During the Virginia vote-counting that former Gov. Terry McAuliffe lost Tuesday night to Trump-lite businessman, Republican Glenn Youngkin, Democratic strategist Max Burns noticed something right away:
Sane used to be a given among our leaders. We lampooned lunatic leaders in films such as Dr. Strangelove. We shuddered at tales that President Richard Nixon talked to pictures of past presidents, wept and asked Henry Kissinger to kneel and pray with him as his presidency imploded. We and Pentagon leaders worried that Donald Trump might deploy troops or launch a nuclear strike against someone in a bid to retain power.
Now we have this:
There were QAnon lunatics gathered Tuesday in Dallas to greet the arrival of JFK Jr. (decades dead) who would announce that Donald Trump is president again (or still):
One post from a widely followed QAnon social media account said that after Trump was reinstated as president, he would step down and JFK Jr. would become president. Then former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would be appointed as his vice president and Trump would ultimately become the “king of kings,” according to Newsweek.
They were but a few hundred lunatics in country of 330 million. But this year too, perhaps eight thousand deluded cosplaytriots assaulted and ransacked the U.S. Capitol while hunting members of Congress. They believed a congenital liar’s allegations that the presidential election he lost by 7 million votes was stolen.
Before the press called the election for Youngkin and long before this morning’s pundits published columns, people speculated as to why Virginians chose an untested, Trumpist businessman to lead them. People blamed progressives in Congress; blamed Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema; blamed President Joe Biden for failing to deliver by now on his signature legislation; blamed Democrats (and McAuliffe) for sucking at messaging and not countering Younkin’s Critical Race Theory alarmism over a topic not taught in Virginia schools.
With all due respect to my friends in the messaging business, I’m not clear how better messaging by Democrats fixes this:
Or this:
Or this:
The Christian right has moved on from “name it and claim it” to “own it and rule it.” They are no longer being coy about it. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.
Cliff Schecter speculated how things might have been different if Democrats went on the offensive instead of reacting to Republican messaging:
[What if] “we messaged their allowing kids to die in school/elderly to die in homes of COVID, their Q insanity/Couping, their utter corruption the way they treat imaginary issues like CRT being taught or real issues they bastardize beyond recognition like Benghazi?
“What if we held constant public hearings? Regular state and fed press confs? Constant social media, paid media, earned media. 3 messages, easy to remember, your narrative. Every individual message fitting under one of these 3? Ya know, like you’re taught in basic marketing classes?
“Why is this so hard for so many who’ve done this professionally for so long? Why is it so impossible for us to use FB as they do? Why won’t our funders build a messaging apparatus that can come close to combatting theirs? I don’t have answers.”
There are lots of reasons Democratic funders don’t. Most have to do with reluctance to invest in efforts that don’t produce immediate or short-term results. Conservative money men are the tortoises.
But Josh Holland offered a reason why better messaging itself won’t work. Having a better messaging is one thing. Delivering it to American voters is another. Holland is not the first to point this out:
The Republican Party does not have a messaging apparatus that Democrats don’t. Conservative millionaires and billionaires do. They built it over decades, and they use it relentlessly to infuse the Republican base with an increasingly fascist worldview that Republican leaders then adopt. The tail wags the dog.
In the case of Donald Trump, the relationship was symbiotic between right-wing fringe news outlets, social media platforms, and foreign adversaries intent on dissolving external reality to undermine democracy. But they are delivery vectors Republicans do not own as much as exploit year-round in ways Democratic funders fail to appreciate except during election season. Democrats’ penny-wise and pound-foolish reliance on traditional media to deliver their message (which needs a lot of improvement) leaves them dependent on referees the right has worked for decades to ensure any Democratic message goes first through a both-sides filter. Republicans deliver their messages directly into their followers’ brain stems.