On Democrats freshening up the brand
Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so.
Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long.
Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through?
Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course. He admits to twisting the definition for didactic purposes:
Trump, twice now, has demonstrated the importance of choosing a compelling character as your party’s nominee. Yes, the substance of what that nominee is selling matters. But being able to generate attention in an ever-more-fragmented media world and reaching the crucial, growing population of low-information voters matters more all the time. That’s something Trump, a 78-year-old creature of old media, grasped in 2024.
But Democrats typically are more interested in governing and making the world a better place for people. They’re less focused on the show. Trump’s emphasis on showmanship represents a kind of “genius,” says Ashley Etienne, a sometime a top communications aide top-tier Democrats. Savants often do one thing spectacularly well.
Smith proposes New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Democrat who fits the bill:
Inside-the-Beltway types tend to dismiss her as having peaked in 2020. But Ocasio-Cortez, more than any other young Democrat right now, is a brand. She has a gift for social media, with more than 8 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on TikTok, and a talent for generating polarizing reactions. The second quality is highly useful in the current and foreseeable information age. David Hogg, the anti-gun-violence activist, recently posted a smart take on the importance of Democrats having a facility for direct-to-camera online video. Hogg’s prime example, 26-year-old Brooklyn city council member Chi Ossé, won’t be old enough to run for the White House in 2028, but Ossé has clearly learned from AOC. Sure, Republicans would vilify Ocasio-Cortez as a radical lefty, but they do that to all Democratic presidential candidates anyway, including Harris, who was solidly centrist. And maybe it’s time for the Democrats to lean into the party’s liberal base; eagerly embracing Liz Cheney in pursuit of moderate Republicans sure didn’t work.
A friend who’s written for Hollywood has for years rent his garments over Democrats relying on chummy, inside-the-Beltway consultants for messaging rather than people who tell compelling stories for a living. Smith consults Billy Ray, the talent behind the Hunger Games script. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned an Oscar nomination:
“Stop any American on the street and say, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’ The only answer you can come up with is, ‘They are the party that hates Trump,’” Ray says. “That is a failure of storytelling.”
But Democrats need more than a left version of Trump or better storytelling to build brand identity. There’s that nagging trees-and-forests problem.
Mike Lux believes the next Democratic National Committee chair needs a way to win back the two-thirds of the electorate with blue collars. Lux recommends several excellent structural reforms that might help with that, but leads with addressing the party’s “Jupiter-sized” media problem:
But the biggest reason by far that voters didn’t know about our accomplishments is the utterly ravaged media landscape outside of the biggest cities. Newspapers are gone or are shells of their former selves. Local radio stations are gone or part of big media conglomerates that don’t cover the news much. Half of local TV stations are owned by far right media companies like Sinclair.
Meanwhile, more and more people are getting most of their news through social media, which is awash in rightwing disinformation.
This Jupiter-sized problem will not be solved overnight, and can’t be solved by the DNC alone. Democratic investors should be buying up media properties so that rightwingers don’t own such a high percentage of them …
But there is plenty the DNC can and should be doing in the media space beyond buying ads two months before Election Day. The new DNC Chair should appoint a task force and give it some serious money to build a media strategy that reflects the modern media era. The Chair should be pulling key Democrats together to get them to invest in some of these other efforts.
That’s a fine idea, if not an original one. Progressives have advocated for left-leaning billionaires to jump headfirst into the media pool for decades. But the deepest pocketed won’t commit to that long-term investment the way a Rupert Murdoch will, nor the way right-wing ideologues of the Koch variety fund think tanks that manufacture talking points like widgets for their media allies to traffick.
If there are among the wannabe DNC chairs a candidate with the gravitas to persuade left-leaning billionaires to do that, please! But the rotating DNC chair has no more ability to finagle left-wing billionaires into undertaking the purchase of major media outlets for a decades-long branding project than RNC chairs did. The most party heads can do is ask pretty please.
Plus, lefties’ fondness for novelty means getting them to get on and stay on the same page, message-wise is their Achilles heel. The left first must craft a message the party faithful will repeat and persuade them to sing it together long enough for it to lodge in voters’ brains. But without a delivery system for that, it’s another tree falling in the forest. President Biden accomplished more for working-class Americans in his four years than perhaps any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Voters heard little about it.
Robert Kuttner profiles the two DNC chair front-runners, “Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party.” Kuttner writes, “If ever there were a moment for both a strong Democratic Party and a compelling face of the party, it’s now.”
Which takes us back to screenwriter Ray’s free advice for what Democrats’ storytelling ought to be:
“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”
That’s a terrific start on a message. Finding a riveting messenger—someone who can stir passion in millions of voters as Trump has, only for good instead of evil—will be a little trickier.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
