A little over a week ago, after the Trump administration killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the opinion-havers of Twitter were doing what they do best: arguing about something most people don’t care about. The debate at hand involved Elizabeth Warren’s shifting public statements on Soleimani’s killing. At first Warren called the dead general a “murderer,” but she soon tempered her description after blowback from outraged corners of the online left, which has been huffing any-enemy-of-Trump-is-my-friend fumes since 2017. After a whole day of Warren mockery on Twitter, Dave Weigel, a reporter from the Washington Post, threw a brushback pitch at two colleagues from the National Journal and ABC News. “Guys, get out of the beltway for a weekend. Most people had to google Soleimani on Friday,” he wrote.

Weigel, who has spent more time in airports over the last decade than most political journalists, was echoing a critique long held by Avis Preferred press corps against their desk jockey friends in Washington and New York: that the stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year. This is because Donald Trump, despite his deep personal insecurities and lust for elite validation—and, indeed, his own use of Twitter—has derived much of his political success by ignoring Washington finger-waggers and connecting with the more primal instincts of his supporters, in whatever televised or digital corner of the media he can, with or without the good graces of the national press and savvy insiders. Trump stumbled into understanding something crucial about the electorate, which is this: There are plenty of divisions in our conventional wisdom—insider versus outsider, progressive versus moderate, young versus old—but one of the biggest splits in American politics is simply between those who follow politics closely and those who do not.

It’s a split that maps, if not perfectly, onto the gap that emerged between college and non-college educated voters in 2016. The latter set are often low-information voters who view politicians and media with contempt, deciding to sit elections out. Trump has exploited them to powerful effect. The president has made politics about culture—not just policy. He found a way to attract new voters, particularly rural and non-college educated whites who previously thumbed their nose at conventional politics. Because he’s a pure attention merchant, he doesn’t care what screen he appears on, as long he is there. Because he lacks an ounce of shame, it all works, with or without the blessing of the legacy press.

None of the above can be said for Democrats, who care habitually about the good graces of the national press, and who don’t see politics as a subspecies of the entertainment business. Democrats happen to believe in facts and institutions—and yes, they would like a cable contract when the campaign is over, thank you very much. But to Trump’s great advantage, the mainstream press is where many of the fights for the Democratic nomination are being waged: on cable news, on Twitter, and in the prestige media. Jared Goldberg-Leopold, the former senior communications adviser for Washington governor Jay Inslee’s presidential bid, told the Washington Post recently that, “In many ways, 2020 is the Cable News Primary. MSNBC and CNN are the biggest pipelines into voters’ living rooms.” The problem for Democrats is that those media spaces are, today more than ever, islands unto themselves. Cable may be a good way to reach highly engaged Democratic primary voters, but the reality is that television news is watched by only a tiny fraction of Americans. During the first five days of the much-hyped impeachment hearings, only about 4% of the American population tuned in to watch some part of the testimony on TV. Twitter, the other opinion-shaper preferred by Democrats, is younger, more educated, and more liberal than the country as a whole, and only 10% of its users create 80% of its content, according to Pew Research.