The Substack You Need to Read (it isn't mine)

"What's Resonating" will change the way you understand politics. It changed the way I think about the impact of Renee Good's murder.

I’ve never written a newsletter about a newsletter. I doubt I’ll make a habit of it. But I need to let you know about a Substack that a) you’ll wonder how you lived without and b) there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it.

It’s called What’s Resonating?, and it’s published by a progressive political firm called “Magnitude Media.” (As it happens, I know their chief strategy officer from my Obama White House days, but I only found that out seven seconds ago when I googled the firm for the first time.)

The idea is pretty simple: use data to show which stories are breaking through on left-leaning, neutral, and conservative social media, respectively.

That might not seem too groundbreaking. But it’s complete reversal of how most newsletters - including this one - operate.

Usually, people like me (and I have nothing against people like me, by the way) focus on what to say. Sometimes we’re making arguments. Sometimes we’re making meta-arguments about which arguments other people should be making.

What’s Resonating is entirely different. It’s not about what commenters should be saying. It’s about what audiences are actually hearing.

Social media isn’t everything, of course. But it’s a big thing - especially because most traditional networks (for example, ABC News or PBS) often reach more viewers through social than they do through TV.

Just in case I haven’t convinced you to check out What’s Resonating already - or if you want a handy guide to interpreting what you see there - here are three things I learned from reading their analysis in the wake of Renee Good’s shooting.

How to Know Who’s Winning an Argument

How many times, over the past week, have we heard some version of, “America is so divided that people in opposite parties can look at the exact same video and still believe two different realities.”

No. That’s false.

If you look at the video clips of Good’s death, especially the first few angles that came out, you didn’t see conservative influencers admitting that the officer who shot her was at fault. But you did see that conservative audiences were less likely to engage and share content that parroted the administration line.

In the olden days of 20 years ago, people sometimes conceded that their side was wrong. Online, that doesn’t really happen any more. Instead, the way you know your side is winning an argument is if the other side doesn’t want to talk about it.

That’s especially clear when it comes to individual people’s arguments. I’m sure Kristi Noem’s staff told her she’s been doing a great job defending incompetent ICE agents who get people killed. But online audiences - even conservative ones - just aren’t buying it. They have no interest in sharing Noem-related content, whereas left-leaning pages are eager for her to say as much as possible.

(I don’t just to suggest that the anti-MAGA coalition is always winning. I assume most people who are reading this weren’t big fans of our takeover of Venezuela - and I think it could be disastrous, long-term - but in the short term it’s notable that left-leaning audiences were much less interested in the story of the raid to seize Maduro than right-leaning pages were.)

Issues Matter More Than Messages

I enjoy thinking about messaging. And messaging is important! But you know what’s even more important? Which issue everyone is discussing. If people are talking about issues that are inherently good for you, every message looks like genius. If people are talking about issues that are inherently bad for you, every message looks like incompetence.

What’s Resonating makes it easy to understand which issues are working for which side. It puts engagement from left-leaning pages in blue, right-leaning pages in red, and neutral-leaning pages in yellow.

What Democrats are looking for is the issues that get huge spikes of blue and yellow, and relatively small spikes of red. For Republicans, its the reverse.

This data suggests Good’s death could be a turning point. Until now, immigration has been a good issue for Republicans, and even ICE has been 50-50 . But what we’re seeing is that, while I still don’t think Democrats have figured out how to message illegal immigration, that issue is fading, and the conversation is turning instead to ICE’s out-of-control lawlessness.

JD Vance will surely come up with new ways to justify the violence MAGA is unleashing on law-abiding citizens. Maybe some of them will be clever? But any day we talk about ICE overreach is a bad day for MAGA and a good one for America.

Politics Still Turns Most People Off

Occasionally - as with Renee Good’s murder - a lot of Americans take an interest in a news story very quickly. But when it comes to the vast, vast majority of consequential stories (for example, the DOJ investigating Fed Chair Jerome Powell in an effort to give Trump even more control over the economy), most people just don’t pay attention. That’s especially true of neutral accounts.

For example, you know what people really have been paying attention to this year? Dancing with the stars.

You might find that frustrating. I find it frustrating. But we live in a democracy, and we need to win the votes of non-political junkies, too.

So as we get toward the election, listing all of Trump’s transgressions may not be as effective as you might think if you read newsletters like this one. Many voters won’t have heard of them. Better to stick to the ones that did break through - like last week’s shooting in Minneapolis. And to encourage cultural figures with large non-political instagram accounts to share more news as Election Day nears, because that’s the best way to reach low-engagement voters.