“No matter how many pork rinds Democrats eat or how many animals they kill or how many times they throw their arms around white policemen and kiss them on the lips — the right wingers will not change their minds because they will not even know about it,” Digby wrote here yesterday. I want to piggyback on that post this morning.
Digby was adding to David Roberts’ (@drvox) tweet thread on the ever-popular hand-wringing over Democrats sucking at messaging. Democrats fail for not supplicating themselves before guys in overalls in red-state diners, etc. Roberts wrote, “Because — stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times — the RW has a giant propaganda machine that carries their messages directly to the ears (& id) of their voters. Dems lob messages out into the MSM & hope for the best.”
As it happens, a new neighbor complained about Democrats’ lousy messaging just yesterday. I agree. Democrats suck at messaging for lot of reasons. But as Roberts said (and I did yesterday), the right wing does indeed have an enormous propaganda machine separate from the Republican Party driving messaging for them. And not funded by it either. That is a structural as much as a messaging advantage.
Progressives complain about messaging endlessly but do not have the ideologue-billionaires willing to make the decades-long financial commitment to constructing such a system on the left. Nor do a big tent full of Democrats have the message discipline to endlessly repeat a single message like a church choir. “Show your creativity,” read a flyer for a D.C. antiwar protest a community college professor once showed me. His biggest concern? What costume he would wear to the march.
There are people on the left like Anat Shenker-Osorio who excel at messaging. Her work has successfully moved the needle on specific issue campaigns here and abroad. But she doesn’t have the throw to rebrand an entire political party. She seems to get more respect and work in Australia than here. Democrats at the national level prefer their pet consultants, many of whom graduated from jobs on Capitol Hill to D.C. consultancies where success depends more on personal connections and campaign experience than on training in marketing and cognitive science.
Plus, as I reminded my neighbor, no magic-bullet slogan will undo thirty years of Rush Limbaugh living inside people’s heads three hours a day, five days a week for 30 years. He started indoctrinating the right wing a decade ahead of Fox News. Restaurants piped his shows into “Rush Rooms” in the early 1990s so people could eat their lunches and not miss out on their daily Two Minutes Hate.
Roberts tweeted:
As Roberts said, stop me if you’ve heard me say this a trillion times, I worked in an office in the mid-1990s where a guy listened to Rush Limbaugh every afternoon on headphones and recorded the show. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads’ radios in the building so their anger would be primed for Limbaugh’s live broadcast at noon. Their brains marinated in it each day for six hours. People have lost family members to Fox News brainwashing.
This is why instead of trying to fight an unfunded, losing battle against decades of networked propaganda, I advocate trying to improve campaign skills at the local level, 50-state strategy style. This is not a problem Democrats think their way out of. They need better skills at the grassroots level. Examine the map above for the grayed counties where Democrats have no organized committees or zero digital presence. Even a third of Stacey Abrams’ Georgia.
This is not to say better messaging is not important. But I swear, every other new volunteer who walks into our local headquarters wants to be assigned to messaging. Democrats suck at it, right? Unknown and untrained, they want to craft the national messaging campaign that through some undefined mechanism Democrats at the national level will take seriously, budget, and convince red-state Democrats to run with from St. George, Utah to Wise, Virginia.
In places like those across the country Democrats might win or at least shave Republican margins if they can master the basic mechanics of getting out the vote and ensuring the Democrats and leaners they turn out fill out the entire ballot. Under-resourced and under-trained county committees don’t need better messaging as much as to be able to put their pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoes. In that order. I have tried.
Heartlanders (as Roberts calls them) cannot be told Democrats do not worship Satan and have bits of baby between their teeth. They must be shown by more persistent community presence and effective campaign-craft that the caricatures they’ve been sold are lies. People they know personally are the best messengers.