Mother Jones illustration; YouTube; x.com
After a historic setback in 2024, the Democratic rebrand appears to be working out.
No, seriously—the rebrand is that they’re all filming themselves working out. In late September, Manny Rutinel, a Democrat challenging Rep. Gabe Evans in Colorado, posted a video of himself doing bicep curls while blaring “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The week before that, a very energized Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed was in Washington, DC, challenging JD Vance to a squat-off. Before that, it was Indiana secretary of state candidate Birch Evans Bayh IV—please, call him Beau—airing an ad in which he racked weights and bench-pressed while lamenting that “most politicians are weak.”
You could keep going back, if you wanted—to Cait Conley, running against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s Hudson Valley, flipping over a tire while shouting “let’s fucking go”; to the former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner, swinging a kettlebell in his backyard; to former Rep. Colin Allred, recording his denunciation of James Talarico before the Texas Senate primary with steam coming off his head after a garage workout; to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, talking to TMZ about the workout video he posted after a visit to the US Naval Academy.
Some of these antics are just a reflection of these candidates’ personalities. Allred, for instance, is a former NFL linebacker. Pumping iron is a thing El-Sayed likes to do (and do and do), and he’s worked it into his campaign as a way to connect with people and reach new audiences. There is often an explicit contrast to bad conservative messaging in this glut of videos—Rutinel, like fellow Coloradan Rep. Jason Crow before him, was making light of Pete Hegseth’s poor form and transparent insecurity, just as Gavin Newsom—who has not posted a workout video—was making light of RFK Jr.’s shirtless workout with Kid Rock in a TikTok of his own.
But if you’ll excuse me for overexamining things for a minute, I think there’s also something more subtle (well, not that subtle) at work here. After the 2024 election, a common shorthand for what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party was that people perceived Democrats as—in the words of one focus group and many, many talk-show interviews—“weak and woke.” (There were infinite corollaries to this, including Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s suggestion that the party lacked “alpha energy,” Sen. Ruben Gallego’s assertion that voters thought they were “wussy,” and Newsom’s belief that “we’ve appeared weak and meek.”)
The “woke” part has probably consumed the most oxygen and engendered the most debate within the party. It has also been addressed, in a variety of ways, in a frenzy of TV ads and ill-advised Reels. But the “weak” part is straightforward: The solution is to not be weak. It’s to be strong, to stand up for yourself, to speak plainly, and when possible—and this really gets to the root of where things went wrong—not to be an octogenarian who walks at a shuffle and speaks at a whisper while voters go mad over inflation. There are many ways of doing that, but as a practical matter, if you want to show you have energy and can do real-person things and dispel misconceptions about Democrats Like You, well, you can always just try picking up something really heavy.
Political messaging can be alarmingly reductive sometimes. Candidates and consultants are borrowing things they’ve seen or used before. Why did candidates start filming themselves driving through their hometowns, eyes curiously off the road, talking about the values that forged them and the neighbors who were left behind? Who was the first elected official to stand in front of a bunch of televisions blaring attack ads and say, very solemnly, “you’ve seen the ads”?
All of these workout videos call to mind another campaign trope. One of the hottest campaign trends to emerge in the Obama years was filming yourself shooting stuff. It was a conservative-coded but not exclusively Republican genre. In fact, it may have even worked best when it was Democrats doing it—cutting against type, while demonstrating that they weren’t like all the rest. Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin famously filmed himself shooting “the cap-and-trade bill” during his first election. When he ran for a final term in 2018, he shot his opponent’s lawsuit to gut the Affordable Care Act. (Kind of the full Joe Manchin experience, to be honest.) When Seth Bodnar, the independent running for Senate in Montana, recently filmed himself shooting a Flock camera, he was following in the footsteps of former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who strapped “REAL ID cards” to clay pigeons 18 years earlier.
Even as the polls predict a big year for Democrats, the party’s national reputation is still underwater. There’s dissatisfaction with party leaders, and big fights still to come on foreign policy, on Big Tech, and on health care. Turning things around will be a heavy lift. But that might be one thing they’re getting used to.
