James Fallows noted a slight difference between that front page and this one:
More than 100,000 people showed up yesterday in New York City alone. They estimate 7 million around the country. The first gets the big A1 front page story. The second has a picture below the fold and a story on page A23.
This is a huge problem.
I highly recommend this piece by Chris Hayes in the same NY Times (gift link) that discusses how much the attention asymmetry is killing us. It’s a media problem, for sure. They are draw like flies to honey to all the provocations of the right and simply aren’t that interested in the earnest dissent from the left. Unless they commit violence or do something illegal they fail to see it as particularly newsworthy. The old “if it bleeds it leads” journalistic trope is very true. But it’s also a liberal/progressive problem.
An excerpt:
The old way is dying. Any campaign must have a theory and a plan for capturing the attention of the voters they need to win. Before the era of TV, campaigns used all kinds of strategies, like doing whistle-stop tours and training supporters to give speeches to local assembly halls on the candidate’s behalf. For much of the past four decades or so, the reach and power of broadcast TV solved this problem for campaigns.
The recipe was fairly straightforward for politicians seeking political office at the statewide and federal levels: raise a ton of money and then spend it on 15- or 30-second TV ads. There were and are other forms of advertising — radio ads, mailers and digital advertising, most prominently — but the main way you got the attention of your potential voters was through TV ads. This made sense; TV was the place that attracted the most attention from potential voters collected (particularly during, say, the prime local viewing hours of network evening news). If you had enough money to buy ads, you could reach the voters you wanted to reach, and the problem was simply getting enough money.
That world no longer exists. TV viewership has declined, and audiences have fractured. Money cannot buy attention as reliably or directly as it once did.
Therefore, it will not do to run the old playbook and hope for victory in this very new game.
He goes on to recommend several strategies and tactics the Democrats can adopt to start narrowing the attention gap. Most important is the idea that they have to start being willing to take chances and risk getting something wrong.
I get the reluctance to do that, I do. First of all, the press rarely gives the Democrats a break when they mess up and Democratic voters don’t have the same “who gives a damn” attitude that Republicans do. After all, shamelessness is their superpower. It gives them tremendous leverage. But you have to be willing to take risks to get something positive as well so Dems need to develop a thicker hide and be willing to endure negative news cycles which move much more quickly these days and leave a shallower mark than in the past.
And yes — look for charisma over fundraising prowess in candidate recruitment and flood the zone by going everywhere. The day of the dominance of TV ads is over. It’s time to look for different ways of getting attention and Hayes’ ideas are well worth thinking about.
This is a fresh way of looking at the Democrat vs MAGA conundrum and I think it’s important. As he points out, all the usual garment-rending about “the message” isn’t the problem. The message is actually much more popular than the right’s creepy 14 year-old trolling. He shows how that was true of the Harris Walz message in 2024 — the problem was that not enough people heard it.
You have to penetrate the overwhelming cacophony of noise in which we live and it’s not easy. But that’s central to turning things around. The Democratic Party needs to listen.