As the presidential election campaign enters its final three days, it remains theoretically possible that Tuesday’s Prime Time debate on RTÉ could upend the pecking order. Possible, but not likely. Still, it has happened before.
In 2011, during the Frontline debate, presenter Pat Kenny was instructed to read out a tweet containing an unsubstantiated allegation about Independent candidate Seán Gallagher. The rest is history, not just in the subsequent election of Michael D Higgins but in the damage done to the reputation of RTÉ’s news and current affairs department. It was the moment Irish media learned the hard way that social media was not just a shiny toy.
No one will be reading out dodgy tweets on air on Tuesday. We have moved on from the days when Twitter seemed like an exciting new forum for democratic participation to an era defined by suspicion of bots, algorithms and bad actors of every kind. Utopia is now dystopia – although both are over-simplifications.
For almost 15 years now we’ve been told that the next election would be the one decided online. This time, that might actually be true. Over the past three weeks, two largely separate campaigns have been running in parallel. One has taken place in the traditional arena of television and radio debates that have little reach among younger adults. The other has unfolded across social media platforms, podcasts and influencer channels that many voters over 40 have never visited.
Election Daily podcast: Poll leaves Humphreys in need of ‘unprecedented turnaround’
Election Daily podcast: Is Heather Humphreys playing it too safe?
Presidential debate: who came out on top and who struggled?
Brian Cowen and The Crash: a new look at the handling and political cost of the Celtic Tiger collapse
In the broadcast version of events, three candidates entered the fray, then became two. Most observers agreed that Catherine Connolly won the opening debate on Virgin Media, clearly and decisively. Heather Humphreys improved her performances subsequently, particularly once Jim Gavin exited the race, but she was always chasing the lead. So, advantage Connolly.
Online, there has been no contest. The Connolly campaign has been omnipresent across podcasts and social feeds, while Humphreys has barely registered. In response to a query from the Irish Examiner, the Humphreys campaign said on Monday it had “podcast appearances in the schedule” for the final week, though it did not specify which ones. That sounded like a candidate admitting she had only just found the map.
If this feels familiar, it should. A cautious party insider facing off against a confident outsider who claims to speak for the people ignored by the establishment. One prefers scripted set pieces, the other thrives on the casual, conversational atmosphere of digital media.
If Humphreys is indeed heading for the same fate as Kamala Harris, the fallout will be far less dramatic. Still, the parallels are striking. A year ago, Donald Trump appeared on a string of popular podcasts in the final weeks before the US presidential election. Shows hosted by Logan Paul and other online personalities gave him an enormous audience among younger voters. The tone of these conversations was indulgent rather than interrogative, but their effect was considerable. Harris, by contrast, stuck largely to traditional media, appearing on a few friendly shows but avoiding the biggest one of all, The Joe Rogan Experience. Democrats later admitted that was a mistake.
What made this particularly interesting – and troubling for establishment parties – was that it wasn’t about money. Even in the US, where politics is hopelessly polluted by obscene amounts of private money, Trump’s digital victory was organic, not bought. On Google and Meta alone, a joint analysis by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets and Wesleyan University found that Harris-aligned groups outspent Trump’s by a ratio of roughly four to one. Yet Trump’s digital reach dwarfed hers.
Professional journalists on both sides of the Atlantic tend to be dismissive of these podcasts and YouTube shows. They point, with some justification, to the lack of any serious interrogation of candidates and to the hosts’ tendency to cheerlead rather than challenge. It is true that both Trump and Connolly have favoured spaces that either emphasise personality or overtly support their campaigns.
But traditional media might reflect on why those spaces feel more engaging than the grimly repetitive formats of conventional interviews and studio debates.
A generation raised on short-form video and conversational podcasts does not see Prime Time as the summit of civic discourse. For many of them, it barely exists. The broadcast interview, with its air of prosecutorial scrutiny, feels increasingly alien to audiences who have grown accustomed to authenticity (or at least its performance).
If the polls are correct and Connolly wins comfortably, both sides will begin drawing lessons immediately. For the left-wing alliance that has carried Connolly this far, the obvious lesson will be to treat this as a model for the next general election. That may prove more difficult. Presidential contests, by their nature, are personality-driven and unencumbered by local issues or constituency loyalties. Dáil elections are not.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil may console themselves that their weak performance was down to poor candidate selection and that the old constituency machinery still matters in general elections. Yet they should be unnerved by the demographic divide that this campaign has exposed. The different media ecosystems have revealed, and reinforced, a generational split that no party can ignore.
This election’s under-35s will be the next one’s under-40s. If you fail to speak to them where they live, you forfeit their attention and eventually their votes. That is the blunt lesson of the success of Connolly’s campaign. Parties no longer have the luxury of treating digital platforms as an afterthought, or of choosing candidates who are not comfortable with the expectations of the online audience.
“The most important thing in life is sincerity,” the comedian George Burns once famously observed. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That old joke has new legs.
