Some of us have been complaining about this for years. Alex Pareen explains at The New Republic why our molars are ground to nubs.
Americans do not know what the Democratic Party stands for.
Two recent post-election analyses attempt to get at a solution. But really, says Pareene, “they are also both really designed to absolve some people, and blame others, for Democratic failures.” Where they agree: both recognize that the party fails to define itself for voters. Republicans do that for them.
The Republican Party does not control the conservative propaganda network that keeps it relevent despite the party’s failures. Conservative media drives the party. But the two are at least symbiotic. Democrats rely on an outdated model of staging events and votes designed to get corporate mainstream media to tell their story for them for free (“earned media”). It is a strategy, Pareene suggests, that dates to when there were only three network news outlets. But after decades of the right “working the refs,” the media’s framing of Democratic narratives often goes sideways.
It doesn’t have to stay that way:
Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter “conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists” with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, “people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads,” and that “higher doses of party-promoting ads” could influence people’s voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. “Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior,” the political scientists wrote. “By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.”
Pareene explains, “These political scientists independently invented party propaganda, exposed Americans to it, and discovered that it can be effective, especially with constant exposure. Conservatives don’t need to learn to do this: It’s how their movement sustains itself.” Democrats may not need their own propaganda network, but they do need to reformat how they communicate with voters.
Political ad agencies Coppock, Green, and Porter contacted were “flummoxed by the request” to create ads promoting the Democratic Party. They’d never been asked. Their stock-in-trade is campaign ads for particular elections and particular candidates. Those are funded, I’d note, by those campaigns or by party campaign arms whose funding swells and retreats with campaign season. Democratic voters’ interest attaches more to candidates than to the party itself. Democrats do not have sustained year-in and year-out messaging in part because they do not have consistent yearly cash flows. Plus, there is no The Democratic Party to buy the ads.
Pareene concludes:
So are Democrats (and their benefactors) simply too blinkered to see the benefit of making a huge investment in propaganda for their own party? It is probably not that simple; if powerful people are refusing to do something that would seem to benefit them, they probably do have good reasons for it. One is that their benefactors might prefer to underwrite propaganda that broadly supports liberal capitalism rather than specifically progressivism. Another is that relying on a news media disconnected from the institutional party or progressive movement gives Democratic leaders a referee to complain about, to point at to justify their compromises, and to hold up as a reason to police their own side rigorously for any hint of left-wing excess. We might someday see some neutered version of the idea—something like the ad campaigns recommended by the political scientists—but for the time being, Democrats still seem quite invested in their often toxic relationship with the corporate media.
But Democrats’ messaging failures involve more than institutional inertia. I call it the campaign-industrial complex (CIC). A lot of people’s incomes depend on campaign spending and on the “dues” members of Congress contribute to the House and Senate campaign arms, the DCCC and DSCC respectively. The CIC considers good fundraisers the best candidates for that reason, almost regardless of other political skills. Winning is less of a goal than keeping the revenues flowing to the “fraternity-like network of former staffers who move from public service into the private campaign industry and back.”
Why do Democrats suck at messaging? That’s why.
A playwright/comedy writer friend shakes his head at how the CIC leaves so much professional story-telling talent lying around unused. The Writers Guild is filled with left-leaning people who make their living telling compelling stories in 30 seconds or 30 minutes. They’re just waiting to be asked to deploy their talents in service to the greater good. But their phones are not inside the Beltway and do not ring. Another exasperated friend writes, “Hire a goddamn ad agency that sells vodka and soap” to sell our ideas. But the fraternity of former Hill staffers, having spent time in D.C., believe they are uniquely qualified to write campaign ads for which so much campaign cash is spent.
They are like tight-assed Lt. Steven Hauk (Bruno Kirby) in “Good Morning Vietnam.”
(h/t DJ)