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"He's a quirky content creator. He's going to generate a lot of curiosity," a veteran Democratic strategist says. But that interest can "peter out" quickly if voters don't think the political scion can show how he will "engage with the Trump administration." When he launched his congressional campaign last week, Jack Schlossberg pitched himself as something of a bridge between Democrats and a toxic social media environment that has been dominated by Republicans. "New media is completely polluted and the air is dirty," the Kennedy scion told MSNBC during the buzzy rollout of his bid for the New York seat being vacated by Jerry Nadler. "I figured out a way to breathe in that environment, and we need to elect candidates who understand how to do that." "I think that's what makes me an effective representative," he added. Since their defeats in 2024, Democrats have been desperately seeking to make inroads in new media -- even fantasizing, at times, about finding a "Joe Rogan of the left." Schlossberg, grandson of the late President John F. Kennedy, is selling himself as an answer to those woes. He's built a large social media following as an oddball troll -- campy, sometimes controversial, and versant in the outlandish, nihilistic style of the way-too-online. "He's a quirky content creator. He's going to generate a lot of curiosity," Trip Yang, a veteran Democratic strategist in New York, told me. Schlossberg has the Kennedy looks, and a kind of mischievous charisma; a Newsweek piece after his campaign launch crowned him the "internet's latest 'babygirl.'" And he's made his cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a particular target of his ridicule, as when Schlossberg mocked Kennedy with the image of a "MAHA Man" Halloween costume. "I'm going as slutty JUNIOR," Schlossberg wrote. Such bits are surely a source of catharsis for some Democrats. They may make others long for a time before politicians did bits -- when there was at least a pretense of dignity in our civic life. But those days are gone, buried in the virtual shit Trump dropped on the insufficiently-loyal electorate from a fighter jet. And in a world in which the president of the United States spews AI slop, his White House responds to journalists with "your mom" jokes, and his edgelord henchmen wage endless culture war online, Democrats need to fight dirty, too -- or so goes the thinking of figures like Gavin Newsom, who has taken to parodying the president's unhinged, all-caps Twitter bluster. The question for the Schlossberg campaign is whether being a provocateur -- even one from America's most storied political family -- is enough on its own.