Epstein and Affordability: This is How We Win
At least egg prices are down bsky.app/profile/dean...
— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 9:55 AM
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TL;DR
Attention remains the world’s most valuable commodity. This year, progressive campaigns learned how to get attention by prioritizing what voters actually care about, instead of what progressives think they should care about. They found out what they actually care about through unbiased social media scoping (what I call “Clean Listening”), and then they centered housing costs, insurance premiums, and energy bills.
They converted this attention into victories by using an algorithmically-tailored content strategy (what I call “Feed First”) to reach voters who supported Trump in 2024 but who now face deepening economic crises.
The administration’s ongoing bungling of the Epstein Files has added a dawning feeling of moral injury to the feeling of economic betrayal in voters who expected Trump to fight for them.
That same “Clean Listening” and “Feed First” approach, outlined here, will help us keep getting good attention (and win!!) in 2026, because it’s only going to get worse for MAGA. If progressives can keep focused, that’s good news for America.
WHAT?
One of Instrumentals’ main ventures in 2025 was helping various organizations find out how better to capture attention, and then, once captured, convert it into action.
(All for waaaaay less than polling firms or audience insights consultants charge, FYI!)
Progressives lost in 2024 because they prioritized what voters should care about instead of what voters actually cared about. Meanwhile, right-wing campaigns worked symbiotically with Big Tech to identify what people were already complaining about, then created content that addressed those complaints. The right went where the attention already was. Progressives tried to redirect attention to where they wanted it to be. The right won.
Progressives too often prioritize what we think people should pay attention to rather than what they actually pay attention to. This is one of the big reasons we lose. For the past ten years (at least), we’ve been trying to teach by telling, which, as any parent knows, doesn’t work. At all. And, as any parent also knows, it’s very hard to stop doing it (“let me explain something to you, buster…”)
On the other side of the moat, over this same past decade plus, right-wing campaigns have activated millions of persuadable people through the oldest political strategy in the book: listening, then shamelessly pandering.
What’s new is that winning right-wing campaigns have used much better tools to effectively carry out this old strategy. Or, rather, they’ve let Big Tech’s use much better tools to carry out the first part of the strategy (the listening), and then they’ve used their dogged shamelessness to do the second (the pandering).
Meanwhile, progressives have tried to bend Big Tech’s finely-calibrated multibillion dollar algorithms toward justice. But, alas, that has also failed.
The more effective MAGA operatives, on the other hand, have listened closely to what the algorithms are surfacing. And what the algos did surface, are surfacing, and will surface, from the mountains to the prairies, until the end of time, is people complaining.
So much complaining! The great pastime of the world! Bitchin’ and moanin’!! Lettin’ it rip! You tell ‘em! These people don’t know who they’re dealin’ with! No sirreeeee! Let me tell you!
But instead of trying to talk people out of their grievances, or hand-wave away their big feelings (again, as progressives do) the smart MAGA teams heard what people were saying, and they did what they do best: they pandered. They pandered like motherfuckers. They pandermaxxed. They pandermaxxed to the maxx.
Crucially, though, they pandered not just to the grievance posters themselves. This is the genius part. They pandered to the algorithm itself. They created branded, fake-solution content with the specs the algos loved, in the forms the algos loved, with the para-social micro influencers the algos already loved, and they stitched, remixed, and boosted. Then they let those algos cook. And the cookin’ algos did what cookin’ algos do best. They persuaded people to do shit not in their interest to do.
MAGA went “Feed First.” And they won.
If we wanted to win in 2025, we knew we needed to either reverse-engineer right-wing methods, or come up with new ones on our own, so we developed a “Clean Listening” + “Feed First” strategy to find, and then reach, new potentially persuadable audiences.
These persuadable audiences were made up of people who had bought what Trump was selling in 2024 but who now had enough buyer’s remorse to want to try something else.
(NB: we weren’t looking for people who would, for example, apologize, or say, you were so right! As nice as that would be, that’s a self-defeating fantasy. It’s hard, but you should give up on that.)
So here’s what we did. Instrumental deployed “clean listening” teams using VPNs to mask our IP addresses, and we scrubbed our browsers to hide as much legacy user data as we could and to go as incognito as possible. We then created fresh social accounts with bare-bones, strategic personas (a 40-year-old divorced dad from Miami, for example, or a stay-at-home mom in Flagstaff).
This set-up worked to both pop our own info bubbles (what’s trending for me isn’t what’s trending for @FlagstaffMama09, obv) and to see what the algorithms thought our test personas would like to see, based on the trillions of bytes of data they’ve hoovered up over the years.
What we found was fascinating.
First, across all of our demographics, geographies, and ideologies, people love Family Feud. I mean, L-O-V-E. Second, beyond all that same stuff, people also love watching other people fall over.
@metrodetroitnews An overnight ice storm coated roads, sidewalks, and porches across metro Detroit, creating unsafe conditions for morning commuters and residents. One Detroit homeowner captured the moment on his porch security camera – a slip-and-fall on icy steps that sent him tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, he wasn’t seriously hurt. A reminder to all: be cautious when walking on icy surfaces. More snow is expected to hit the area this weekend. Stay safe – winter isn’t over yet! (Educational and informational purposes only)
♬ original sound - metrodetroitnews
So, the first big takeaway is that if you want to reach the broadest possible audience with your campaign, partner with Steve Harvey to make clips of him narrating people falling over. Or better yet, partner him to make clips of the man himself falling over. Extreme, exaggeraged, moustachioud, bald-headed, slapsticked bink bonk bonk bonk? Landslide. Guaranteed.
Second lesson, if that’s not quite your jam, is that people are being priced out of everything, and they are open to anyone and anything that can help them fix what they see as a rigged system.
Shorter: We used social media monitoring to identify organic voter concerns, and the dominant concern across demographics and geographies: Family Feud. Then, affordability . Specifically, housing costs, insurance premiums, and energy bills.
Once we started seeding our accounts with data by creating a strategic watch history and a pattern of behavior, we found the billion dollar algorithms didn’t serve us Trump speeches or “Save Democracy” memes.
Across the board, from Kansas to New Jersey to Arizona, the algos served us a simple, brutal reality. People feel like they can’t afford to live. We saw a rational skepticism about the state of the nation, and tangible, everyday hacks to help people outwit a rigged system.
Over and over, we were served videos of people calculating their rent vs. their income with captions like, “The Math Isn’t Mathing,” or finance dads explaining how home solar systems will lower energy bills, or ex-insurance adjusters showing how to stop corporate firms voiding claims after hurricanes or wildfires.
People wanted solutions. Desperately. So we then built campaigns around those concerns rather than around organizational priorities.
By mid-2025, another factor emerged: Trump administration scandals, particularly the Epstein document releases, began appearing in the same feeds that surfaced affordability content. On its own, scandal coverage might be politically survivable. But when voters see their rent doubling while Trump dismisses transparency demands and attacks celebrities on social media, the scandal confirms what the affordability crisis already suggested: he's part of the system pricing them out, not fighting it.
This creates unusual vulnerability. The belief that "we're all in this together against the establishment" breaks when the leader appears to protect that establishment. Voters who expected Trump to fight the system now see him as complicit in it.
These audiences may have seen Trump as their advocate in 2024, but most of them weren’t true believers, and now that he hasn’t solved their problems (and, in many cases, only made them worse), they’re ready for another option.
These voters may have supported Trump in 2024, but most weren't ideological. They wanted solutions to specific problems. When Trump failed to deliver and instead dismissed their concerns, they became persuadable again.
But they weren’t persuaded by “a return to normalcy,” or "preserving institutions,” or “some of you didn’t pay attention in history class,’ or, even, “we have to save democracy.” All of that got eye-rolls on these platforms (from the target audiences) as being part of the legacy problem.
The next winning option for the mass of persuadable audiences will have to be tangible, everyday, and real. Like a free bus, or low-cost child care, or a way to not get screwed by the insurance company.
(And you know who knows this? Josh Hawley. He might be a coward, but he’s no dummy).
Clearly, definitely, finally – people do not trust experts to give them good information. They would rather hear “what the experts don’t want you to know” a thousand times more than “what the experts think you should know.”
Persuasion is happening through a neighbor who knows a guy, or a friend who figured out how to save this on that, or a co-worker who actually used AI to get around filling out that HR form. Not through Dr. Fauci, Bruce Springsteen, Jerome Powell, or the Union of Concerned Scientists.
To state the obvious, should these people trust Kai Cenat more than the Union of Concerned Scientists? OF COURSE NOT! But they do. The ship of “shouldn’t” has sailed.
2025’s smartest campaigns knew this.
The winning campaigns targeted behavior that told them a person was persuadable, with the help of the algorithms that do this better than any tool in the history of humanity. They found their new people by the memes they shared, not the petitions they signed. Mamdani, Spanberger, the Georgia Public Service Commission, Mikie Sherrill, they all figured out how to listen outside of their datasets, and then they messaged on what they heard, through the people most-trusted to deliver that message.
They went for the electorate as it actually is, not as they wished it would be.
They went Feed First.
@zohran_k_mamdani "Without the night shift, there is no morning." Late Thursday night, I canvassed the taxi line at LaGuardia — and caught up with some old friends.
♬ original sound - Zohran Mamdani
Now What?
This is a perilous time for Trump and the incumbent power structure. His failure to address the affordability crisis has planted seeds of doubt with the independent voters who elected him. And while they’re wondering how they’ll pay for rent and insurance denials, he’s calling them stupid, bombing Nigeria, and attacking the ghost of Rob Reiner.
This confirms their suspicion: he's part of the system pricing them out. Turns out, the guy is a huckster.
But if nothing else please listen right now: DON’T GLOAT. Cassandra never won an election, and no one likes to hear “I told you so.” Especially from progressives, who are already seen as preachy and obnoxious. So, instead of demonizing people who fell for it, we should try to reach them.
How? By shutting up.
For Instrumental’s work on insurance, energy bills, and infrastructure, we found that relatable, authentic speakers like DIY dads, teachers, and nurses dominated the persuadable audience feeds. These are what the influencer biz calls “para-social relay points.” We used these para-social relay points to help create a sense of a movement, or group of insiders people would want to join.
The influencer marketing research says when local, trusted insiders share a narrative, it doesn't feel like a campaign. It feels like a discovery. A secret. A hack. Which triggers identity-driven sharing, where people pass along content not just because it's true, but because it affirms who they are. Just ask the MAHA movement.
This creates a feedback loop. The algorithm notices the engagement, boosts the content, and, suddenly, a small but loud close-knit network makes an idea appear mainstream, creating a perception of consensus that the media then will want to discover and unpack. The feedback feeds back.
Our listening reports identified the winning tone as skeptical and empowering, a neighbor who knows a guy. The narrative should be "here is how we outsmart the broken system together".
Note, the most effective content was unbranded. It prioritized human-first storytelling over organizational visibility, which is a biggie. So, as much as it would be great for the ED to be the thought leader the world needs with amazing SMART-objective-nailing direct-to-camera TikToks, a better strategy is to find the creators already posting about insurance greed, energy bills, tariffs, pollution, rent. Boost them. Let them be the messengers of the 2026 victory. That will validate real-life economic and cultural experiences without triggering partisan resistance.
This is especially true with the Epstein files, where partisan feeling runs super high. The sequence is: economic injury first, moral injury as confirmation. "They raised your costs AND won't show you who they work for" resonates. “Noam Chomsky was just there to research class warfare!” does not.
The 2026 campaigns that win will be the ones that meet voters where they are and use Trump’s scandals to validate that worry, not distract from it. If campaigns lead with economics and use scandals as evidence of systemic rot, voters hear someone who understands their actual problems.
The scandal becomes proof that no help is coming from the top. The economic crisis becomes proof Trump can’t fix anything. He makes things worse for everyone except himself.
Our job is to let people know that help is on the way, and then actually help them.
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