Introducing Doomscroll
A newsletter about digital stuff on the right
One Question
What’s the biggest challenge facing Republican digital strategists right now?
Hi. Welcome to Doomscroll - a weekly newsletter that covers digital stuff on the right written by me, Amanda Elliott.
When I first started my career in the political digital space, we lived and breathed Facebook organic page reach. New media? That box is getting CHECKED. Twitter ads were still a thing and they were COOL. Micro-targeting as an advertising strategy was in its infancy, and Cambridge Analytica was getting meetings all over Washington.
A lot has changed since then. Today, there are more ways than ever to reach voters. Media plans are getting more complex by the day. Privacy laws and targeting restrictions are forcing digital advertisers to stay on their toes. Organizations and campaigns are spinning up their own content creation teams, and the word “digital” encompasses everything from voter outreach and persuasion, to small dollar fundraising.
But sometimes we forget the simple notion that when it comes to digital, the fundamentals remain the same. Digital is about reaching voters with the right message at the right time and in the right place. If we’re not doing all of that, we’re not doing it right.
We’re Republican digital operatives, so we’ve heard the narrative. The right has always lagged behind in the world of political tech and digital innovation. Sure the Trump campaign took the political world by storm in 2016 with its micro-targeting and Facebook advertising, yet somehow Republicans were lulled back into a sense of complacency.
That’s not to say Republicans haven’t done some great things on digital in the last few years, but narratives exist for a reason. If 2022 taught us anything it’s that yes, candidate quality matters, but so does getting outspent. On digital, spending was so lopsided in favor of the Democrats it’s no wonder they held onto every incumbent senator for the first time in decades. In Georgia alone, the Warnock campaign had spent $13.8 million on digital ads by mid-October. The highest spender on the right - One Nation - had spent only $3 million by that point. Are you feeling irritated yet? Come with me to an even darker place: online fundraising. Those numbers tell an even more depressing tale. That struggle is real, and if you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time doomscrolling through the interwebs about how this Democrat is going viral and that Democrat raised a billion dollars and that lefty campaign figured out relational organizing and cool merch and sick websites and funny memes and p2p texting and all the rest.
I know liberal journos are always going to think any Democrat digital campaign is the best thing sliced bread (forgive the overused idiom), but so what? Why did it take so long to get a WinRed? Why are we giving up on the youth vote? Why were Democrats the first to really utilize peer-to-peer texting? Why are we ceding anything at all to the left? If we’re so obsessed with winning, why don’t our media budgets reflect that? The check engine light for the Republican digital ecosystem is blinking nonstop and we’re headed for big trouble if we don’t pull over now and get this thing checked out (and that concludes my first and last car analogy).
I don’t have all the answers. That’s not necessarily what Doomscroll is for, anyway. But I think covering what we’re doing in the digital space on the right is a good first step toward improving our lot going into 2024. Who’s spending where? Who’s running a good email program? Who has good creative? Who’s killing it on social media? How are we growing the GOP online donor pool? What kind of tech innovations can we expect? What’s going on in the policy world that could impact Republican digital campaigns? What are we, as a subsection of a subsection of this industry, doing to make sure we win big on Election Day two years from now?
At the end of the day, the digital nerd in me wants to know how our space is evolving in real time, and if no one is chronicling those changes - I figure…why not me?
It’s a lot, yes, but it’s something I hope to deliver on week after week on Sunday evenings for the foreseeable future starting in January. I hope you’ll find Doomscroll informative and at least a little entertaining. I hope you’ll subscribe and participate by sending me tips and answering the “one question” at the top of each edition. I hope you’ll forward this to your friends and encourage them to subscribe as well. But most of all, I hope you will feel my gratitude to you for being here and reading this thing.
Let’s do digital or die trying.
-Amanda
P.S. Got a suggestion for what I should cover in the first issue? Got a tip about new hires or transitions in the digital space? Send ‘em to me at itsthedoomscroll@gmail.com