On July 19, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) started an Instagram Live stream with the caption “This messy moment.” Over the course of nearly an hour, she spoke extemporaneously about the drama within the Democratic Party over whether President Biden should remain the nominee. She promised to deliver the “straight truth” about how “s—’s hitting the fan,” and the “chaos” and “enormous peril” if Biden steps aside.
The stream reached an audience of millions. It made national headlines. Of course, two days later, it would all be for naught. Biden announced he was quitting the race via a letter posted to his social media accounts.
Whatever you think about Ocasio-Cortez, the Instagram Live that night showed she has cultivated an authentic connection with her audience. It may not feel particularly familiar to people who expect and embrace the proper etiquette of American politics, but that’s precisely the point.
AOC is “Extremely Online,” as they say, but she has made it work because it’s not artificial. That stands in stark contrast to the months-long effort to make Vice President Kamala Harris “brat” — to clunkily attach her to a “cool” movement (based around pop star Charli XCX’s new album) that she would glom onto through artifice and cultural deception.
Looking at Harris’s social media output, one doubts that she even knows the password to get into her accounts. It’s all meaningless and hollow — clumsily constructed campaign slogans and low-level social media marketer-speak. It is indistinguishable from what we would get if we asked ChatGPT to do the job.
But it’s not surprising — Harris oozes inauthenticity. Witness how she stumbled last week through an overly-produced town hall with Oprah Winfrey, in which she happily took a backseat to the festivities.
On the other side of the aisle, former President Donald Trump deserves a plaque in the Twitter Hall of Fame — one of the true champions when it comes to the craft and artistry of posting. He happily veers into the Extremely Online world while firing off missives like “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” which he actually posted on Truth Social, which he owns.
This surely makes his advisors, and detractors, cringe. But it’s not far off from the type of content he has enjoyed wading into on social media for decades — like in 2012, when he felt very strongly that Robert Pattinson should dump Kristen Stewart, his “Twilight” co-star.
And then there’s Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who uses social media in a way no American political figure has before.
Earlier this month, Vance responded to a brief comment on X about daycare from Hannah Anderson, a Christian writer, by delivering a point-by-point, 350-word policy dissertation in the unlimited-character posting format that Elon Musk brought to the platform.
It was nuanced, thoughtful and purely authentic — and unmistakably written by JD himself. As journalist Zaid Jilani noted, “It’s hilarious how JD Vance dropped a whole policy manifesto in a Twitter reply and Kamala Harris can’t describe one policy in this level of detail in a televised interview.”
A week later, it would be Jilani who got a lengthy X reply from Vance, about the Extremely Online issue of his and Trump’s claims about Haitian immigrants “eating the pets” in Springfield, Ohio. Vance began his response with “dude, I’ve always liked you, so maybe this should be a longer conversation…” He then laid out his take on how immigration hurts the working class more broadly.
It was a fascinating exchange, and one that left Jilani, a longtime liberal who runs “The American Saga” Substack, with a respect for Vance, despite their disagreements. “Vance is very intellectually curious,” Jilani told me. “He reads stuff on the left and the right. He’s very online, and spends a lot of time in that theory and debate space…in a way most lawmakers don’t.”
Despite the casual “dude” beginning to the X reply, Jilani says he has only met Vance once in person, before he was a senator. At the time, Vance noted that he read Jilani’s work. Jilani is also friendly with Vance’s chief of staff, Jacob Reses.
“It’s refreshing to see somebody who’s involved in government and politics actually be that responsive,” Jilani said about the exchanges, not just with him but with others on X. “He put a lot of thought and effort into allaying someone’s concerns.”
Both Vance and AOC are millennials, so, as Jilani notes, they “probably grew up writing social media posts” — unlike the elderly Biden, or Gen Xer Harris. But Vance’s online persona notably matches his in-real-life persona — which only adds to the perception that the online engagements are the “real” JD.
Vance has answered questions from more than 100 interviewers in the time since he joined the GOP ticket — and that’s not including a vast number of casual opportunities for constituents to engage with him.
Trump may be the “Poster President,” but “Vance has more of a sheen of intellectualism,” Jilani told me. And it’s quite obviously natural to who he is.
This is a skillset that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) may have trouble with when he meets Vance on the debate stage on Tuesday. And no matter how it goes when the bright lights are on in the most traditional of political formats, Vance will likely be back on X soon for some more intellectual curiosity and thoughtful combat.
Maybe being Extremely Online isn’t such a bad thing — especially when it’s juxtaposed with the stilted emptiness on the opposing ticket.
Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.