Kamala Harris’ digital manager has admitted that the Harris campaign was blindsided by being shunned by sports broadcast personalities and ultimately unable to make a dent in the new cultural media ecosystem online.
In a lengthy interview with Semafor, Harris campaign operative Rob Flaherty admitted that Donald Trump’s campaign was far more adept at reaching those who have had it with the traditional media. He also pointed out that sports have become the home of red America, despite the generally left-wing sports media.
In fact, even left-wing sports media seems to be finally coming around to understanding their fans’ desire to stay out of politics. Flaherty told Semafor that the hosts of a surprising number of sports TV, radio, and podcast shows turned down interviews with Harris because they felt their audiences would be annoyed by having to sit through a Harris appearance on their favorite shows.
That surprising situation caused Flaherty to believe that sports are now “associated with right-wing culture” despite the best efforts of the sports media.
“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty said after finding that some of the biggest sports commentators politely turned down the offer to have Harris on their shows.
“It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.'” he added.
“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” Flaherty added. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly, the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for [Democrats] to reach people.”
While Flaherty didn’t name names, it is notable that Harris never appeared on Colin Cowherd’s show, nor with Bill Simmons or the Kelce Brothers. This led Flaherty to realize that many of these otherwise leftist commentators were avoiding the Harris campaign because they were “afraid of their audience.”
It was then that Flaherty further realized that the Democrats were quickly losing their decades-long control of culture, and Trump’s huge win was evidence of that. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture,” he added.
Speaking of Colin Cowherd, he made a similar comment last week when he pointed out that all the left-wing activism in the NBA seems to have ended up in a massive loss of TV ratings. He compared that loss to the downfall of the Democrat Party, which also lost “regular people” in November’s elections.
So, with Cowherd making such a statement now, after the election is over, it might seem less surprising that he had little interest in having Kamala Harris as a guest on his The Herd sports show.
Flaherty admitted that Democrats are still not exactly sure how to fix this problem. They used to fully control the news landscape, as well as movies, TV, and music. But with the slow death of traditional media and the rise of personalized Internet media, culture is quickly moving away from the forums where the Democrats used to push out their message.
He went on to insist that the left needs to invent its own Joe Rogan and develop its own left-wing ecosystem of shows and podcasts on the Internet. What Flaherty doesn’t seem to realize, though, is that “creating” these sorts of platforms has never worked in the past. And left-wing media personalities are distrusted as shills by a growing number of Americans who are seeking out voices who do not represent the entrenched, left-wing establishment.
Flaherty is right, though, in his final assessment that the Democrats have a steep hill to climb to regain even a modicum of the control they once had over American culture.
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