One Sneaky Reason Why Sports Media Shunned Kamala Harris

I'm betting on one underrated factor in particular

A few of you sent me this Max Tani interview with a Kamala Harris campaign manager in Semafor. It’s about as open as you’ll see from the losing side. The campaign’s inability to court sports podcasters is highlighted. Deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty explains that the inability to appear on podcasts with Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers was not for lack of trying.

Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports.

The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts.

But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.

“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty, 33, told me in an interview last week. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”

“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” he said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”

Faherty declined to say who turned Harris down, but she didn’t appear on key shows hosted by sports figures sympathetic to Democrats, like Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers. (As Semafor first reported at the time, Harris did appear on All The Smoke, a popular but more niche basketball podcast, and NFL hall-of-famer Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast.)

The campaign’s failure to completely crack the sports sphere was, to Flaherty, ominous, and part of a larger trend in which some influencers who had felt comfortable engaging with the Biden White House, demurred when asked to help Harris make her case to their followers. “When it’s not cool to talk about politics,” he said, “you’re kind of afraid of the audience.”

“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he said. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

The issue for the Democratic Party, and I’d argue it’s their biggest problem going forward, is young men. I don’t think it’s coincidental that about the only big time male athlete support Kamala Harris received came from greying millennials like LeBron James and Steph Curry. My cohort came of age during the rise of Barack Obama, who was very popular with young men. Dudes in their 20’s don’t have the same relationship with the Democratic Party.

Exit polls can differ, but it appears that men ages 18-29 went, in just one election cycle, from double digit Democrat support to double digit Republican support. That’s bad for Dems in strict vote counting terms, but the young male cohort only represents a roughly 6-7 percent slice of the electorate. In theory, you should be able to leak some support in this demo and make it up elsewhere. But it’s just not that simple.

The male Zoomer political shift hurt on multiple fronts. This cohort is extremely important to culture setters like the ones the Kamala campaign was attempting to court. The most coveted consumer is the young consumer. They haven’t formed strong brand affinities yet. They’re more open to gamble on the games via an app than your dad would. Also, and this is an aside, campaigns operate like armies, and armies typically need a lot of young males willing to sacrifice time and effort for the ground game cause. In 2008, a few of my friends volunteered for Obama and flew out to battleground states. How many men in their early 20’s were engaged like that for Team Blue in 2024?

But I digress. One of the reasons, “The Democrats need their own Joe Rogan,” became such a post election trope is that young men punch above their weight as consumers. They don’t vote in the numbers that, say, old ladies do, but they influence the media tastemakers. They’re well represented among YouTube viewers and other forms of new media. They’re active on social media, where much of the political discourse gets settled before filtering out to legacy brands. The young men of this country might be poor compared to the boomers, but they’re also closer to being “cultural billionaires.”

For those asking, “What about younger women?” I’d respond that they’ve been massively influential. When social media reached critical mass, they shifted markedly to the left, driving a lot of the culture with them. Subjectively, I think there was a broad expectation that men were following women down the same path. It turns out, and I’m generalizing here, many men broke off from that path and instead formed their own political consciousness.

The young male aspect of the “vibe shift” has been regarded in legacy media as almost a one way brain washing. Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan got together in a conspiracy to scramble the minds of our bitter boys. But modern media isn’t that simple. People don’t just make content; They are acted upon by the people reacting to the content. There’s an element of the public being influenced by the influencer, but there’s also an element of the public influencing the influencer.

This isn’t just true for independent cults of personality but also for major corporations. In sports media specifically, I think the larger brands began to fear a potential “Bud Light Effect” from the mostly male customer base. By 2023, you could sense that the sports culture war had mostly died, and that these companies were “sticking to sports.” Elon Musk buying Twitter has a lot to do with that, but there are other factors.

There’s a thorny economic component here, alluded to above when I mentioned gambling apps. I’ve personally got deep reservations about legalized sports gambling, and its lack of concern for what happens to the customer. Ironically, though, the sports gambling era might have fueled a heightened sensitivity to customer taste. Since the money is real, and the sports book options are numerous, media companies are more inclined to mirror the preferences of young men. These are the people who disproportionately sports gamble. To get a non-survey based sense of who tends to bet on sports, see how Taylor Mathis conveys her picks to an audience.

Pre 2022, these sports media companies were similar to Nike, often chasing the Undecided Whale of female customers. There’s still an element of that in the Era of Caitlin Clark, but the pitch hasn’t been as loud lately. There was more of a focus on (or tolerance for) social justice ideology back when commentary need not be in service of a ruthlessly efficient operation. The game was more about sounding good to someone like John Skipper and less about tangibly getting dudes to fork over picks money.

In the Semafor interview, I thought Flaherty was quite articulate about the cultural dynamics that ended up burning his side. Quoting him in the money excerpt:

“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,”

Sports and culture did merge together in a way that helped Trump. You can see it in Barstool’s Bussin' With the Boys interviewing the president elect. The other aspect is that sports companies felt more financial pressure to mirror, or at least not oppose, this changing culture. The sports content consumer was no longer just a passive viewer, watching ads for standard products. The customer became an actual customer and his money started to matter to these financially strained institutions. The sports companies do not care at all about what happens to the men who gamble. They do, however, now care about the opinions of the men who gamble.