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House Dems I’ve spoken with are absolutely gutted over the news that Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly’s cancer has returned and that he plans to retire from Congress. Connolly, of course, is the ranking member on House Oversight, the Hill’s most politically charged committee, and speculation is already swirling about who will take his slot. Most eyes are trained on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to the 75-year-old late last year. But it’s complicated. After losing the Oversight race, A.O.C. won a shiny consolation prize with an appointment to the Energy and Commerce Committee—and left Oversight altogether. The notion that she might now run for, and win, a contest to become the ranking member of a committee that she’s not even on would set a striking new precedent that may not go over well with some of her colleagues. (The congresswoman deflected reporters’ queries on Monday about her potential Oversight ambitions, and her office did not respond to my own.) Still, norms are changing in the House Democratic caucus. And the chatter speaks to the ongoing vibe shift among Democrats; until six months ago, it was conventional wisdom that committee leaders were selected based on seniority—a reward for slowly climbing up the ranks. If A.O.C. runs and wins, that would further upend caucus tradition after a handful of ranking member upsets last fall. (And would she even want the job if it means giving up a coveted spot on E&C?) In any case, as my partner Leigh Ann noted yesterday, Rep. Stephen Lynch is next in line to run the committee, and will step in for Connolly while the race heats up.

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Buttigieg’s Flagrant appearance is so sneaky good that it’s pretty much the ur-text of what Democratic media strategy should look like over the next four years. I was hanging with a bunch of beleaguered Democrats last Friday night in Washington at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner party hosted by Crooked Media, the progressive media outfit, and Buttigieg’s appearance was top of mind for pretty much everyone I talked to. “It shows a hunger for content that isn’t just the three-minute interview,” said Dan Koh, a former top advisor in the Biden White House. He himself recently launched a podcast, The People’s Cabinet, to help demystify good government and talk to voters who don’t bother with traditional media. Victor Shi, a Gen Z Democratic influencer and communications strategist, reposted a two-minute clip of Buttigieg on Flagrant discussing the importance of government research and federal grants that the Trump administration is threatening. Shi’s video alone now has 6.6 million views on X. Meanwhile, the almost 10,000 comments on Flagrant’s YouTube channel are a breath of fresh air in toxic times. One commenter: “I voted Trump but ngl Pete made a lot of good points.” Another: “Not a Dem, but Pete here is the real deal. Great episode.” Another: “Honestly i just wanna throw huge respect to this comment section. No useless aggression, an overall welcoming environment, generally positive vibes. Damn near all of y’all behaving admirably as fuck.” Mayor Pete: Making Comments Sections Tolerable Again. Rob Flaherty, who ran digital strategy in the Biden White House and for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, and who had been urging Democrats to quit their dangerous addiction to traditional media, said Buttigieg’s appearance on the podcast was about as good as it gets. “He was conversational, open to engaging, hung out for a long time,” Flaherty told me. “He’s now being rewarded for it: The clips from the interview are everywhere and breaking through to the kind of opt-out voters who haven’t [had] Democrats meet them where they are in a long time.” Flaherty published an essay in The New York Times yesterday about the need for Democrats to communicate with the “opt-out” voters who decided the election, not just the “opt-in” voters whom Democrats already cater to, i.e., people with college degrees who follow the news intensely. The latter makes up a rather small minority of Americans. Democrats pretty much own them at this point, but today’s tastemakers and information-brokers are in social media feeds and behind podcast mics, not in mainstream newsrooms. “The right owns where voters are going,” Flaherty wrote. “It leaves Democrats unable to influence the culture that really matters today, which leaves us unable to make our case to the voters we need.” By now, the phrase “meeting voters where they are” has become a cliché when Democrats talk about how to reach casual voters, as they think about how to get a message out beyond the Times and MSNBC and to compete with Republicans online. And Buttigieg is the rare politician who makes these kinds of appearances look easy. There’s another common refrain you hear from Democrats when they talk about Buttigieg: He’s so good at this. But for all the promise of Pete’s podcast success, his skills also highlight what most Democrats can’t do. It’s more than just Buttigieg’s talents in front of the camera, his ease with facts. He’s also willing to say yes to interviews in the first place—and unlike most people in politics, he’s actually compelling enough to get invited on by hosts who also want to interview 50 Cent, Timothée Chalamet, and Kay Adams. Congressional backbenchers who love getting mentioned in Playbook aren’t on their radar. To consider how difficult this feat is for a politician, Dems need to ask themselves three important questions: How many party leaders are famous enough in the culture to get invited on Rogan or Theo Von or Flagrant in the first place? How many of those Democrats would actually say yes to the booking, and happily sit next to cans of Republican-coded Black Rifle Coffee and spitball for an hour or more about everything from “chicks” and space aliens to questions about trans athletes? And how many of those Dems could actually survive, have genuine fun, and win over the hosts and the audience? The list of capable Democrats in this thought experiment is vanishingly small.

For a foray into the manosphere, whatever that means, the Flagrant episode wasn’t really a frat-house hazing at all. At one point in the nearly three-hour interview, which also touched on Social Security, infrastructure, DOGE, and the downstream effects of tariff policy in red states, Schulz asked Buttigieg why the Democrats these days so often fail to do the Bill Clinton thing—I feel your pain—when trying to connect with voters on an emotional level. “‘Build the Wall’ wasn’t about building the wall,” Schulz prodded, asking why Dems avoided talking about immigration concerns for so long. “It was an idea that satisfied a concern that people felt.” Buttigieg agreed with him, and jabbed at the scolds in his own party. “There is not enough persuasion,” he said. “We used to have actual landslides in this country. I think our party should aspire to be a 60 percent party.” (It needs to be said here that fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom was savaged by progressives for making roughly the same argument when launching his new podcast back in February.)

Buttigieg has been pushing into unusual media spaces for years, of course, going back to his insurgent 2020 presidential bid, when podcasts and digital shows were happy to have the little-known Democrat while rival candidates like Biden and Elizabeth Warren were more interested in the five-minute cable news hit, despite its shrinking relevance. Back in that primary, only Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang were invited on Rogan, because their ideas were provocative and deviated from the norm, and like Buttigieg and his strategist Lis Smith, they were willing to go anywhere to get their messages out. “These are partly the habits that I formed when I was an unheard-of, 30-something-year-old Indiana mayor running for president,” Buttigieg told the Flagrant hosts when Singh asked why Democrats are so spooked by podcasts. These days, Buttigieg is armed with more skills and more confidence, thanks to four years working in the federal government as Biden’s Secretary of Transportation and a crucial surrogate (especially since the president was no one’s idea of a clear communicator). But his aides tell me he’s also in a bit of DGAF mode postelection—if the beard wasn’t a tell. “I think Pete realizes you can’t play it safe all of the time,” said Chris Meagher, a longtime advisor. Buttigieg has been making the media rounds lately—Colbert, Jon Stewart’s podcast, some Instagram lives, CNN—talking about whatever the hosts want to talk about. His Stewart interview blew up much like Flagrant: It’s now passed 2 million views on YouTube, a bigger audience than Stewart’s interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps the only other star in the Democratic Party with comparable media intuition. Ocasio-Cortez is worth throwing into the manosphere conversation, because shows like Flagrant offer male politicians an obvious advantage: the ability to bro out while chasing the bro vote. In a brilliant New York Times profile of Theo Von last week, the writer Jon Caramanica calculated that less than 20 percent of Von’s guests in the past 12 months have been women. A quick scan of Schulz’s guests reveals roughly the same. While Josh Shapiro has been appearing on sports pods—and Newsom has been podcasting with former NFL star Marshawn Lynch for years—in my conversations over the past few days, I’ve had a hard time finding a Democratic operative who thinks Ocasio-Cortez or Warren or Gretchen Whitmer could pull off the same kind of freewheeling interview that Buttigieg did last week. Kamala Harris ably showed up on several male-hosted podcasts last fall, like the NBA podcast All the Smoke, and she was relaxed and compelling in an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God in Detroit. But in Wilmington, late campaign conversations about her appearing on Rogan’s podcast became tortured, as Harris and her advisors weighed the pros and cons, with concerns over which kinds of wildcard questions might get thrown her way. (Taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners was surely right there in his quiver.) At that point in the race, it was already too late for Democrats to make up the Republican edge in the podcast space that had been under construction for years. As for A.O.C., whose presidential prospects I examined last week, she’s proven her media talents when it comes to gaming, livestreams, pods, and plenty of nontraditional media spaces. She can hold court with almost anyone. But as the congresswoman eyes 2028, it has to be asked: Would she go on a bro-cast? Unlike Bernie Sanders, she remains beholden to certain elements of the identity left and has advocated for ideas—prison abolition!—that might have her playing too much defense with decidedly unwoke hosts. And if she ever does tiptoe into the manosphere, would Brooklyn leftists back home scream at her for “sanewashing cis fascism” or whatever radical chic cri de coeur comes her way? A.O.C. can do it—but will she? The opportunity is there for Democrats, but is the talent? The latest Harvard Youth Poll found last week that young men—like most voters—are running away from Trump as he messes with the economy and fails to follow through on his promises to lower prices and end foreign wars. The Harvard poll found that Trump’s disapproval rating with young men now stands at 59 percent, having skyrocketed since he won the election. But the poll was equally bad news for Democrats: Young men might be turning on Trump, but they still view Dems as useless. Those opinions won’t change unless they actually hear what Democrats are saying. “People who run for office want to win,” Buttigieg told Schulz. “But for me, it’s worth some risk in order to reach everybody.”

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