Introduced in 2015, the character was created by Blake Zeff and mostly written by Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas for CAFE, an online publisher of political news and satire, in the run-up to the 2016 United States presidential election.

Diggler, a middle-aged, centrist pundit who prides himself on his "inside the Beltway" knowledge of the Washington, D.C. political scene, is the purported author of a column published at CAFE and a keen, if clueless, Twitter user.

Texas ran an op-ed in The Washington Post about their predictive success and the ways Diggler exposed the flaws of supposedly objective data-journalistic techniques.

[3] Cafe editor-in-chief Blake Zeff came up with the original idea for Carl Diggler, and hired Biederman and Texas to develop the character and write his columns.

[5] Zeff contributed ideas, edits the columns, and helped to run Carl Diggler's in-character Twitter account, but the articles and social media posts by the character were largely the work of Biederman and Texas.

They occasionally broke the fourth wall in the column to write articles as themselves when they were, in real life, on-location covering political events on the 2016 campaign trail—under the fictional pretext that Diggler, meanwhile, is stuck moping back in his Park Slope apartment.

From his sycophantic love of candidates in uniform to his hatred of Bernie Bros, from his reverence for "the discourse" to his constant threats of suing the people who troll him on Twitter, Carl is predicated on being myopic, vain and — frankly — wrong.

[3]Biederman said Diggler "grew out of the craven inanity and absurd self-importance you see in the worst 'wonks' and horserace pundits, but we exaggerated it to make him as much of a clown as we personally saw these people.

"[7] Diggler writes with adoration for the ceremonial decorum of American politics,[8] but blithe, often oblivious disregard for the plight faced by real voters.

In an episode of the podcast Chapo Trap House, Biederman and Texas listed Digger's biggest influences as Chris Cillizza, Mark Halperin, and above all, "greatest hack of all time" Ron Fournier.

During his period of dating KweenTrashWytch✨✨, Diggler became "woke" and, claiming to follow his newfound understanding of intersectional feminism, endorsed Carly Fiorina in an attempt to impress his girlfriend.

"[20] Following the practice of many other political journalists and news publications, Diggler published predictions for who would win each contest of the 2016 presidential primary season.

[7] Diggler backed up his picks with absurd, often grotesque rationales, based on the character's "gut" reading of a state electorate's supposed tendencies and mindsets.

[22] Most conspicuously, Diggler correctly predicted more primary outcomes than the models used by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, a prominent data journalism and statistics blog owned by ESPN.

[3] In the editorial, Texas said that Silver's predictions were, despite their reliance on data, not falsifiable and thus unscientific, and that they overstated the statistical impact of factors like endorsements based on subjective assumptions about historical elections.

According to Eddie Brawley, Diggler's writing has a niche appeal, because understanding the column's many elaborate in-joke references requires a reader to closely follow media discourse on Twitter and the character's own idiosyncrasies and intricate storylines.

"[35] In National Review, Theodore Kupfer cited Diggler's predictions and Texas' op-ed as prescient, in contrast to Silver and other pundits who had been blindsided by the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.