Nationwide and locally
We’ve covered before how Democrats must get better at selling “the brownie,” and at painting “the beautiful tomorrow,” rather than just reciting economic data and touting policies. Even accomplishing the latter is a problem since the media, especially conservative-owned media, does not want to cover that boring stuff.
But this week’s viral Joe Biden’s ad is ” a master class in digital communications,” Dan Pfeiffer believes. On top of leaving an entire omelet on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s face.
Better than that, it delivers what a good digital ad should: virality and a solid message. That’s something Hillary Clinton did not accomplish with this viral tweet:
Virality, engagement, even fun, but no message.
Pfeiffer writes:
Informing the voters about his economic achievements is one of President Biden’s most important strategic objectives; and one of his biggest challenges. The press doesn’t want to cover the past. Stories about the economy do not drive web traffic. The many events the White House and other Democrats have done (touting the CHIPS Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) don’t lead the news or drive conversation online. The video with Marjorie Taylor Greene is the platonic ideal of a piece of political content. It is viral AND communicates a persuasive message at scale.
There is, of course, an element of lightning in a bottle with this video. It is impossible to do something like this all the time. However, Team Biden’s video is still worth studying because it exemplifies success for every person who works in communications.
Communicating a narrative cannot be left to the top of the ticket, and certainly not to policy wonks. And great as it is, Biden’s ad did not really communicate what his policies deliver for people, just offered a tidy recitation of what they are. (Thanks, Marge!)
The larger problem Democrats face nationwide is getting beyond “deliverism” to engendering a feeling that people’s lives have improved and will improve under Democratic control. People can’t eat policies or bar charts. It’s one reason Biden’s numbers are sagging despite good economic reports. Voters don’t feel the impacts yet.
“Just passing good laws and sitting back and waiting for the acclaim is not nearly enough to win electoral victories next time around,” Mike Lux writes this week. “We need good progressive policies, but we also need deeper organizing, better storytelling, more innovative ways of getting the story out, and a long-term vision of a better society for working families.”
That’s where barrier to entry is a problem:
Our Factory Towns work showed that one of the biggest problems Democrats and progressives face in telling their story is the lack of pathways available for getting information out to people. Working-class voters don’t trust national media sources, which they describe as deeply biased and totally profit-driven “corporate media.” Meanwhile, local newspapers are laying off reporters or closing down altogether. And three far-right-wing media companies—Sinclair, Gray Media, and Nexstar—now own 50 percent of local TV stations. The online right-wing disinformation machine is a powerful barrier as well. Democrats and progressives desperately need to invest in media and in innovative organizing and messaging techniques targeted to working-class voters.
One of the most important things we have to do is the kind of organizing that builds community. Working-class voters, especially those living outside metro areas, feel abandoned, isolated, and forgotten. More than half of them, according to one poll we ran, report that they or a close family member have experienced job loss, retirement savings loss, or an addiction or other mental health problem. Their communities are fraying, and in the era of Trump every political conversation seems angry. They want to have places, whether in-person events or online communities, where they can rebuild the ties that bind, where they can rediscover that sense of the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. We can’t just be talking politics and policy with folks: We need to be talking with them about their lives and well-being.
A friend wrote this week about a nacent effort to reach more rural communities where corporate media don’t have the reach they do in more urban areas. If it gets off the ground, that’s one way to break the stranglehold right-wing talk has in small towns.
It’s needed. Because policies don’t arrive fully formed. Telling people about them is one thing. Feeling their impact is another. Good story telling can help accomplish both, by drawing attention to impacts voters may eventually feel but not notice.
Lux concludes:
Over the long run, a decade of fully flowered Bidenomics—where we build on the good things that were passed in 2021-22 and add important components like child care, affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, and a permanent expanded child tax credit—gives us an opportunity to change the dynamics. If we combine these policies with deep organizing, good storytelling, and innovative ways of delivering the story, we will have real potential to break loose big chunks of working-class voters. Democrats could start to consistently compete again in states like Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and more of the South, as well as winning in more of rural America.
Our country in recent years has been on the verge of breaking. Trump accelerated that danger but did not start it. The cracks in our democracy were driven in part by ever-increasing right-wing extremism, but also by the reality that too many leading Democrats over the past 40 years bought into the myth of trickle-down and catered to wealthy donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
But this is not an impossible dream. We can build a more beautiful and prosperous country based on the ideas that people should have dignity and agency at work, that small businesses and consumers can thrive if they are protected from the rapaciousness of monopolistic corporations, and that the economy’s goal should be for everyone to have the freedom to build the lives they want to have. An America where progressive policy wins make a better life possible for most people will restore our democracy for the long term, and make the Democratic Party the party of working people again.