The Direct-to-Consumer Playbook

Over the past two decades, as American voters have migrated online, each election cycle has followed their drift. The “internet election” of 2008 begot the “Twitter election” of 2016 and the “podcast election” of 2024. Politicians have increasingly relied on social platforms as a way to reach voters directly and become less dependent on the television, radio, and newspaper interviews of traditional media. This new relationship between politicians and their audiences—what you might call a direct-to-consumer model—leaves the Fourth Estate out of the equation.

For candidates and elected officials, cultivating a presence on social media is nonnegotiable. Republicans are the most active across social platforms, holding 58 percent of accounts, according to a recent analysis by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Facebook, with its older user base, is particularly fertile ground; governors including Ohio’s Mike DeWine and Florida’s Ron DeSantis—who has two accounts on the platform—garner the most engagement among state leaders. Democrats narrow the gap somewhat on Instagram and TikTok, which have a younger demographic. There, Gen Z state legislators like Texas’s James Talarico, Tennessee’s Justin Jones, and Arizona’s Analise Ortiz have far more followers than better-known officials.