Dems Don't Have a "Messaging Problem"
They have a delivery problem
Every time Democrats get their asses handed to them in an election, the postmortem analysis always includes volumes of nonsense about “messaging.” It’s become a kind of code word or secret handshake for lefty pundits who want to sound legitimate – if any of them run out of things to say, they pound the desk and shout about how democrats need better messaging.
It reminds me of the days when I used to roam the halls of Ohio University, occasionally challenging my colleagues to define “critical thinking.” Everyone had an answer, but none of those answers ever shared language with any of the others, so we had no shared understanding of the concept itself. We still don’t. The same is true of Democrats and their “messaging” issues – it’s more about pundits elevating themselves than it is about actually solving a known and fixable problem.
For example, recently, after his election as DNC Vice Chair, David Hogg suggested that “We need to be a tsunami of content” if we want to counteract the onslaught of right-wing propaganda put out by Trump and his minions. And he’s not wrong, but his plan has a glaring and certainly fatal flaw.
That “tsunami” should it ever become real, will never reach the people Dems need it to reach. The wave will only touch those who already agree with and already vote for democrats. It will motivate for sure, but it will not persuade, not because it can’t, but because the folks who need to be persuaded simply aren’t in any of the places where the left delivers content.
With a very limited number of exceptions, Trump voters get their information exclusively from right-wing media, and while centrist and left-friendly media cordially invites right-wing talking heads onto their air, the right walls off dissenting opinions completely, and effectively. The hard right gets to talk to the left’s voters all the time, yet democrats never, ever, ever speak to the right’s audience. And it’s been this way for over 50 years.
It's simple. Democrats fund candidates. Republicans build infrastructure. The GOP way is better, and they have been winning over the American public little by little for generations while the left’s messaging machine consists mostly of underfunded self-aggrandizing “content creators” whining about what the “bad orange man” did yesterday. That’s not a jab at content creators. It’s a jab at the communications people directing them.
Almost every messaging priority on the left is short-term, click oriented and reactionary, which makes their defeat not only certain, but mind-numbingly frustrating. Meanwhile, the GOP is building communication infrastructure in working-class neighborhoods all over America, using the tried-and-true formula of time and repetition to bury the opposition while democrats double and triple down on an audience that can’t get much bigger because few if any new people are hearing the message.
The evidence is everywhere. For example, progressive economic policies like Medicare for All, wage increases, unionization, antitrust reform, even student loan forgiveness are massively popular. But progressives themselves are incredibly unpopular everywhere except in a few key areas. And even though every major economic tragedy of the last century happened with the GOP in power, Republicans are widely considered to be better on economic issues. This massive gap between reality and how the public sees reality is a product of pure right-wing hustle. They outspend democrats, and they outwork democrats, and the public listens to them because of it.
For example, media types, especially those on the left, mocked the GOP for setting up campaign offices in black neighborhoods, only to see the same GOP move the needle with black men cycle after cycle. Once again, democrats took voters for granted, stopped talking to them, and the GOP hustled and scooped them up.
There’s no rule that says the left can’t make the same investments in working-class factory towns all over America – the towns that lost those factories to corporate greed, the towns that were once the very heart of the American Dream, but are now awash in poverty, joblessness, and opioids. These towns are the GOP base, and they’re struggling more than ever today because of the very people they always vote for. And today, every one of those towns has a corporate controlled Rush Limbaugh clone on the air, and no one competing with him.
Long-term investment in local media by, for, and in service of working-class voters. That’s what is needed, and without it, we are only talking to ourselves.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.