Every other new activist in Democratic politics wants to be assigned to messaging. Democrats suck at it and they believe they can do better. They are going to write the white paper that will rescue Democrats from themselves and somehow get national-level politicians who have never heard of them to take their amateur advice. Even the pros have trouble getting Democrats to listen. Getting them all on the same page is even more of a challenge.
Belief that the right message can cure Democrats’ popularity dips is widespread among people who do politics largely in their heads. Not long ago, messaging trainings based on the hero’s journey were in vogue. We are always looking for shortcuts for replicating the messaging monster the right built for itself over decades. And for short-circuiting nationalism.
Pod Save America‘s, Dan Pfeiffer spoke with Vox’s Sean Illing about why good messaging won’t save them. People are covid-weary. Normal seems elusive. We underestimated the political impact of inflation (remember the toll it took on Jimmy Carter?). The media would rather focus in Democratic infighting than on explosive economic growth.
Democrats are behind the curve if they think mainstream nedia is going to carry a mesasage for them (on the cheap), says Pfeiffer. They still believe good policy (and truth), “popular stuff,” speaks for itself. They believe that what they support helps the working class is self-evident, that they don’t need to invest in advertising it. “I mean, Biden mailed money to people and his approval rating didn’t move,” Pfeiffer says.
Republicans have no policy. They campaign on race and identity.
Pfeiffer in several places makes the common mistake of identifying the messaging colossus as a Republican Party effort rather than a project of the allied-right:
Sean Illing
Given everything we’ve said, do you think Democrats can message their way out of this problem?
Dan Pfeiffer
You can win an election in this environment. Like I said, we’ve done it before, we can do it again. But we need everything to go our way. In the long run or even in the medium term, the only real answer here is to build up a progressive media and a messaging operation that can compete with the right-wing one.
People have been screaming about this for a long time. It has to happen. There have been some good recent efforts. I’m proud to be a part of what Crooked Media has been doing for the last few years. But there is still not a commitment from the top of the party, or the party’s donor base, to solving this problem.
Sean Illing
Help me understand how that’s possible. You’re in this world, you’re having conversations with donors and party leaders. How is this message not getting through? How do they not see the need for action on this front?
Dan Pfeiffer
There are a couple issues. One is generational. There’s a younger set of Democrats who are much savvier about this and more focused on it. This is the consequence of having a party leadership that is much older. You have people who started their careers in the golden age of television, decades before the internet was invented, and it’s not easy to get them to adjust to a new model.
The other thing is, I think we’ve spent too much time demonizing Fox News for its propaganda. There’s this visceral reaction from a lot of people in our donor community. They don’t want to be labeled propagandists in that way. Which is why you see Democratic billionaires buying the Atlantic and Time magazine and not trying to build a non-racist, more honest, better version of Breitbart, or a Democratic Fox News, or whatever that would look like.
Some of that is because Democratic progressive talk radio in the early part of the century, with Air America, didn’t really work. For a certain set of donors, that was a formative experience. The key difference is that Republican donors view their media operations more as political investments than as profit engines. Pick a digital right-wing outlet that started in the last 10 years and there’s a Republican billionaire behind it.
They are willing to lose money for years before those investments pay off.
But the “younger set” is so enamored of the latest tech that they focus on data rather than on people. Each election there is a new technological advance activists believe will give them an edge rather than putting enough energy and funding behind retail politics and lasting infrastructure that has time to grow and mature. Republican billionaires invest for the long term and don’t mind remaining in the shadows. Progressive ones want flash and accolades now.
Pfeiffer cautions Democrats not to take the wrong message from their loss in the Virginia governor’s race. The Gavin Newsom recall election in California might hold a better lesson:
What I took from that is that we shouldn’t call whatever candidate they put forward another Trump, but we should frame the Republicans as Trumpists. We should say that they are part of this dangerous movement that brought this coalition together to take the House, the Senate, and the White House.
Seriously. But it’s more than that. The Republican Party under Trumpism looks to turn the United States into something antithetical to Americans’ prized sense of themselves. Two short decades ago, the George W. Bush adminstration told itself and the world the goal of it’s military adventurism was to seed democracy in the Middle East, to make the region more like us. Everybody wants to be more like us, we tell ourselves.
Or we did. Trump wants to turn the supposed beacon of liberty into Hungary, Turkey, Brazil or Russia. He wants to make us more like them.
Is that really what Americans want? Message that.