In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) sat down with Semafor’s Burgess Everett to discuss leading the Democratic Strategic Communications Committee and his mission to get Senate Democrats out of their cable news comfort zone and into the digital age, one viral video at a time.

See for yourself:

Semafor

How Cory Booker convinced his party to get extremely online

By Burgess Everett

…

When Chris Coons stepped into his party’s meeting room after listening to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress in March, Cory Booker had a surprise waiting: a room of social media influencers ready to interview him.

“I’m looking at him. And he goes, ‘I know you’ve never met these people. I know you’ve never heard of what they’re on,’” Coons recalled to Semafor.

Booker listed the follower counts of social media personalities in the room, Coons added, and then told him: “Just go with it.”

The Delaware senator took Booker’s advice — as have many of his Democratic colleagues this year. Booker is on an active mission to tone the party’s weak media muscles, an atrophy that many now believe cost Democrats in 2024.

It’s part of Booker’s new role in the caucus: modernizing a party that he believes relies too much on traditional print and TV outlets to get its message out.

…

“Our caucus was not understanding that we put so much energy into going on MSNBC, but more people are on these devices,” Booker said in an interview this week about his social media work.

“We’ve got to start shifting our strategy towards having a digital and media strategy that could break through, that could capture attention.”

…

According to data Booker presented during a Senate Democratic caucus meeting this month, his approach is working to help Democrats catch up on multiple platforms. He says he’s quadrupled online engagement in the caucus, from roughly 400,000 engagements a day to 2 million. Senate Democrats have added 15 million new followers across platforms, outpacing Republicans significantly.

…

You can see the Booker-inflected changes if you bop around the party’s social media accounts: more direct-to-camera riffs, fewer press releases and canned quotes, and more shareable content, like Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., explaining what a rescission is.

Will it all have an impact on the 2026 election? Who knows. But it is notable that Democrats, for perhaps the first time, have someone in their ranks thinking deeply about this.

…