The Democrats find themselves out of power because they failed to embrace spaces where community connection is forged
Ahead of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, Maga doubters abounded. It wasn’t just pollster J Ann Selzer’s infamous whiff in Iowa where Kamala Harris supposedly leapfrogged Trump on the eve of the election. One Democrat official in the battleground state of Pennsylvania went as far as to claim, “The Republicans, they really didn’t have a ground game.”
Others derided Trump’s ground game as subpar and vibes-based, for gambling on infrequent voters, for outsourcing operations to private groups like Elon Musk’s America Pac. In doing so, these critics overlooked conservative groups’ investment in spaces not typically viewed as electoral or even political. Republican strategists focused on off-the-radar communal groups that channeled low-propensity voters in a rightward direction. “We were more focused on relationships built,” explained Tyler Bowyer of the get-out-the-vote outfit Turning Point.
Sports comprise a vital zone where such relationships are built and cultivated, and the Trump campaign took full advantage. Yet, many political strategists and social commentators failed to understand that engaging with the sphere of sports can be more politically effective by being less explicitly political.
Sports played an enormous role in Trump’s successful bid for the White House. Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson funneled $100m into Trump’s reelection effort. In June, Trump attended a UFC card in New Jersey where fans chanted, “We love Trump!” Former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention. Attacking transgender athletes became a go-to-move on the stump. Just before the election, Trump did a three-hour interview with UFC color commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan. UFC president Dana White speechified at Trump’s victory celebration. Trump summoned the Maga-hat-clad pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau to the stage, too, while NHL great Wayne Gretzky stood in the wings sporting a Maga cap. NFL defensive end Nick Bosa seemed to don a Maga hat at nearly every opportunity, while the Kansas City Chiefs’ Harrison Butker started a Pac to support Trump-aligned conservative causes. Boxer Mike Tyson, former NFL player Antonio Brown, and UFC fighter Jorge Masvidal were reportedly on the guest list for Trump’s inauguration. The list goes on.
But sports aren’t just part of Trump’s past. They’re a huge part of his future. The 2026 men’s soccer World Cup and the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics provide Trump with a premium opportunity to engage in sportswashing, when political leaders leverage sports to self-legitimize on the world stage while stoking nationalism and diverting attention from ingrained social problems and human-rights woes at home. Trump has hyped his own role in securing these sports mega-events. He bragged to Bill Belichick on the former New England Patriots coach’s podcast that “The World Cup and the Olympics, I was responsible for getting both of them, actually.”
Many sports honchos are more than happy to help Trump capitalize. Fifa president Gianni Infantino wasted no time congratulating Trump on his victory, even before the Electoral College votes were officially tallied, posting on Instagram, “We will have a great FIFA World Cup and a great FIFA Club World Cup in the United States of America!” Infantino shared six photos of himself and the US president-elect, signaling to billions of fans that Maga is soccer-friendly. Infantino attended Trump’s inauguration, and posted about it on Instagram.
When it comes to taking sports seriously, Democrats have flat-out dropped the ball. But downplaying the importance of sports has a long and ignominious tradition.
For years, academics and political strategists alike have snubbed sport as unserious turf. A shiny bauble for the trinket shelf. The American Political Science Association – the flagship professional organization for the study of political science – has 55 organized sections and not one of them addresses the politics of sport. French intellectual Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote about how “sociologists of sports are…doubly dominated, both in the world of sociologists and the world of sports.” In short, those who take sports seriously are often relegated to the political sidelines.
Trump’s reelection shows that it is past time to ditch the bugaboo that sports don’t matter, or worse, that they are some spurious diversion from reality, a nefarious opioid that dulls our collective political vim. “Karl Marx once described religion as the opiate of the masses,” wrote Richard F Shepard in a 1974 New York Times essay. “Well, Marx went away too soon or he might have revised his dictum to make organized sports the villain of the piece. There is nothing that comes close to sports in the seizure of men’s souls.” The sentiment hasn’t dampened with time. More recently, French intellectual Marc Perelman dubbed sport “the new opium of the people.”
But it is clear that sports helped sway voters into ticking Trump on their ballots. Sports create space where people create collective meaning. Fandom isn’t random. It is rooted in social relations that can bend toward the political.
In fact, Marx himself might have taken issue with dismissing the power of sport. After all, his original “opium of the people” passage rippled with empathy. Marx wrote that “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress.” For him, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” So, Marx viewed religion somewhat sympathetically as “the heart of a heartless world.” For many, the same can be said of sport.
Conservatives have already dialed in to this reality. Sure, Laura Ingraham infamously told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble,” but this is a distraction. A faction of the Republican party is committed to platforming sports during the second Trump presidency.
Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election in part because they failed to embrace spaces where community connection was being forged. Sports is an ever-bubbling cauldron of connection on full boil. To ignore it is to concede defeat.
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