What the @Headquarters Controversy Revealed About Digital Campaigning

It’s 5:17AM and I’m writing this from the west coast, which means I’m waking up behind the news cycle. This week that meant opening up my phone to a full-blown Twitter war over the Headquarters 68 (previously 67?) rebrand. If you work in politics you either saw or were part of the discourse.

For me, it started in our Majority Democrats group chat. I opened up signal to a tweet being circulated from a colleague debating the merits of this project, specifically, how it will measure what content persuades and mobilizes voters.

I have strong disagreements with some of the points made in that thread. But the initial question my colleague asked was fair, and one that we should be asking (especially after we got whopped in an election just over a year ago). Here’s the answer: it serves a completely different purpose.

Everyone who has been a digital staffer knows we need to manage the tension between good content and base-energizing content (“lib-bait”, if you may, which drives likes, views, and engagement). It’s difficult to manage that tension while putting yourself out there pitching ideas, especially when you’re in a position that’s supposed to be social media mastermind, fundraising guru, and cinematic studio all at once. It’s even more difficult when those draft ideas are posted online.

But the back and forth online illuminated the complicated dynamics of digital campaigning that all campaigns must reckon with. From a baseline standpoint, Headquarters had been sitting dormant for months. The idea that it would shift into something that aligns with our values and is designed to speak in a language meant to activate younger audiences is exactly how it should be used. It’s a net positive. I said this yesterday and it bears repeating: if we don’t flood the online space, we are choosing to cede it to our adversaries.

The real issue isn’t whether this specific decision was right. It’s that we don’t have enough people equipped to make these types of decisions - in real time, in context, with the kind of judgement they require.

There’s a natural tension between good content, persuadable content, and lib-bait in digital strategy that will always exist, and it changes from race to race and organization to organization. You’re constantly balancing substance against what will travel, persuasion against activation, clarity against virality.

You can create a boatload of thoughtful, persuasive, relatable content that gets no reach at all. As Matthew Yglesias rightfully pointed out, you can also create a lot of sloppy content that spreads like wildfire. That’s not a moral judgement, it’s the reality.

The fact is nearly all of these platforms are owned by right-wing billionaires with algorithms that reward the most extreme voices, on the left and right, and click-bait slop over constructive debate or any sort of nuance. That is the environment every Democratic digital staffer operates in, and our side faces a clear disadvantage.

The challenge for any strategist is figuring out how to operate inside that ecosystem.

So from my point of view, lib-bait can serve a purpose early on — especially when a lot (perhaps, most) midterm voters aren’t dialed in yet. But when lib-bait starts getting treated as a signal – about what voters want, what candidates should run on, or what “works” – it becomes actively harmful. It distorts incentives, rewards the loudest voices, and pulls attention toward spectacle instead of substance. That doesn’t translate into more votes or a stronger party - over time it actually weakens us. Candidates should not run on lib-bait. Regardless of whether this election is a referendum on Trump, Democrats still need their own theory of the case for how to move forward.

But here’s the inconvenient part: performative vanity metrics still matter, and that’s what lib-bait drives. While it’s true that likes, views, and engagement are not serious predictors of voter behavior on their own, they do function as signals to gatekeepers. Reporters notice who’s “popping off.” Donors follow momentum. Coverage and money often flow toward the candidates and accounts that appear to be breaking through online, regardless of whether that engagement is a meaningful proxy for electoral support. In that way, digital metrics can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: attention drives coverage, coverage drives resources, and resources shape the race.

The conflict between true creativity and bureaucracy is obvious: there isn’t a formula that resolves that tension, there are only judgement calls. We need to hire and train people who understand the guardrails. This isn’t about removing them. But too often, good ideas are killed by approvals that don’t improve the work, and things that could have been shipped in a fast and timely manner are buried in a muddled and painfully slow approvals process.

And here’s the thing: We know campaigns can be funny, online, and culturally fluent without being reckless. We’ve seen it work — because they trusted their digital strategists to understand the guardrails and know when to push them. Which is why the answer isn’t to litigate every post, but hire smart people and actually empower them to make those decisions in real time.

This isn’t about shaming people for being cautious. It’s about recognizing that caution has a cost. Momentum gets sanded down. Timeliness disappears and the internet moves on. We’re left wondering why content that looked and sounded fine on paper didn’t land in the real world.

My hope after the 2024 election was that we’d stop talking about why we lost so much, and just start trying new, better, different things. What’s hard for me to swallow is how little appetite there seems to be, particularly from the DC establishment, for an honest reckoning with what works and what doesn’t.

Part of that reckoning has to be about how we develop digital talent. The deeper issue is that we haven’t done a good enough job of teaching and training digital leaders to navigate these tensions. We need people who understand that it’s not black and white. That the right answer for one race might be wrong for another. That what works in February might backfire in October. It’s incumbent on these individuals to use their tools to serve the campaigns’ shared goals. You can use digital tactics to help serve earned media goals; you can use earned media to help serve digital goals; all of it should help serve finance goals. As a wise friend of mine put it - we are one big tree with shared roots.

At Majority Democrats, we work with 32 elected officials at all levels. One of the most common questions I get is how to get content more distribution, more engagement, more traction online. As a relatively new organization, we are in a building and follower-growth phase, and face these challenges regularly. The truth? It requires much more lib-bait than I’d like, but it’s a proven approach, and I believe we need to do what it takes to create an audience on these platforms. The idea is that if you create good content, people will come (à la Zohran Mamdani’s rise). They assume the internet is fair. It isn’t. And understanding how to operate inside that reality requires sophisticated judgment that we’re not systematically building.

We need to hire smart people and actually empower them to make decisions in real time. But first, we need to train them properly. At Majority Dems, we pay closer attention to saves and shares because they tell us whether something actually landed, not just whether it was seen (and Instagram’s CEO, Adam Mosseri, has previewed this algorithmic shift for a while). But that’s just one tactical adjustment. The bigger shift needs to be organizational.

Digital directors need a seat at the table: on consultant calls, in polling conversations, in focus groups. Digital should not report to comms. I can’t believe I have to say that in 2026, but if you’re joining a campaign structured that way, be wary. The digital directors of today are the campaign managers of tomorrow and right now, I can count on one hand the individuals in our orbit that applies to. That’s the problem. If we’re serious about winning, we need to be building a bench of digital leaders who can make these judgment calls thoughtfully.

My take is pretty simple: everyone needs to go outside and touch grass. Candidates should spend more time campaigning and talking to voters than reading their replies. Different kinds of content serves different purposes: some persuades, some mobilizes, and some does both. In 2026, a candidate, or political operation, that understands how to effectively communicate online, break through noise, and have that message resonate naturally is a massive asset. We need to invest in building the people who can deliver that. Regardless of whether this election is a referendum on Trump, Democrats still need their own theory of the case for how to move forward. And part of that theory has to include how we develop the next generation of strategists who can navigate these tensions with the judgment they require.

PS - last year I made the “Redzone” video with Jackson Boaz. Many people have asked me what our trick was to this - and it’s exactly what I wrote about in this article. The McMorrow team hired and empowered digital talent early on and gave them a seat at the leadership table. In large part kudos to Mallory, but specifically her ad makers at Thematic, Brad Elkins. We built a foundation of trust together, and when a cultural moment happened, we were able to back out of that cultural moment and move fast based on the trust that we built. Most people don’t know this - but the day we filmed, I had to ask the campaign manager to pull down call time so we could film for an hour. How many CM’s are willing to give that to their digital team? Only the ones that have foundational trust in the vision. The result was incredible. Some might argue it didn’t translate to votes - but it sure as hell changed the tides.