Days before Election Day last year, Sen. Cory Booker went to then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer with a problem.
“We’re way behind,” Booker told Schumer.
Republicans were dominating podcasts and social media. While the likes of Joe Rogan were supercharging Republican rhetoric, Booker showed Schumer that online engagement for Senate Democrats was comparatively “anemic.”
In Booker’s estimation, Democrats were producing “poignant,” viral-worthy moments, but the moments weren’t going viral. And Democrats had no answer to the Republican media ecosystem to amplify them.
Booker’s warning to Schumer came too late to spare Democrats from their election defeat. But as the fog of the campaign war lifts and the Democratic Party pours over where it went wrong, Booker has gone from a Cassandra to a leading agent of change.
The senior senator from New Jersey has been officially charged with a new leadership role — chair of the new Strategic Communications Committee — overseeing the jump start of a sleepy social media scene for Senate Democrats.
To that end, Booker plans to hire in-house content creators and partnership managers. He’s cross-promoting his colleagues on his own social media platforms — each with over a million followers — and he’s espousing direct-to-camera videos to his peers.
Average daily social media engagement has tripled since December, per a presentation shared with Senate Democrats that was obtained by NOTUS. But for Booker, the effort is just beginning.
“We are a team that’s gone from crawling to walking,” Booker told NOTUS during a sit-down interview in his office last week. “And one would think that that’s really good. But we don’t want to walk. We don’t want to run. We want to fly. And we have a lot longer to go.”
“We’ve gone from addition to multiplication,” he continued. “We need to do string theory.”
The energy is just as feverish in the House, where upping the Democratic “new media” presence has become a focus for leadership.
Take House Minority Whip Katherine Clark. She invited so-called “new media voices” to at least two Democratic whip meetings in February alone, one House Democratic leadership staffer told NOTUS.
In the first session, Clark brought in Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling firm, to present recent data showing that most swing district voters get their news from nontraditional media. And on Feb. 12, she invited Brian Tyler Cohen — a favorite content creator among Democratic lawmakers — for a presentation about embracing independent media.
“Now that we have endured this election, I think that there is definitely a hunger to change course here, and the party, to its immense credit, was really receptive. And this is coming from an institution that is not known exactly for being nimble,” Cohen told NOTUS in an interview. “So it was heartening to see that they were definitely open to doing things differently.”
In a statement to NOTUS, Clark committed to keep the efforts going.
“We need to meet Americans where they are — whether that’s on a podcast, on Instagram, or on the ground in our districts,” she said. “We know that more and more Americans get their news from social media and content creators. We’re talking to everyone, everywhere.”
For both parties on Capitol Hill, boosting social media presence is a challenge. But as Democrats race to make up for lost time, the battle is seeming more urgent for them than Republicans.
House and Senate Democratic leaders seem to see the issue. To close the social media gap, rank-and-file members are scrambling to break through with stunts to spark viral fame — and communications staffers are transforming from press release writers to click getters.
The approach will be on full display this week as President Donald Trump addresses Congress for the first time of his second presidency. The Democratic Policy and Communications Committee — House Democratic leadership’s messaging arm — is hosting events before and after the speech so that members can “engage with digital creators,” according to an invite sent to congressional offices that was viewed by NOTUS.
“Members are encouraged to join digital creators and create content reacting to the speech,” the invite says.
Meanwhile, Schumer is pushing Democratic senators to invite people affected by federal job cuts to the speech — and to get “influencer engagement” ahead of time, Axios reported.
But the scurry for engagement doesn’t stop there. The DPCC now has a speaking slot in the caucus’ weekly meetings to address messaging strategies, and the group has invited content creators to specifically cover events. The DPCC has also been holding training sessions for staff regarding nontraditional media, per a House Democratic aide.
Last Tuesday, ahead of the dramatic vote to adopt the House GOP’s budget resolution, Democratic leadership invited content creators — including Allie O’Brien (over 600,000 followers on TikTok), former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Brita Filter (over 150,000 followers on Instagram), Russell Ellis (over 5 million followers on TikTok) and Suzanne Lambert (over 700,000 followers on TikTok) — to gaggle with lawmakers alongside members of the press, per a list obtained by NOTUS.
“There’s some real energy in this caucus to rethink what it actually means to do Hill comms. Like, it’s not going to be a screenshot of an Oversight letter and an email blast from Mailchimp anymore,” the House Democratic aide said. “And it’s not because we don’t like the, you know, fun West Wing vibe of sending a press release. It’s because we actually are trying to break through.”
Rep. Maxwell Frost, a DPCC co-chair, told NOTUS that leadership is focused on “making resources” for the caucus. But, he said, it comes with challenges.
“The problem is, a lot of times, these trainings get done to staff, and staff is important, but honestly, the leadership has to come from the member themselves, right? And so we’re trying to figure out creative ways to push members to do that stuff on their own,” Frost said.
It’s true that communications staffers have borne the brunt of the digital training, with multiple communications directors describing a newfound pressure from their bosses to generate viral moments.
“You’re only as good as the amount of people seeing what you’re doing,” one communications director for a House Democrat told NOTUS.
“You could be saving the world, but if you’re not making sure people know about it, your people are still disillusioned,” this staffer added.
Another House Democratic communications director said that, while they continue to pitch to legacy media, “I’m sending those same pitches to content creators, who are often more willing to work with us and help us move content around different channels at a faster pace.”
Still, even with all the changes, some Democrats worry the party isn’t moving fast enough.
One House Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told NOTUS they have seen a lot of people saying “we should be doing this” and less follow through on behavior.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz — known for striking a caustic tone with Republicans on X and generating viral moments in committee meetings — shared similar concerns.
“The game has changed up here, and we have people playing the game like it was 30 years ago,” Moskowitz told NOTUS.
The game these days, multiple members told NOTUS, is to dictate the topics of conversation themselves rather than to respond to the news cycle driven by legacy media. That’s why social media and longform podcasts that allow for winding conversations have become so critical to politicians; they have latitude to drive discussions toward their messages.
After all, the ABC News presidential debate got just half as many views as Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Of course, the race for virality also has pitfalls. Rep. Dan Goldman — whose X following is half-a-million strong — cautioned new members about veering off message just to gain publicity.
“There’s always a tendency to get a viral clip in order to gain notoriety,” Goldman told NOTUS.
Younger members trying to match Goldman’s following are trying to strike that balance.
Rep. Julie Johnson, who joined the House this year, told NOTUS that first-year House Democrats in particular are pursuing new media opportunities “because we’re fresh off of a campaign.”
“We’re the most closely associated with the American people in this recent election, and we bring that perspective to D.C. — challenging the status quo, because we don’t know it,” Johnson said.
One of those Democrats challenging the status quo is Rep. Suhas Subramanyam. The freshman lawmaker recently tried to draw attention to Department of Government Efficiency staffers sleeping in federal agencies by creating a TikTok where he asked staffers at the Department of Education if he could spend the night — pillow and blanket in tow.
While the stunt was obviously gimmicky, it got 75,000 views.
“Just posting, ‘I’m outraged by DOGE staffers sleeping in agencies’ is not enough anymore,” Subramanyam said. “You have to figure out how you get that message across and bring awareness to something.”
Subramanyam insisted there is no competition between members about going viral. But other Democrats spoke to a culture of one-upmanship around the Capitol. Booker is going so far as to give out weekly awards in the Senate for creative social media posts.
“There are definitely regular humble brags,” the House Democrat who spoke anonymously said.
“What they’ll do is they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I really landed a good line’ and then pull up the tweet to show, as evidence that it’s a good line, of how many retweets there are,” the lawmaker said. “‘I landed a really great line — went viral!’”
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Riley Rogerson and Oriana González are reporters at NOTUS.