Monday marked the anniversary of a momentous day in U.S. politics: the Great Vibe Shift of 2024, when Joe Biden finally dropped out of the Presidential race, and it became clear that Kamala Harris would succeed him atop the Democratic ticket. By the time the day was out, Charli XCX, the unofficial vibes arbiter of the summer, had declared on X that “kamala IS brat,” a reference to a type of girl “who, like, feels herself but then also, like, maybe has a breakdown, but kinda like, parties through it, is very honest, is very blunt, a little bit volatile.” Harris’s campaign account quickly co-opted the vivid chartreuse aesthetic of Charli’s latest album, as did Harris’s supporters, who also made a deluge of memes referencing coconut trees, Venn diagrams, and “the context of all in which you live.” Two days after Biden’s departure, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, went on MSNBC and declared Republicans “weird,” catching liberals’ imaginations and catapulting himself to national relevance. Harris then picked Walz as her running mate, and more memes ensued, many of which depicted him as an endearing, if slightly embarrassing, Midwestern dad.

Suddenly, there seemed to be a genuine energy around the Democratic ticket—in real life, but also, crucially, online. Some, however, were skeptical—Jay Caspian Kang wrote in this column that “weird” might soon come to feel “a bit small and juvenile,” something we’d look back on as “a memento of a fun and energized period in the campaign”—and, sure enough, brat summer eventually gave way to pratfall. After Donald Trump beat Harris, a narrative swiftly formed that he was the candidate who had successfully harnessed online energy, not least by touring podcasts connected to the so-called manosphere, including big shows hosted by Joe Rogan and the comedian Theo Von.

As I’ve argued before, it’s possible to overstate the centrality of Trump’s podcast appearances to his victory. The result was very close, and the output of a welter of different inputs. If Harris had flipped the relatively few votes she needed to prevail, we might now be talking about the “brat election”—but to the victor go the post-facto narratives, especially when they concern a novel trend that the traditional media doesn’t fully understand. Harris, it’s easy to forget now, also went on podcasts, including the hugely popular “Call Her Daddy,” a step that might, in an alternate reality, have been described as an inspired foray into the womanosphere.

That said, it is reasonable to conclude that Trump performed better in this arena than Harris did. As Kang put it in a column this year, Harris’s appearance on “Call Her Daddy” felt “like a rehashing of her campaign’s talking points with fluffier-than-usual pillows on the set”; Trump “talked with Von about cocaine addiction.” It’s fair to see this discrepancy as a symptom of a broader reality: Democrats tend to suck at the internet. Whereas Trump says whatever he likes, wherever he likes, and seems mostly to get away with it—or, even better for him, to come across as authentic because of it—his most high-profile opponents have often been reluctant to take risks online, both in terms of what they post and whom they talk to.

After the election, I found myself wondering if this state of affairs was, if not inevitable, then in some sense tied to the fundamentals of our current political reality. Maybe a certain reserved professionalism is part of what makes Democrats different from Trump, and is thus worth preserving; maybe, given the asymmetric power of the right-wing-media ecosystem, Democrats don’t have Trump’s latitude to say whatever crazy things they like without it being held against them, and so need to keep their guard up a bit; maybe the manosphere is just too right-wing-coded for liberals to thrive there. Then again, Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020—and, as I’ve explored in this column in recent weeks, he, Von, and others of their ilk now sound increasingly disillusioned with Trump, following his strikes on Iran and (supposed) concealment of the Epstein files. This would seem to offer Democrats an opening in the podcastverse. And, when it comes to all the other online spaces, there’s never been any inherent reason that the Party’s positioning requires so much of its content to suck so much.

Indeed, at what is starting to feel, just maybe, like an inflection point for Trump, there’s evidence that some Democrats are doing better online. Assessing these recent efforts could illuminate their party’s future. It’s also an opportunity to think about what “doing better” online even means, and the extent to which politicians have it in their gift.

A couple of months ago, when I wrote about the fragmented nature of the media landscape, some Democrats were at least starting to show up on manosphere podcasts and in adjacent venues: various governors had been on sports shows; Pete Buttigieg had chatted for close to three hours on the comedy podcast “Flagrant.” That trend has continued. Buttigieg recently made a cameo on a show affiliated with Barstool Sports, perhaps the Platonic ideal of bro culture, presenting an award for “Lib of the Year”; Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, went on a different Barstool show, and appeared on Von’s podcast and on “Flagrant.” A week ago, Rogan hosted James Talarico, a Democratic state lawmaker in Texas who is not well known nationally (when I messaged a plugged-in friend about the interview, he replied, “Who?”), but perhaps will be soon. Rogan encouraged him to run for President.

Beyond the world of podcasts, Exhibit A for how Democrats might be more compelling online is clearly Zohran Mamdani, the New York assemblyman who was little known even in New York City before riding a wave of virality to win the Democratic mayoral primary last month. Mamdani, who is thirty-three, did all sorts of media, old and new, but demonstrated an internet native’s fluency when it came to producing grabby short-form content. (Talarico, thirty-six, has also proved good at this; indeed, it’s how he came to Rogan’s attention.) This week, Mamdani was at it again, posting a video in which he said that he had absorbed feedback that he should go back to Africa and would return to Uganda, where he was born—to celebrate his recent wedding with family and friends. “I do want to apologize to the haters, because I will be coming back,” he said, before flashing up a handful of imagined, punny New York Post headlines raging at his trip.

Some Democrats, however, are unconvincingly trying to imitate the appeal of others rather than cultivating distinctive online brands of their own. Andrew Cuomo—who lost the primary to Mamdani but will run in the fall as an independent—relaunched himself last week with a Mamdani-style video delivered with all the ease of a hostage tape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has combined the two by hosting a nauseatingly sycophantic interview podcast that I’ve criticized before, and is somehow still going. Jaime Harrison, until recently the chair of the Democratic National Committee, now has a podcast, too. (“The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate,” Semafor wrote, tongue hopefully in cheek.) On the first episode, posted last week, Harrison hosted Walz and assured him that he should “feel free to drop F-bombs.” (As far as I heard, he didn’t take the invitation.) At the end, Harrison asked Walz to give a “Sit Your Ass Down” award to a person of his choice. “Can I get in trouble and go viral on all this?” Walz responded, seeming to promise controversy. His pick? Kristi Noem, Trump’s widely reviled Secretary of Homeland Security.

The obvious conclusion here is that some Democrats are good at the internet and others aren’t. And yet the idea that online trends can be dissected under a microscope and cloned seems to have overtaken the Party; as I noted recently, strategists and donors are reportedly throwing money at influencers in their next-Rogan quest, and even studying the syntax that appeals to young men. Members of Congress are apparently betting that they can crack the code by performing a popular meme, or investing in a pocket microphone to get crisper audio on TikTok, or dropping more F-bombs. I’m still finding Democratic lawmakers’ gleeful insistence that Trump should release the Epstein files hard to get my head around after they spent years scolding right-wing conspiracy theorists. But it feels a bit like a ham-fisted attempt to appropriate a hot strand of internet discourse, consistency and consequences be damned. (One strategist told the news site NOTUS that the Democrats’ Epstein pivot “reminds me a little bit of ‘Brat Summer.’ ”) Khanna has arguably led the Democratic charge on Epstein, and talked about it on the Barstool show and “Flagrant”; he at least sounded like he speaks the language of that part of the internet, though I still think he’s playing with dangerous forces.

Earlier this year, Kang wrote that “social media is no longer just a tool for politicians to get out their message” and that they are now required to “shape themselves into optimized vessels for social media”; he has separately suggested that Democrats might find success in this arena by attacking the Party establishment in attention-grabbing ways, churning out a high volume of content, and appearing “authentic.” Kang’s arguments channel the broad idea that “the medium is the message,” to borrow the famous formulation of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. This is, undoubtedly, true to a large extent—the rhythms of the internet can dictate what people say, as well as how they say it. But we shouldn’t forget that the message is the message, too. Mamdani’s virality would have been worthless—or, perhaps, impossible—without his laser focus on the high cost of living in New York. His Uganda video this week was fun content, but most appealing (at least to me) in its implied repudiation of Democratic-consultant brain, which tends to advise politicians to hide their perceived vulnerabilities, not make a joke of them.

Becoming “optimized vessels for social media” could be interpreted as an imperative to be as vicious online as Trump is. But Mamdani actually seems to show that there’s another way. His entire candidacy can be seen as a rebuke of Democratic orthodoxies, and he has not been shy about tweaking his critics, not least Cuomo. But, over all, I wouldn’t describe his online persona as combative so much as sunny; mostly, his videos showcase his sense of humor and ability to listen to ordinary people. Talarico certainly wasn’t combative on Rogan; he came across as considered and articulate, and while his background is unusual—he’s currently studying at a Presbyterian seminary, and has uncommonly interesting things to say on spirituality from a liberal perspective—many of his comments were standard Democratic bromides about problem-solving and bipartisanship. He put me in mind of Buttigieg, who has also sounded assured in his ventures into the manosphere (and basically is the Democratic establishment at this point). None of them are in any sense blustering, bomb-throwing analogues to Trump.

The core of their online appeal, as I see it, is both very easy to pinpoint and devilishly hard to replicate: basically, it’s all about rizz. Mamdani clearly has it; so, in a different way, does Talarico, if his Rogan appearance is any guide. To some extent, charisma might be medium-dependent: I once saw Cuomo give an old-fashioned stump speech in the flesh and found him to be electrifying, in a way that clearly hasn’t translated to short-form social video. But Trump—who, like it or not, is a rizz monster—has proved able to assert a huge force of personality on television, on text-based social platforms, and in viral clips alike.