Politics in 2024 is a brutal, never-ending war for attention. The mechanisms of traditional media are irrevocably broken. Unlike the old (i.e., my) days, voters no longer have newspapers delivered to their homes or are forced to turn on the local news to figure out the next day’s weather. They aren’t sitting in front of their TVs for hours on end and being force-fed commercials. Voters have an endless array of options for their attention. There’s the bottomless well of content on Netflix, the addictive flow of videos on TikTok, and every song ever written on Spotify. Unless they watch a live event like the World Series, football, or the Golden Bachelor, most voters under 50 are unlikely to see political commercials.

And, because nothing is easy, the hardest voters to reach are the ones who will ultimately decide the election. Around 6-10% of voters—those undecided on a candidate, unsure if they’ll vote, or open to changing their minds in the next week—have largely tuned out of political news. Therefore, the Harris and Trump campaigns are doing anything and everything to grab as much attention as possible. This is why Kamala Harris was in Houston with Beyoncé instead of in Ann Arbor with Big Gretch. It’s why Trump was willing to make thousands of people in Michigan wait hours for him so he could finish up a three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. And it’s why Tim Walz was playing Madden on Twitch with AOC. Both campaigns have largely adopted an approach to media that I have dubbed “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Getting attention is a skill. Trump was a shitty president but a master of getting attention. Joe Biden was a very good president but struggled to find ways to grab the nation’s attention during his presidency and abbreviated campaign. Kamala Harris is the first politician in the Trump era to successfully make politics about something other than Donald Trump. Throughout “Brat Summer,” Harris dominated the conversation without talking much about Trump. Her campaign has been pretty deft about finding innovative ways to break through, including campaigning with Liz Cheney and tonight’s closing argument speech from the site of Trump’s infamous speech on January 6th.

While both the Harris and Trump campaigns value attention, Trump believes it is the campaign's be-all and end-all. He thinks that if people are talking about him, he wins. Well, thanks to a very “weave-y” performance on Rogan’s podcast and an atrocious display of racism, misogyny, and abject idiocy during the high-profile rally at Madison Square Garden, people are definitely talking about Trump.

Trump got what he wanted, but is it helping his campaign?...