Opting Out

Finally, a postmortem worth reading

This week, a new phrase entered the political lexicon, and I’m obsessed with it: “opt-out voters.”

Rob Flaherty, a longtime Democratic digital operative and a Deputy Campaign Manager for the 2024 Harris campaign, has written a must-read op-ed in the NY Times. He coined the phrase “opt-out voters.” But I’ll let Rob explain:

Today’s culture is no longer a creation of executives in New York City and Los Angeles. Thanks to algorithms and an endless set of media choices, what you see, read and hear is a personalized reflection of your own interests. It’s like a city with a lot of different neighborhoods. You might live in the personal fitness neighborhood or the parenting neighborhood, and you’ll never cross over into the equine science neighborhood or, say, the politics neighborhood. So if you don’t care about politics — or more precisely, don’t trust our politics — you don’t have to hear about it at all. A voter can turn on, tune in or opt out.

It was these voters — opt-out voters — who decided the 2024 election. It’s the same voters Democrats are struggling to reach today.

Flaherty admits in his piece that he’s an opt-in voter, as is most anyone reading a New York Times op-ed. Democrats, he argues, have become the party for opt-in voters and have targeted all of our communications towards galvanizing voters like us. Meanwhile, the MAGA Republican party “present[s] right-wing cultural narratives on every issue set — and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures. They reach opt-out voters directly. They test messages and see what works, and then it all jumps from their online ecosystem into speeches from the president.”

I’ve written about how the left is currently losing the pop culture battle that we once dominated and about the importance of building a non-political pipeline for content, but Flaherty gets right to the heart of our problem. “Opt-out voters don’t buy what we’re selling, and even if they did, we’d have a hard time reaching them.” He’s also brutally honest about what it will take to build that, and – something I appreciate – acknowledging that it will mean moving money from traditional campaign spending into ventures that won’t be profitable immediately.

The pandemic changed how we consume digital media and how much of it we consume. Americans consumed more digital media generally as we became more isolated in our homes, and it was a mass radicalization event for the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation. The MAGA Right had the infrastructure in place to capitalize on how our media habits were changing and the increased loneliness in our lives. Mass culture gave way to niche culture, and many of us, myself included, didn’t realize what had happened until it was too late.

I find myself curious about how many opt-in voters tuned out and became opt-out voters in the period between the 2020 to the 2024 election. Flaherty touches on this, suggesting that the right “owns where voters are going” but doesn’t offer any data or analysis on how that might have unfolded or be unfolding. It’s a scary thing to consider, especially since, as of right now, we don’t have the ecosystem to bring these folks back or stop them from checking out in the first place.

You might feel anger and resentment towards opt-out voters. It’s a sentiment I share, even as I’m trying to figure out how to reach them. Opting out feels like another way of saying dropped the ball or left the rest of us to clean up this mess. Part of me wonders why it’s always on us to stay tuned in and find ways to reach people who were more than happy to tune out and likely won’t ever acknowledge their own role in bringing back the Trump Regime or the harm their inaction has done.

At the same time, it’s helpful to have a framework beyond the usual election post-mortems. A way of understanding what happened to these folks and where their heads are at. A roadmap for funders, advocates, and those of us still trying to understand why our friends and family voted the way they did. As angry as I still am at these folks, I’m grateful to at least have a theory of change and a way forward.

We’re 100ish days into the Trump Regime, and there’s no going back. Trump’s approval rating is at a historic low, but not as low as it should be given the damage he’s done. He’s losing ground, but again, the drops aren’t that dramatic. It’s unclear to me how much is getting through to opt-out voters, but some of the NYT’s most recent focus groups with Trump voters indicate that it’s not nearly enough.

Eventually, Trump’s decisions will come for all of us, and there’s an opportunity to bring some of these folks back into the fold. What concerns me is that we don’t yet have the pipeline ready to capitalize on those moments as they come. It’s long past time to start building.

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ICYMI

The Group Chats That Changed America (Semafor)

Billionaires spent as much time on group chats as you did during the pandemic. Only theirs sound a lot more obnoxious.

"Still No Epstein Files": After Virginia Giuffre Dies, MAGA Conspiracists Struggle to Keep the Faith (Salon)

Virginia Giuffre’s death by suicide will only add fuel to the fire for conspiracy mongers, but as Amanda Marcotte points out, they’ll never be satisfied. Reality has a way of doing that.

Mistakes Were Made. And Made. And Made Again. (Mother Jones)

The most useful roundup of Trump’s first 100 days in office. Listing each and every mistake. A good one to bookmark.

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Coda

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