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How Democrats Finally Won the Internet

After years of churning out digital cringe, Democrats finally seem to have found a human message during the government shutdown, leveraging the left’s messy creator ecosystem to beat the Trump meme machine.

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The D.N.C., which went megaviral on TikTok and X with a cutesy/weird shutdown explainer clip starring kittens, jumped 24 spots on Resonate’s ranking of social media accounts compared to the previous week. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also collected millions of views with a widely shared walk-and-talk video explaining the Obamacare subsidy cliff. Photo: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
Peter Hamby
October 7, 2025

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Last Wednesday, in the hours after the government officially went into shutdown mode, researchers at Resonate, a firm that monitors online discourse for Democrats, began to notice something unusual: For once, the left was actually winning a message battle online.