Where Have All the Lefties Gone?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 22, 2024

 

The Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers after the outfit, which restyled itself an anti-Trump publication in the latter half of the past decade, declined to endorse Donald Trump’s opponent in 2024. What seemed at the time like an act of protest might have been a leading indicator of consumer preferences.

 

In the wake of the election — one that generated far less engagement with conventional news outlets than previous elections had — left-leaning cable news ventures have seen their ratings collapse. “MSNBC and CNN have shed hundreds of thousands of viewers while Fox News viewership has skyrocketed after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election,” The Wrap reported. “That was also the case for NYTimes.com,” Digiday.com reporters wrote of the paper of record’s online presence, “which had about 29.4 million site visits on Nov. 5 and 33 million visits on Nov. 6 2024, compared to 36 million visits on Nov. 3 and 61 million visits on Nov. 4 2020.”

 

Some attribute the general decline in media consumption to the phenomenon of “news avoidance,” but other factors suggest that it might just as easily be ascribed to reality avoidance. What factors? Take, for example, the staggering increase in the number of users signing up for Bluesky, the consciously left-wing platform meant to compete with X .

 

“Usage of the Bluesky app in the U.S. grew by 519% in the weeks after the election, compared to the first 10 months of the year,” Axios reported on Friday. The outlet has long cultivated a left-of-center user base that does what Elon Musk’s social media venture won’t — namely, censor (they call it “moderate”) discomfiting opinions that conflict with progressive nostrums. But Bluesky isn’t alone in capitalizing on the sudden exodus of left-wing refugees from mixed society. “Lefty, a dating app for progressives, has experienced an unprecedented 453% surge in downloads in the two weeks since the election,” the report continued.

 

And the news for Democrat-friendly news isn’t all bad. While MSNBC, CNN, WaPo, and others are attempting to broaden their appeal, the outfits that eschew balance in favor of cultivating a far-left audience are doing fine. “Slate said daily subscription sign-ups were seven times higher than normal on the day after the election,” Axios added. “The Guardian raised $2.4 million in two days after the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post pulled their Harris endorsements at the last minute.”

 

Progressive audiences are fleeing to venues that cater to their desire to be protected from exposure to the world around them. Psychically gratifying though that act of avoidance may be, it’s also a recipe for perpetual confusion and marginalization. Democrats who decline to succumb to that temptation and learn to communicate with voters outside their tribe are most likely to begin reconstituting the constituency that Democrats alienated during the Biden years. If trends among progressive news consumers are any indication, those Democrats are also most likely to come from more moderate redoubts within the Democratic ecosystem.

 

Like stress eting or binge drinking, the progressive Left’s spasm of self-harm isn’t going to last forever. The impulse will either subside or claim its sufferers. In the meantime, however, the far-Left has fled the field.