Democrats got beat “because the conservatives and Republicans built a different media system,” CNN pundit Van Jones said Thursday.
“It had to do with online, had to do with podcasts, with streaming platforms. And they were spending their money there.”
Trump last month spent three hours on the Joe Rogan podcast. In August, he sat for a friendly two-hour interview with billionaire Elon Musk on Musk’s social media platform, X.
Last year, he skipped the first GOP debate, opting instead for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a form of counterprogramming.
The interview, which was 45 minutes long, has been viewed 268.2 million times.
Jones said many Democrats and mainstream media outlets were “laughing at Trump for throwing away his ground game and doing weird stuff online.”
“It turned out we were the idiots,” he continued. “We woke up in a body bag because while we were knocking on doors, they were making these phones into 24-hour-a-day political weapons for themselves.”
Shannon C. McGregor, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, recently told the Hill that podcast appearances gave voters a better insight into the candidates as people than regular television interview.