There are no actual Democrats in Trump’s Cabinet so far, but he’s hoping to appoint an ex-Democrat to run HHS. As I noted at New York, RFK Jr. is in trouble for not abandoning abortion rights far or fast enough.

Donald Trump’s shocking nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the vast Department of Health and Human Services led to a lot of concerns about his suitability and ideological compatibility with the MAGA folk that would surround him at the Cabinet table. Kennedy’s reflexive hostility to vaccines puts him at odds with many Republicans. His complaints about Big Pharma, agribusiness giants, and use of pesticides by farmers have earned him some enemies who are very influential in the Republican Party. And his denunciation of processed foods as child-killing evils has to personally annoy the Big Mac aficionado of Mar-a-Lago.

But even if none of those longtime controversies surrounding the former Democrat make him radioactive among the Senate Republicans who would have to confirm him for HHS, he’s also in considerable trouble with one of the GOP’s oldest and most important allies: the anti-abortion movement. Suspicion of him in that quarter is natural, since Kennedy for many years maintained a standard Democratic position favoring abortion rights, though it was never an issue that preoccupied him. Then, as a presidential candidate who drifted out of the Democratic primaries into an independent bid, he was all over the place on abortion. He made remarks that ranged from unconditional support for the right to choose even after fetal viability to support for a three-month national ban to various points in between.

At a minimum, anti-abortion activists would like to pin him to an acceptable position, but they also seem inclined to secure concessions from him in exchange for declining to go medieval on his confirmation, as Politico explains:

“Abortion opponents — concerned about Kennedy’s past comments supporting abortion access — have two major asks: that he appoint an anti-abortion stalwart to a senior position in HHS and that he promise privately to them and publicly during his confirmation hearing to restore anti-abortion policies from the first Trump administration, according to four anti-abortion advocates granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. And Kennedy, according to a fifth person close to the Trump transition, is open to their entreaties.”

He’d better be. Despite Trump’s abandonment of the maximum anti-abortion stance during his 2024 campaign, the forced-birth lobby remained firmly in his camp and has maintained even more influence among Republican officeholders who haven’t “pivoted” from the 45th president’s hard-core position to the 47th president’s current contention that abortion policy is up to the states. Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s even more important than ever to anti-abortion activists that Trump be surrounded by zealots in order to squeeze as many congenial actions as possible out of his administration and the Republicans who will control Congress come January. And there’s plenty HHS can do to make life miserable for those needing abortion services, Politico notes:

“At a minimum, anti-abortion groups want to see the Trump administration rescind the policies Biden implemented that expanded abortion access, such as the update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, as well as FDA rules making abortion pills available by mail and at retail pharmacies. … The advocates are also demanding the return of several Trump-era abortion rules, including the so-called Mexico City policy that blocked federal funding for international non-governmental organizations that provide or offer counseling on abortions, anti-abortion restrictions on federal family-planning clinics and a federal ban on discriminating against health care entities that refuse to cover abortion services or refer patients for the procedure when taxpayer dollars are involved.”

Anti-abortion folk could overplay their bullying of Kennedy and annoy the new administration: The Trump transition team has already vetoed one of the Cause’s all-time favorites, Roger Severino, for HHS deputy secretary, though it may have been as much about his identification with the toxic Project 2025 as his extremist background on abortion policy. It probably doesn’t help that objections to Kennedy for being squishy on abortion were first aired by former vice-president Mike Pence, who has about as much influence with Trump 2.0 as the former president’s former fixer Michael Cohen.

As for Kennedy, odds are he will say and do whatever it takes to get confirmed; he’s already had to repudiate past comments about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, including a comparison of his new master to Adolf Hitler (a surprisingly common problem in MAGA land). Having come a very long way from his quixotic challenge to Joe Biden in 2023, Kennedy really wants to take his various crusades into the new administration, at least until Trump inevitably gets tired of hearing complaints from donors about him and sends him back to the fever swamps.

“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” by TNR editor Michael Tomasky is cross-posted from The New Republic:

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google started eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

Some excerpts from “Biden Is Pouring Millions Into a State Democrats Haven’t Won Since 2008” by Tarini Parti at The Wall Street Journal:

President Biden’s re-election campaign is making a larger investment in North Carolina than recent Democratic presidential efforts, laying the groundwork for an alternative path to retaining the White House and potentially forcing Donald Trump to play defense in a Republican-dominated state.

The Biden campaign has 16 offices and hired more than 60 staff members, a campaign official and county officials said, marking a larger footprint—at an earlier point in the race—than Biden’s 2020 effort or Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Biden and his allies have spent $5.2 million in the state through June 19 on broadcast and cable advertising, as well as radio and online, data from AdImpact shows. Trump’s campaign has spent nothing on advertising in the state so far for the general election, a sign his campaign sees the state as safely Republican.

“This week I’m joined by my good friend, Josh Kraushaar. He’s one of America’s keenest political minds and a long-time journalist who is currently the Editor in Chief of Jewish Insider. We discuss developments in the presidential campaign, the ongoing brand challenges of Biden on the economy and energy policy, and explore the impact of recent anti-Israel protests and emerging divisions within the Democratic Party on the Israel-Hamas war.

“We discuss developments in the presidential campaign, the ongoing brand challenges of Biden on the economy and energy policy, and explore the impact of recent anti-Israel protests and emerging divisions within the Democratic Party on the Israel-Hamas war.”

Josh Kraushaar is the author of Axios’ weekly Sunday Sneak Peek newsletter, which focuses on the big-picture forces driving American politics, and he writes a column analyzing the latest political developments for Jewish Insider. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Hotline, where he authored the biweekly Against the Grain column and hosted a weekly podcast featuring the leading lawmakers, political operatives and journalists for candid interviews. He also was co-author of the 2014 Almanac of American Politics. Kraushaar frequently appears as a political analyst on television and radio. He is a Fox News Radio political analyst, providing political commentary across all the network’s platforms.

Ruy Teixeira is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, author of numerous works of political analysis, and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?”

As a participant in anti-Vietnam War protests, I felt some clear comparisons to today’s antiwar protests was in order, so I wrote an assessment at New York:

For many a baby-boomer, the sights and sounds of student protests against U.S. complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza brought back vivid memories of the anti–Vietnam War movement of their youth and of the conservative backlash that ultimately placed its legacy in question. Some of today’s protestors consciously promote an identification with their forebears of the 1960s and 1970s. And some events — notably the huge deployments of NYPD officers at Columbia University 56 years to the day after police crushed an anti–Vietnam War protest at the school — are eerily evocative of that bygone era.

As someone who was involved in a minor way in the earlier protests (mostly as a member of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), I’m both fascinated by the comparisons and alert to the very big differences between the vast and nearly decadelong demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the nascent movement we’re seeing today. Here’s how they compare from several key perspectives.

Size: Gaza protests are smaller than anti-Vietnam demonstrations.

While early protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza were often centered in Arab American and Muslim American communities, the latest wave is principally college-campus-based, albeit widespread, as the Washington Post reported:

“The arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on April 18 set off the latest wave of student activism across the country.

“The outbreak of nearly 400 demonstrations is the most widespread since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. From the Ivy League to small colleges, students have set up encampments and organized rallies and marches, with many demanding that their schools divest from Israeli corporations.”

The size of these protests has ranged from the hundreds into the thousands, but they can’t really be regarded as a mass phenomenon at this point.

There are, however, similarities to the earliest phase of the anti–Vietnam War movement: the campus-based “teach-ins” of 1965 (the year U.S. ground troops were first deployed in Vietnam). These began at the University of Michigan and then went viral, as a history compiled by students of the university recalled:

“The March 1965 teach-in at the University of Michigan inspired a wave of more than fifty similar teach-ins at universities around the nation and directly challenged the Johnson administration’s ability to shape public opinion about the War in Vietnam. At Columbia University, just two days after the UM event, professors held an all-night teach-in attended by 2,000 students …

“At UC-Berkeley, after an overflow crowd attended the initial UM-inspired teach-in, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a second outdoor event that drew 30,000 students.”

The anti–Vietnam War movement soon outgrew its campus origins as the war intensified and U.S. deployments soared. By 1967, monster rallies and marches were held in major cities — notably a New York march that attracted an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 protesters and a San Francisco rally that filled Kezar Stadium. At the New York event, the expansion of the antiwar movement to encompass elements of the civil-rights movement that had in part inspired the early protesters was exemplified by the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., who had just made his first overtly antiwar speech at Riverside Church.

By then the antiwar movement was beginning to attract support from a significant number of politicians, mostly Democrats but some Republicans.

The pro-Palestinian protest movement could eventually grow to this scale and breadth of support, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Durability: Gaza protests are new; anti–Vietnam War movement lasted a decade.

The fight to end American involvement in Vietnam lasted as long as the war itself; protests began in 1964, grew to include a mainstream congressional effort to cut off U.S. military aid, and continued as the South Vietnam regime collapsed in 1975. It had multiple moments of revived participation. Once such moment was Moratorium Day in October 1969, when an estimated 2 million Americans joined antiwar demonstrations once it became clear that Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the war begun by Lyndon Johnson. Another was the massive wave of protests in May 1970 when Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia; student walkouts and strikes occurred on around 900 college campuses and students were killed in Ohio and Mississippi.

It’s unclear whether the pro-Palestinian protests have anything like that kind of staying power. That’s a significant issue, since the goal shared by many protesters — a fundamental shift in the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians — could be harder to execute than an end to the Vietnam War.

Focus: Gaza protests have less clear-cut goals than Vietnam demonstrations.

Most pro-Palestinians protesters have embraced multiple demands and goals: an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza; termination of U.S. military assistance to Israel; and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Campus-based protesters have also called for termination of university investments in companies operating in Israel and, in some cases, closure of academic partnerships with Israeli institutions.

If this is going to become a sustained movement rather than a scattershot series of loosely connected local protests, some clarification of tangible goals will be necessary. Some of these aims are more achievable than others. If, for example, the Biden administration and the Saudis succeed in negotiating a significant cease-fire that temporarily ends the carnage in Gaza, does that take the wind of out of the sails of protesters seeking a definitive withdrawal of support for Israel? That’s unclear at this point.

For the most part, the anti–Vietnam War protest movement had one principal goal: the removal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam. Yes, factions of that movement expanded their goals to include such war-adjacent issues as university divestment from firms manufacturing weapons, closure of ROTC programs, draft resistance, and non-war-related issues like Black empowerment and anti-poverty efforts. But there was never much doubt that bringing the troops home was paramount.

Leadership: Gaza protests include more radical organizers.

One of the reasons for a perception of unfocused goals in the current wave of protests stems from organizers with more radical positions and rhetoric than some of their followers. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, two major groups helping organize pro-Palestinian protests subscribe to ideologies incompatible with mainstream support:

“The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets …

“A second group that has helped organize the demonstrations at Columbia is called Within Our Lifetime. Like SJP, WOL takes an uncompromising eliminationist stance toward Israel, even calling for ‘the abolition of zionism.’”

This was intermittently an issue in the anti–Vietnam War movement, particularly as such campus-based pioneers of protests as Students for a Democratic Society drifted into Marxist sectarianism. I vividly recall an antiwar march I attended in Atlanta in 1969 wherein the organizers (mostly from the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance) put Vietcong flags at either end of the march and controlled bullhorns bellowing slogans like “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is gonna win,” referring to the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This effectively turned a peace rally into something very different.

But over time, the extremist wing of the anti–Vietnam War movement went its own way, falling prey to fragmentation (the collapse of SDS into at least three factions that included the ultraviolent and Maoist Weatherman group epitomized its self-marginalization) and irrelevance. If the pro-Palestinian protest movement is to last, it needs to shed its more extreme elements.

Relevance: Gaza protests aren’t impacting U.S. politics as deeply.

There was never any doubt that anti–Vietnam War protesters were talking about something that vitally affected Americans, even if it took them a while to get on board. 2.7 million American citizens served in the Vietnam War with 58,000 losing their lives. 1.9 million young Americans were conscripted into the military during that war. While what Americans did to the people of Indochina wasn’t often called “genocide,” millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, and the humanitarian disaster did increasingly trouble the consciences of many people not directly affected by the conflict. As many military leaders and reactionary politicians bitterly argued for decades, U.S. public opinion eventually ended the Vietnam War.

While the rise in sympathy for Palestinians and support for some sort of cease-fire has been palpable as deaths soar in Gaza, it remains unclear how invested Americans are in any sort of policy change toward the conflict. Yes, unhappiness with Joe Biden’s leadership in this area is a real political problem for him, but much of the unhappiness stems from conservatives (particularly conservative Evangelicals) who want stronger support for Israel. And the effort to make this issue an existential threat to Biden’s renomination during the 2024 Democratic primaries failed in contrast to the major role played by anti–Vietnam War sentiment in sidelining LBJ in 1968.

Making Gaza a crucial issue in American politics grows more challenging to the extent protesters choose more radical goals, like a single secular (i.e., non-Zionist) Palestinian state. And at the same time, more modest goals could undermine the strength and unity of the protest movement if protesters reject half-measures (much as anti–Vietnam War protesters rejected “Vietnamization,” phony peace talks, and other steps that prolonged the war).

Legacy: Gaza protests could provoke a similar backlash.

Arguably, the many sacrifices and eventual triumph of anti–Vietnam War protesters were more than offset by a conservative backlash that treated the “disorder” and alleged lack of patriotism associated with protests as a social malady to be remedied with heavy-handed repression. In the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the two candidates who engaged in law-and-order rhetoric and often espoused more violent steps to win the war, won 57 percent of the national popular vote. Other successful conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan made crackdowns on “coddled” student protesters a signature issue.

Today, Donald Trump and other Republicans are eagerly making pro-Palestinian protests part of a law-and-order message aimed at both student protesters and the “elite” faculty and administrators who are allegedly encouraging them. If protesters deliberately or inadvertently help Trump get back into the White House, they may soon encounter a U.S. administration that makes “Genocide Joe” Biden’s look like an oasis of pacific benevolence.

You should not be shocked to learn that “The advertising dollars spent on U.S. elections and advocacy issues will grow to roughly $16 billion next year, up 31.2% compared to the last presidential election in 2020, according to a new forecast” by  GroupM, one of the world’s largest paid advertising agencies, Sara Fischer reports at Axios.

OK, ad expenditures up nearly a third from the last presidential election is a pretty big hike, but not a huge shock, considering inflation and the persistence of political polarization.

Every American who looks at images on a screen, either on TV, the internet and even cell phones, should expect an historically-unprecedented deluge of political ads. Oh, and print is not quite dead yet, so there will be more political ads in your mailbox.

Fischer notes further that “A majority of political advertising spend in the U.S. goes to local broadcast TV, but an increasing amount is moving toward digital channels.”  Further, “One of the fastest-growing segments is Connected TV (CTV) advertising, or video ads that run on digital TV sets connected to the internet. They offer campaigns the ability to target their ads more narrowly to voters with certain interests, instead of just age and gender demographics.”

Democrats should hope that the party’s ad gurus are on top of the trend toward Connected TV advertising, so they can better target key constituencies with appropriate ads. And let’s hope that Dems are already busy placing their ads in the most important swing county markets, like Erie County, Pa, as I noted on January 1. And would it be too much to ask that Democrats at least try to reduce the tremendous advantage they have ceded to Republicans on the nation’s radio networks, which penetrate into rural areas?

Of course, it’s not just about ads. Democratic campaigns must improve their game in terms of getting more “earned” media coverage. It’s a tough challenge when the other side has all the bomb throwers. But, as infrastructure projects  enacted by Democrats kick in during the next year, let no Republican who voted against them escape unscathed, especially those who have the temerity to show up for the ribbon-cutting.

The thing to keep in mind about political ads is that they are important for both persuasion and boosting turnout. If we have learned anything about “low information” voters in recent years, it is that there is a lot of room for improved outreach to them. The stakes couldn’t be much higher for both Democrats, and for the future of democracy in the U.S.

In “Democrats plan to track and corner Republican 2024 candidates on Trump,” Jarrett Renshaw reports at Reuters:

When Republican U.S. Representative Don Bacon was asked if he supports Donald Trump’s bid for the White House next year at Nebraska town hall last month, he batted away the question, saying it was too early to say, given the former president hadn’t yet secured the nomination.

Despite the non-answer, a Democratic activist with a video camera filmed the exchange, and it was quickly blasted it online with the headline Bacon “refuses to tell Nebraskans if he supports Trump.”

Crenshaw notes further,

Democrats are monitoring local radio interviews, scouring news stories and hiring teams of political trackers armed with cameras to blanket Republican events, to capture the moment a candidate is asked a Trump loyalty question.

North Carolina, Arizona and Pennsylvania Democrats are currently hiring “trackers” to follow, record and post footage of Republicans at local events, according to job websites.

For $4,000 a month, a tracker will be responsible for “comprehensively tracking opponents’ schedules” and providing “same day footage” to “drive the campaign narrative,” one such job posting says.

Tracking, essentially following an opponent with the hopes they slip up or do something that can be used to influence voters, has become a ubiquitous practice in U.S. political campaigns in recent years. It will only grow in 2024, some Democrats say.

American Bridge 21st Century, the largest research, tracking, and rapid response operation in the Democratic Party, spent $84 million tracking Republican candidates and using the footage to run ads against them in their home states in 2020.

In 2024, the operation is “going to be bigger than it’s ever been,” President Pat Dennis told Reuters.

Renshaw adds, “Republicans in suburban districts are the most squeezed by Trump politics, making them the best areas to film, Dennis said….”The amount of damage Trump has done to the Republican Party in the suburbs is extraordinary. So that’s sort of the pain point for them,” Dennis said.”

Good to know that state and local Democratic parties are paying attention with determination to hold GOP candidates accountable. Now, if local media will do its job, Dems will have a fighting chance to elect a working majority that can get America moving forward in the post-Trump era.