There’s only so much you can do. And so much that needs to be done. And so many activists focused on too few things.
That’s why I work on teaching get-out-the-vote (GOTV) mechanics and logistics, particularly in under-resourced, red places Democrats generally ignore because, out there, they get their butts kicked. (Chicken or egg?) No one else wants the job. It’s not sexy. It’s not cutting-edge. There’s no money in it. There’s no promising career path for budding, young activists dreaming of a White House job. It’s not popular.
The upside, I joke, is that makes me, like the late Professor Irwin Corey, the nation’s foremost authority. I’ve practically got the field to myself.
Something Dan Pfeiffer writes this morning in his Substack got me thinking about this. HIs topic is discussion sparked by Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation with strategist David Shor about mistakes of the Clinton era, the bleeding of minority support, and advocating “popularism,” essentially, Democrats not talking much about what’s unpopular. (I wrote about Klein’s interview on Friday.) Jamelle Bouie replied, also in the Times, that Shor is more diagnosis than prescription. “Perhaps there is a way to stop the bleeding with non-college whites and Hispanics without pandering to the worst forms of racial conservatism,” Bouie wrote, but if popularism is not the “Third Way” of Bill Clinton, “then they should say what it is.”
Pfeiffer summarizes Schor’s theory of popularism:
- The movement of working-class voters towards the Republican Party puts Democrats at a massive disadvantage in the Senate and Electoral College. According to Shor’s analytic model, if the Democratic presidential nominee wins 51 percent of the vote in 2024, Democrats will lose seven Senate seats. A hole like that could take us a decade or more to climb out of.
- The salience of immigration, race, “wokeness,” and other cultural issues pushed many of these voters into the Republican Party. The Democratic problem is about more than working-class White voters. According to Shor, Defund the Police caused some working-class Black and Latino voters to support Trump in 2020.
- There is a massive disconnect between the largely progressive, young, very online donors, activists, and operatives that dominate the party and the voters we need to win.
- To address this challenge, Democrats must talk about popular things and stop talking about unpopular things. In practice, this means more populist economic issues and less race and immigration.
- The model to follow is Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, which relentlessly focused on the economy and ran up huge margins with Black and Latino voters and persuaded enough white working-class voters to get the job done.
Shor may be right, at face value, says Pfeiffer. “Talking about popular things more and unpopular things less is a good idea,” whatever popular means. The problem is not that Democrats are not saying popular things. The problem is voters are not hearing them:
First, the Right-Wing media ecosystem, defined by Fox and powered by Facebook, consistently drowns out Democratic messaging. The Right-Wing defines the four corners of the political conversation. There are fair critiques of the messaging decisions of Hillary Clinton’s 2020 campaign, but I do not think it was possible for them to center the entire election around the economy — as Obama did in 2012 — with Donald Trump making outrageous racist statements about immigrants. Outrage-inducing cultural issues — especially ones that touch on identity — drive online traffic and cable ratings. Facebook traffic is a major economic driver for most media outlets. If a topic gains traction via the Facebook algorithm, the press will give it even more coverage. In the past, what led the news trended online, but now the opposite is true. The tail is wagging the dog.
The second problem is this: while Republicans spent decades building a massive media operation to deliver their messaging directly to their voters, Democrats continue to rely on the traditional media as the primary means of distribution. This is a real problem as David Roberts, the author of the Volts newsletter, pointed out on Twitter:
The mainstream media with or without Bothsidesism spins Democrats’ message. The party’s reliance on traditional media is the problem. Meanwhile, the right (not the Republican Party, per se; here I disagree with Pfeiffer) has assembled a massive infrastructure devoted to spreading and relentlessly repeating its message.
Democrats are talking about the popular details of Biden’s plan, but the messaging is not reaching the people we need it to reach because the people carrying the message do not share our interests. This was the problem in 2016. It was the problem in 2020. It will be the problem until the Democratic Party, its donors, politicians, and activists commit to building a progressive media infrastructure to compete with the massive MAGA megaphone dominating politics.
Pfeiffer does not have a real prescription, either. But for all the edge Democrats once had in campaign tech, they are behind the times in communications. Partly, that’s lack of right-fringe billionaires, but partly just being stuck in the past. Which is why I have my field to myself.
Underlying much of Democrats’ training is an outdated precinct-focus. “Precinct organization is the foundation of the party” is rote catechism from an age in which elections were a one-day, 14-hour marathon. Yes, precincts still play an important role in party organization and in election administration. But the days when precinct captains were vital to turning out the vote on Election Day are long gone. Most states today have some form of early voting. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the vote is already cast by Election Day and at early voting sites not confined to individual precinct captains’ turf.
Turning out the early vote, recruiting, scheduling, supplying and training electioneers for every hour of early voting countywide does not fall under precinct organization. Yet, precinct-based voter turnout remains the assumption underlying Democrats’ training programs. There is none for county leaders whose charge it is now to do everything I just listed. The other faulty assumption is that by the time someone is in charge of running a county committee, they’ve picked up all that by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. Bad assumption.
I get the message focus, and the pitfalls Pfeiffer mentions. But depending so much on message is like taking your sports visualization training to the Olympics and expecting to be competitive when you arrive with no conditioning and no skills. Execution matters, especially out in places where the big campaigns don’t go.
Training in GOTV mechanics and logistics is not sexy, but before activists become foremost authorities on messaging, they might first want to learn how to put their pants on one leg at a time and to tie their shoelaces. Preferably, in that order.