermined Trump and weakened him before he even takes office. This is that slow governing part asserting itself. When the original CR failed, Trump backed a hastily crafted CR that included a debt ceiling increase. That went down in flames in the House with 38 Republican members voting against it. Eventually the House passed a modified version of the first bill with all the major funding intact.2
A good legislative strategist would have cleared the decks for Trump going into his inauguration. This is something that Jake Sherman at Punchbowl News repeatedly pointed out. A better approach would have been to pass an omnibus bill funding the government fully through 2025 along with a two year debt ceiling increase. I don’t know if Democrats would have voted for that. The appropriations bills favored their interests so it was worth a try. If you do that Trump doesn’t need to take on a debt ceiling fight in 2025. That fight pits him against his own party in the House. It would make much more sense to at least postpone that fight while he works on more popular proposals like tax cuts and immigration reform.
Crafting a strategy like that requires swamp creatures like Mitch McConnell and doesn’t lend itself to last minute tweet storms. Threatening to primary members of your own party when you are going to have a 1 seat majority isn’t a great strategy. You can only primary someone once. I’m not sure the 5th threat is going to have much more impact. Now Trump’s momentum and the aura of his mandate have been dented by his supposed ally and his own party in the House. That’s an own goal.
The second example is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC)’s failed bid for the top Democratic slot on the House Oversight Committee. AOC lost to a more senior member of the committee, Gerry Connolly. This decision shows that Democrats are letting the slow government change part paralyze them.
Oversight is involved in all the made for tv and now TikTok Congressional investigations. Do you want your party’s response to Republican attacks led by your rumpled 9th grade math teacher?
Or by the most attractive and social media savvy talent the party has?
If the Dems manage to flip the chamber in two years, AOC is exactly who you want raking Trump Administration officials over the coals. Not Elmer Fudd. This is a colossal error and evidence that the party still doesn’t get what happened to them.
It’ll take an insurgent Presidential candidate who is media savvy (maybe AOC herself) to shake up the party the same way Trump has with the Republicans.
We Are More Divided and Less Polarized: One thing we need to keep in mind is that even with Trump’s trifecta winning the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, it was a very close election. The final vote tallies are far closer than was indicated on Election Day.
Trump won by a mere 1.36% margin and the Electoral College turned on just 230,000 votes across the three key swing states. The Democrats ran one of the worst candidates in history and almost won.
Clearly the country is still very divided and because that division is basically 50/50, power will continue to flip election to election. What if Harris had selected popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and made RFK head of a sunshine and clean living task force? Could that have swayed the result? Who knows?
However, despite being divided it seems like the country is becoming less polarized on many dimensions which is all to the good. Racial, educational, and even gender polarization fell in 2024. This is consistent with politics by influencer and transfer portal. Chunks of the electorate are going to move as one or another party embraces them and their policies in their election efforts.
Overall I’m impressed by the US politic system’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. It’s a thriving, messy, and full-throated democracy. That makes for some volatility and certainly helps with headlines but its key feature is that it adapts and accommodates. Next week we’ll take a look at Europe where I see the opposite. Until then…
Keep learning,
Alan
P.S.
1 For my non American and sports knowledgeable readers, Coach Prime is the nickname for former NFL star and now head coach of the University of Colorado football team, Deion Sanders. He’s a big personality and uses the attention he gets from the media to attract players to him. A couple of years ago the organization that manages college athletics, the NCAA, created a transfer portal. This allows players to move between programs year to year in a way that had never been available before.
2 One of the dropped provisions was restrictions on US investment in China. This isn’t a good look for Musk and will certainly fuel conspiracy theories about doing Beijing’s bidding.
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