virtually every journalist and political influencer in America. Almost all of my journalist peers are on Twitter (I can think of only one or two exceptions), and when I say “on” Twitter, I mean “on it hours per day.” If politicians aren’t on Twitter, their young staffers certainly are. And so is the creative class across the length and breadth of publishing, Big Tech, and entertainment. That means that Twitter punches well above its traffic in raw cultural impact. And that cultural influence is harmful to both sides of America’s partisan divide.
Spend much time reading the right on Twitter, and the first thing you’ll notice is a sense of almost-constant crisis. Everything is lost. Everything is slipping away. The left is ascendant, and therefore desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s exactly the kind of feeling one might expect if you spent your life in, say, Barbara Lee’s congressional district in Berkeley. Conservatism simply doesn’t have much purchase there.
But the dominance of the left has its own pitfalls for Democrats. According to Pew, Democratic Twitter users are to the left of the average Democrat: “Some 60% of Democrats on Twitter describe their political leanings as liberal (with 24% saying they are ‘very’ liberal), compared with 43% among those who are not Twitter users (only 12% of whom say they are very liberal).” As a result, it’s easy for the cultural elite to think not only that the United States is more left than it is, but also that the Democratic Party is more left than it is. In 2019 Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy published
arguably the single-most-insightful analysis of the Democratic electorate of the entire election cycle:
The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.
There, in one paragraph, is a key reason why Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and a key reason why so many online analysts wrote him off far too soon. He was out of step with Twitter, but he was in step with the majority of Democrats.
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