Because Democrats suck so badly at messaging, I joke that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters thinks they can do it better. They want to write the white paper that will remake Democratic politics nationwide, issue it somehow from our little redoubt in Western North Carolina, and expect people at the national level to listen. Hell, those at the top won’t even listen to real experts.
Ask my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio (“Don’t Buy It“). She gets more attention abroad than here, it seems. ASO appeared again with Dan Pfeiffer the other day on Pod Save America and had some advice worth repeating here.
Message discipline begins with the discipline part, so Democrats are at a disadvantage from the get-go. “Low-propensity voters” is negative and out. “High-potential voters” is in. Now repeat. Really. (It’s the little things.)
The small group that attempted the violent overthrow of our country’s government on Jan. 6 are, as James Madison warned, a faction “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” They have been with us since the beginning of the country and remain committed the proposition that all persons are not created equal. This faction is “fundamentally at odds with America” and American ideals, ASO insists.
Labeling that faction authoritarians, says ASO, is unhelpful (as is repeating right-wing frames such as “stolen election”). It grants them power we do not need to hand them. And among those high-potential voters Democrats need to turn out in the next election, research shows that fosters cynicism.
“It’s not that people don’t think our ideas are right,” ASO explains. “It’s that people don’t think our ideas are possible, so why bother?”
In any election, ASO argues, there are actually three candidates. “There’s ours, there’s theirs, and there’s stay-at-home.” And if you want people to turn out and flex their political power, voters have to feel powerful, that the election is a fight that’s winnable and not a lost cause. Authoritarians risks framing our opponents as too imposing to defeat (edited for clarity):
And so, that is why we want to position them, yes, as powerful, yes, as damaging, yes, as destructive, yes, as nefarious, but not as authoritarians. And that also is the reasoning behind this sort of “faction” idea and language, that they are a potent, lying, horrible group of people that have a hold on many, many things — not least of which is the media, especially their own media channels — but this is something that we have vanquished before and it’s something that we can vanquish again.
One of the things … that was most heartening to me personally after the 2020 election was my friends in Australia where I have lived and work and my friends in the UK where I’ve done some work saying to me, “Whoa! Holy shit! Y’all dealt a blow … to fascism at the ballot box.” That has never happened. The only check that we have had in history on fascist forces has been through military action. And my friends’ views from abroad of our election was like a shot in the arm, at least for me. Yeah, we did do that, we did do that, and we can do it again.
How do we talk about voter ID laws, voter suppression and election certification rigging, etc., without convincing people that their votes do not count?
So my answer to that is, we’ve been looking at this for a very long time doing, in some cases, daily research, weekly research, feeling all sorts of different instruments — beginning in October and continuing on now through the insurrection, post-election, up until today. And, basically, what I would say is that the encapsulating value or phrase that keeps popping and rising to the top is freedom. And what I mean by that is that we need to talk about this as an attempt to take away your freedom to vote, an attempt to take the freedoms that Americans of every race, place, wallet-sized walk of life, hold dear and cherish.
And so a message that threads that needle … is that in America we value our freedom. Right now, a handful of lawmakers want to take away our freedom to vote so that they can rule only for the wealthiest few. And then, whatever the ask is … to make the ask framed as a protection of, a preservation of, a continuation of our freedoms. Because what we find is that when we try to talk to people in terms of “democracy”, and “saving our democracy,” or “having a democracy,” or “protecting our democracy”, or whatever, first of all, we run into the challenge of the fact that we’ve never had a democracy. And secondarily, what we find is that democracy is an abstraction. Democracy never bought you dinner. People do not have a tangible feeling about it.
So, what we’ve seen is that we need to make arguments around these anti-voter laws, arguments around these anti-election integrity laws that Republican state legislatures are passing. We need to frame them as them trying to take away your freedom, them trying to silence certain voices, them trying to rule for the already rich. But we can’t let the voting conversation and issue … wander away from what those folks deliver.
This is once again the brownie analogy mentioned in December (repetition):
“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”
Don’t argue your policies in public, ASO insists. Talk about outcomes.
So, what I mean by that is (and here she launches into a pre-tested message), in America we value our freedom, the freedom to raise our voices and to cast our votes so that we can elect leaders who deliver on our priorities — from creating jobs to expanding healthcare, to ensuring rights for all. But today, a handful of lawmakers want to take away those freedoms so they can rule only for the already wealthy and powerful few. By coming together to pass the For The People Act, or by coming together to vote in record numbers (or whatever the ask is), we can ensure that this is a place of freedom where the leaders we elect govern in our name and act in our interests.
We have to [retain the message] about good governance. That this is about the delivery of things that we want, whether that be stimulus checks, whether that be the ability to vote freely and fairly, affordable healthcare etc.
Voters won’t stand in line for policy prescriptions. They will for outcomes. From December again:
Universal health care? Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you. Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.
Right now, my truck is sitting in the driveway with a bad water pump. When it goes into the shop, all I want to know is how much it costs and when it will be ready to drive again. I don’t care about the details. That’s why I hire a mechanic. That’s why (less ideological) voters hire politicians. For the results.