Hotties for Harris (photo of mine not included)

CHICAGO — Much of the grumbling from the reporting class about this year’s DNC has nothing to do with the security checkpoints (which were a breeze yesterday) or the lack of writing space (which is a real problem) but with the presence of accredited “content creators” who arguably have better access. There’s a “blue carpet” on the first floor of the convention hall where elected officials, unwilling to answer anything more than what they ate for breakfast, strut for Instagram.

Campaigns, often comprised of young people, tend to embrace anything new. I must admit, I once benefited from this. At the 2008 DNC, bloggers focused on a particular state were given a seat on that state’s delegation to cover. I went with my fellow bloggers to the sadly departed Calitics, and the pass got me a seat on the California delegation for an evening. Wired Internet (grab a chair, kids, and I’ll tell you about Ethernet cables) was attached to the podium, and during the state roll calls that made my day, all the bloggers were on camera. (I sat directly across from a local district attorney that night named Kamala Harris, who called me “Hey Blogger” all evening.)

So I fully understand the need to penetrate a young market that I and my parents know nothing about. I only fully understood it after the speeches in Congress on Tuesday night, when my Outlook Colleagues and I made our way to the Hotties for Harris party.

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The influencers entered a rented warehouse directly across the rail line that was decorated with projected graphics and memes. In a wood-paneled living room, a life-size statue of JD Vance, “the most embarrassing man in America,” stood next to, well, a couch and posters of the parade of awfuls, mostly on social issues that would befall the world if Vance and Donald Trump were the leaders of the free world. On the opposite side was a wheel that you could spin to win prizes like a blindfold and, yes, condoms. (Safer sex and reproductive justice were a theme.)

In another room there was Skee-Ball, a punching bag to test your strength, and one of those carnival machines where you can win a prize. A writer from La Crosse, Wisconsin, who writes about motorcycles, showed me the rabbit she had won. I didn’t know you could win anything at that game.

Perhaps the rigged machine was evidence of how much money was being spent at the party. Beer, cocktails, and drinks in hollowed-out coconuts (of course) flowed freely; there was a food truck with an entire pizza oven with gold tiles inside that dispensed whole pizzas, and another truck that offered empanadas. None of us could figure out who paid for it; one inventor I spoke to said the money came from “a PAC.”

UPDATE: In true Milkshake Duck fashion, a press release sent out before the Hotties for Harris event and forwarded to me states that the event was funded by something called “Investing in US,” which, according to a helpful link to Influence Watch that the press release provided, “is a for-profit investment fund founded by billionaire and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and former Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow Dmitri Mehlhorn.” Yes, The Reid Hoffman.

I guess the return on investment was solid. Microtargeting is nothing new in politics, but this is micro-microtargeting: TikTok and Instagram posters are being tricked into telling their followers, many of whom may have no connection to politics at all, about the brat and the coach and the election. The creators I spoke to were smart and enthusiastic—one told me she was about to start law school, and another woman with disabilities spoke proudly about what Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) had done for Illinois. In general, these were regular Democrats with cultural affinity to the left who were happy to be invited and motivated to use the most powerful campaign tool, word of mouth, to reach an electorate they were unlikely to otherwise reach.

One thing Vice President Harris has shown in her first weeks as a presidential candidate is that politics can be fun. It would be easy to cynically view Hotties for Harris as a generic return to the woke neoliberalism (someone else says that, not me) of the Hillary Clinton campaign. But people react differently to different messages and motivations. I’m concerned with the content.