{"id":1723,"date":"2024-12-19T20:27:21","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T20:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.authorfreeman.com\/blog\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2026-02-01T20:48:02","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T20:48:02","slug":"engaging-the-right-wing-echo-chamber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.authorfreeman.com\/blog\/engaging-the-right-wing-echo-chamber\/","title":{"rendered":"Engaging the Right Wing Echo Chamber"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Democrats are beginning to understand <\/span>the power and extent of the right wing media bubble<\/span><\/a>. For the past three election cycles, many of us have asked, \u201cHow could so many people have voted for someone like Trump?\u201d More and more, we’re realizing that the answer is not any particular issue or line of reasoning, not anything \u201cdeplorable\u201d about the people themselves, but: \u201cBecause right wing media was <\/span>their <\/span>sole<\/span><\/i> source<\/span><\/a> of the news.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of post mortem talk these days about how the Democratic Party could improve its policies, messaging, and candidates to do better next time, and we should by all means continue evolving our vision for the country and how we communicate it. However, no change in the party is going to affect voters who will <\/span>never<\/span><\/i> hear about them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let that sink in for a moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s an enormous segment of the electorate that will <\/span>never even hear<\/span><\/i> our pitch to the nation, however well we tune it. They won\u2019t be choosing between our policies and the GOP\u2019s; they\u2019ll be choosing between the distortions of those policies presented to them by the voices they trust, voices that are more free than ever to lie more egregiously than ever to their audience because of how well they’ve insulated it from any other news sources.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where does that leave us?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It obviously depends on how big that segment is. Right now, <\/span>the best organizations I know of<\/span><\/a> for growing and turning out a Democratic electorate still seem to have fertile fields to work, room to maximize our advantage among voter cohorts that are still persuadable, but the 2024 presidential election, in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote for the first time in twenty years, raises the concern that this might not always be the case.<\/span><\/p>\n

What will happen if\/when the right wing media bubble grows to the point that no success we can have outside it will give us more than 50% of the vote?\u00a0 At that point, we’ll have to find a way to penetrate the bubble, to inject our voices into that echo chamber, so we can pull at least some of its occupants back onto the common ground of a shared reality.<\/p>\n

Democratic organizations, current or new–I suspect that brand new ones devoted to this specific mission will need to be founded and funded–must begin or accelerate the work of:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Establishing the extent, makeup, and trajectory of the right wing echo chamber,<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Finding ways to reach that audience, and<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Developing effective messaging that can pull them out of the bubble.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Some notes:<\/p>\n