We should cop to a tension—a pretty severe one—between a) the Democratic Party’s desire to contest elections on safe ground like health-care policy and b) the new consensus that reaching marginal voters will require engaging with the online influencers and pop-culture figures those voters admire.

Generating mass interest in policy has always been a challenge. Even a few years back, when political content was a backwater for nerds and information about elections and candidates flowed outward from a relatively small number of sources, Democrats struggled to reach voters with policy appeals.

But there was still a broad consensus across politics that issues and solutions helped shape campaign narratives. Democrats would talk about the number of Americans without health insurance, and the number of children living in poverty, and the ways the tax code favored the rich, and it would communicate something meaningful: we’re empathetic, we’re fair. Immigration still drew ugly nativism out of the woodwork, but from a fringe that most Republican leaders found embarrassing. The policy discourse turned on technical questions about border security and legalization. Democrats liked to talk about creating a pathway to citizenship for most immigrants, in no small part because it portrayed them in flattering light: humane, solutions oriented.

That’s all changed now.

Policy is obviously still important—it is the “why” of liberal politics. But do these kinds of appeals—here’s what my policies say about me—make much sense in a world where the decisive voter never has to grapple with politics on those terms? Where he or she gets information from people who don’t generally care or talk about policy?

The tension becomes pretty obvious when you think back on the past months. How many times have you heard Democrats brush off controversies of all kinds as “distractions” from health care? How many of those same Democrats fret openly about their party’s “Joe Rogan problem,” or their inability to connect with young voters who get their information from TikTok celebrities and other influencers?

Politicos love admonishing each other to “meet people where they are,” but what if “where they are” is in the intersection of a Pop-Wellness/Epstein Files Venn diagram? Is it incumbent on Democrats to find those people and recount for them all the projected harms of Trumpcare? Or is it to key into their interests, fads, and reflexive anti-establishmentarianism? To find small areas of overlap, or glom on to their existing obsessions?

WORKING THE JEFF

The answer is probably “both.”

But if it’s both, it’ll by definition entail a major overhaul of messaging practices. Democrats will have to spend less time practicing pivots to health-care talking points and more time gaining fluency in digital pop culture.

It’s a wild thing to ponder, but it took until this week for Democrats to realize that the bugbear of “the Epstein files” wasn’t just dumb right-wing nonsense, but something tons of people (even people who aren’t particularly committed to Donald Trump) actually care about.

Better late than never: Here’s a letter from Jamie Raskin and other House Judiciary Committee Democrats to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding she “publicly release all documents in the Epstein files that mention or reference Donald Trump.”

Here’s the DNC with a daily reminder that Trump and his loyalists have buried the Epstein files.

Here’s Rebecca Cooke, the Democrat running to unseat Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), tying her opponent to the Epstein-Trump coverup.

But how many high-profile Dems could sit with these dudes and talk about the Epstein scandal in depth?

Do many of them take genuine interest in getting an answer to that question: Are Trump’s minions covering it up, or did they just exploit the sexual abuse of children to help get their guy elected?

Or do they mostly think the whole issue is sordid and beneath them…

To square their objectives, Democrats will have to stop wishing away distractions from their best issues, and start asking whether and how those issues slot into existing online hobbyhorses.

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WHEN THEY GO JOE…

Consider Rogan’s recent denunciations of Trump’s immigration raids.

It’s a rare “man-o-sphere” invocation of what, at bottom, is a policy question. But read the act