CNN commentator Van Jones on Thursday said that Democrats "got beat" in the 2024 election because the GOP rallied around a conservative alternative media system online. They listened to podcasts, turned to YouTube, engaged on social media, and did not listen to the big networks or the major dailies.

"And here's how we got beat," Jones said. "We got beat because the Republicans and conservatives built a different media system that had to do with online, had to do with podcasts, had to do with streaming platforms, and they were spending their money there."

He added, "We were laughing at them and knocking on doors in Philadelphia and Detroit, it's like, there's no Trump people. They're not dropping literature. They're not knocking on doors."

"Well, in fact, it was, it was laughing like, oh, Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk, with their PACs, don't know what they're doing, they're blowing it," host Erin Burnett added.

"We were making fun of Donald Trump for having thrown away his ground game and doing some weird stuff online. We thought that they were idiots. It turned out we were the idiots," Jones said. "We woke up in a body bag because while we were knocking on doors, they were making these phones into 24-hour-a-day political weapons for themselves. And so we got outflanked, outplayed, outbeat by people who told us the whole time that they knew what they were doing."

During the campaign, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance appeared on numerous popular podcasts, including the Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Theo Von's This Past Weekend, appeared on a Kick stream with Adin Ross, and many others. Nearly two weeks after it aired, the Joe Rogan podcast episode featuring Trump had been viewed nearly 50 million times on YouTube alone. 

Joe Rogan said that Harris had given her campaign an "open invitation" for her to appear on his widely watched program, but the campaign had demanded that Rogan travel to her, not Harris appearing in his Texas studio, and that the interview last just 1 hour, not the usual two to three hours Rogan airs.