Conservatives have built their own media ecosystem. In it, they define issues early, frame them in emotionally resonant terms, and push the narrative they want out there relentlessly. Conservative streamers are in their heyday.
Meanwhile, the progressive and center left are at a structural disadvantage in the media. They’re perennially on defense—too often responding late, not responding at all, or not able to amplify their arguments to fragmented information consumers. Progressive don't have as big of a bullhorn.
Here are four issue areas where the left—and at times the mainstream position— has lost the political narrative. Note: I’m only talking about the storyline itself—not policy positions.
On DEI
Trump and his acolytes have made it a mission to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion in government and corporate America. For years, conservative influencers like Robby Starbuck and Christopher Rufo on Substack have negatively branded DEI as “woke”—a negative proxy for liberal, inclusive policies. Both of these guys have created toxic vibes in the business world around DEI, even before President Trump’s anti-DEI executive order.
Rufo’s work, amplified in the mainstream press, also helped force Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, out of a job in 2024. He explained his pressure strategy to Politico that included “smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign.”
On Democracy
MAGA has successfully raised doubts about the integrity of our election system. This is a shining example of completely making something up and spoon feeding it to people enough that huge chunks of voters, about a third of the country, believe it. Painting free and fair elections in the U.S. as not free or not fair – generally fraudulent– is one of those most successful campaigns to move public opinion from zero people believing something to tens of millions, in the Republican Party. Most Americans don’t believe the ‘20 election was stolen, but a striking number do.
On Immigration
Legal and undocumented Immigration is one of MAGA’s winning issues; they’ve been talking about it nonstop for 10 years. Democrats seem to have either avoided the issue, hoping it would go away, or have splintered off into different policy directions. Even after getting clobbered on the issue in the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats, 18 months later, have no unified immigration policy or message.
“If Democrats had a very clear, solution- oriented stance on immigration, they would be contrasting Trump’s extremism with their pragmatism, and that’s a debate Democrats can win,” Frank Sharry, a veteran advocate for immigrants and an immigration overhaul said about the immigration raids.
On Vaccines
The campaign against science and scientists isn’t new. But in recent years a pocket of the right wing, including Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Elon Musk, targeted Dr. Peter Hotez, the renowned pediatrician in Houston. The anti-vaxxers political movement has grown and begun to shift a slice of public opinion against vaccines. The percentage of Americans who believed childhood vaccinations was important plummeted by 18 points in five years—from 2019 to 2024.
The question moving forward is can the other side of these and other cultural policy issues get a footing? The answer is yes. Narratives are almost always changeable, if not reversible. A new narrative can knock the old one off the radar.