Yesterday, sitting here in the wreckage of the 2024 election, feeling extremely burdened by what has been, I started to wonder what the Democratic Party has planned for the future. So I checked and it turns out things are going extremely well!

I’m kidding of course:

The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

This remarkable paragraph, which appeared in an otherwise boring and uninsightful New York Times story from a few days ago, made me regret that I didn’t have the foresight to rebrand myself as a “youth masculinity consultant.” If the Democrats are going to set $20 million on fire anyway, I could at least capture and redirect some of that money to a good cause. (Perhaps it’s not too late, branding experts in my readership please get in touch.)

What makes SAM so incredible is not just the goofy acronym, the obscene cost, or the idea that elected Democrats can reverse engineer online virality if they study it hard enough. It’s also the specific example reported on by the Times: The alleged plan to buy advertisements in video games. If someone paid me (preferably many millions of dollars) to come up with a political outreach campaign that would deliberately polarize and alienate “the youth vote,” I doubt I could come up with a better idea than “put Pete Buttigieg in Call of Duty” — but I think that’s where we’re headed.

There are no details on what precisely “buying advertisements in video games” would look like or whether any political consultant has actually thought that through. One would hope it doesn’t mean literally trying to buy advertising real estate in GTA 6 or something. I’m sure nothing will build the Democrats more goodwill than reminding players that they already spent $70 on a game and did they really pay that much just to see Gavin Newsom’s face on a virtual billboard? This kind of thing was a novel strategy in 2008, when the Obama campaign purchased space in EA’s sports games but not so much in 2025 or — god help us — in 2028. Let’s also hope political messaging in games doesn’t look anything like what the Kamala Harris campaign already tried: Namely, a hastily cobbled-together and universally panned Fortnite map, released days before the election in an apparent attempt to capture the very important voting demographic of fourteen-year-olds! (Do you remember this? Of course not! It flopped.)

I’m not exactly deep in gaming culture, but even I understand that any attempt to message the guys who are persuadable and not already captured by the MAGA movement will need to seem far more organic and authentic than any campaign the Democratic Party’s current stable of consultants is capable of crafting. This is not a space that politicians or their surrogates can simply slide into without fundamentally changing their approach. The Harris campaign created a Twitch channel, and it was wholly irrelevant. If they had actually wanted their message to reach voters on Twitch, they would’ve needed the help of personalities who already had people’s attention. I don’t know if AOC playing Among Us with Pokimane helped win the election for Biden in 2020, but it was certainly more helpful than anything the Harris campaign did this time around!

To be really clear: Livestreamers and the personas they cultivate are no more or less “authentic” than any other kind of public-facing celebrity. But successful influencers — whether in gaming, politics or any other space — gain a following because they are adept at performing authenticity. You form parasocial relationships with streamers and respect their opinions, not because you actually know them, but because you think you know them. Politicians and aspiring politicians have a huge disadvantage because anyone who enters politics is presumed to be duplicitous; people associate politics with inauthenticity and pandering, and they aren’t necessarily wrong to do so. And you can’t overcome that disadvantage by just running ads in video games; you have to adapt to the medium or watch your message be destroyed by hordes of irony-pilled children who think you’re cringe.

None of what I’m saying here is particularly new or profound. This is basic knowledge for anyone who is moderately online and has thought about this stuff for half a minute. But that is apparently half a minute longer than anyone currently running the Democratic Party has thought about it!

UPDATE, May 29, 2025:

A few hours after I posted this, Rolling Stone published the entire SAM fundraising prospectus. It’s worth reading in full, if only to revel in how discouraging it is.