In other words, if democrats would simply get their messaging from the non-whites they profess to want to help, rather than from extremely wealthy, white, female, suburban, college-educated, radical progressives, they could implement effective policy rather than virtue-signaling to alleviate the upper-class status anxiety of the champagne liberal set.
"Fetterman’s version of this nods a bit more to the left by mentioning oversight and accountability, but is also even more straightforwardly tough on crime than Cortez Masto’s. He talks generically about violent crime instead of centering more feminist concerns like sex trafficking and sexual assault."
Sex trafficking is also an issue that gets a lot of attention in some conservative religious communities. Talking about sex trafficking may be a way for some Democratic politicians to signal to certain types of religious voters that "I share some of your values related to human sexuality and the fact that I support (abortion, LBQTQ rights, etc.) doesn't mean I have a completely 'everything goes' attitude towards sexuality and I do think some kinds of sexual behavior are completely unacceptable and wrong." Not going to make a difference for hard core religious conservatives, but may be helpful with some audiences who hold more conservative views on sexuality but find other aspects of Democratic messages appealing (or are totally freaked out by wacko candidates, including the sexual improprieties of some candidates, eg Trump, Walker, that Republicans have fielded lately).
theoretically i get the police for america idea, but i think the issue that prevents people from becoming cops isn’t bad vibes as much as like…you can get other jobs that have less (perceived) risk of dying/bodily harm?
Also - have you every watched what police have to do? My idea of a fun Friday night is not busting up a fight between drunks or getting involved in a domestic dispute.
I would be interested in identifying a very specific type of Democratic candidate who overperformed partisanship in the 2022 election, specifically:
- Non-incumbent. Incumbency matters a lot for being able to define a message of success and raise money.
- Non-politically established. Manchin already had a reputation as Governor. Tim Ryan was already a Congressman. Other examples Matt has used over the years like Steve Bullock were also established.
Especially in some areas without a Democratic bench, you've got to do what you can with the candidates willing to run.
"The point is that just being a Democrat who says loud and clear “I think it’s good when the cops arrest criminals” actually moves the needle meaningfully because people’s baseline impression of Democrats on crime has become so bad."
The quotes from the study do not explicitly say that arresting criminals is good. This means that the optimal rhetorical path is wide enough to accommodate those who believe that there are good ways of using police to fight crime that do not resort to arresting people and putting them in cages for long periods of time.
Arresting people does not mean putting them in cages for long periods of time! It might just mean dragging them to jail overnight and then releasing them the next morning.
Asking 77,197 registered voters what political message works best for them is like asking 77,197 people who tune in to watch the Super Bowl but are otherwise totally uninterested in football questions like, "Is a ball control approach or a wide-open fling it down the field offense more likely to win the Super Bowl?" You'll probably get answers, but it's a fool's errand to dig too deep into them for what they mean. (What they may actually mean to the person may just be: ball control means the damn game will end sooner, or hey I really like scoring so yeah fling it.)
My theory of American politics is that absent a true emergency, the median voter doesn't want the government to do much at all. That's why they like bland, safe messages whose meaning really is "I won't upset the status quo." That's why they like modest/moderate Republican governors in blue states with blue legislatures -- not much will get done! That's why they tend to see activists from both parties as similarly radical, whether it's throw the healthcare system away and replace it with Medicare for All, or Stop the Steal by overturning elections. Both are scary.
Democrats did pretty well in the midterms because they came off as sensible, moderate and not prone to rocking the boat. The Republicans . . . not so much.
Is there a substantive reason we actually moved beyond hippie-punching? I was thinking about how, if the Defund the Police movement had happened while Bill Clinton was president, how he would have handled it. He would have found a city with a black police chief and jetted out there, then immediately held a press conference with the chief talking about all the hard work most cops do and X bill or executive order he can claim credit for helping fund police, and he would have had some kind of stern, disappointed lecture that certain activists don't appreciate all the hard work police do for marginalized communities.
Follow it up with a sop about improving training and community policing and partnerships with local community groups or something, and then he jets back to Washington. And the whole "democrats want to defund the police" idea would be much weaker in the minds of median voters, even though Fox news would still be pushing this narrative.
I feel like almost all democratic politicians today don't push crazy progressive ideas, BUT the groups push them pretty loudly to their friends who are journalists, who publish articles in the media about how great it will be when Democrats enact these huge changes, and then median voters think most democratic politicians support these progressive ideas because moderate democrats don't go out of their way to publicly push back.
I think this underestimates the impact that staff has on a campaign/administration. Biden historically was supportive of the Hyde amendment, but had to switch on this in 2020 because of pressure from his own staff who found this unacceptable. Similarly, if the majority of your staff is very "hippie" then they are going to feel like you are hitting them when you do "hippie-punching."
You make a good point. A third of those hippies or activists are your own staff, another third are journalists, and the remainder are the ones who went to work for a nonprofit group and network with your staff and journalists on social media constantly about how they have to stay true to the progressive vision they all had in college. Getting your staff member to write up a speech basically slamming themselves, and then having their buddies report on it in any way that doesn't make you look bad, is pretty difficult these days.
But I'm not sure of the answer then. It's not enough for politicians to be silent when the groups make huge demands, especially when those demands are widely circulated in the media. Normies are going to assume that whatever Democrats say, they will enact some radical agenda if given power as long as they refuse to condemn said agenda as "radical." That was the entire point, historically, of hippie punching, and it worked.
This sounds good - very much an economic argument - but completely ignores the political realities. How strict a police dept can be about discipline is not about economics but about the enormous power of hard-core police unions which back even obviously abusers and laws and policies that are designed to protect cops from consequences and make it difficult to fire them. Do better Matt!
"How strict a department can be about discipline is, at the end of the day, largely a function of how hard it is to replace officers. In any workplace, if vacancies are very hard to fill, you’re going to be reluctant to let anyone go, you’re going to be sad to see anyone quit, and you’re going to have a relatively low bar in terms of the mid-career people you’re willing to employ. "
I think the counterargument would be that the spicy takes are constructively more effective, even if no particular spicy take is.
After all, the spicy non-persuadables had to be persuaded at some point and, given their spiciness, those spicy messages must have turned them from maybe-Democrats to always-Democrats (or, at least, never-Republicans).
It wouldn't hurt to take a swipe at someone who really does say something objectively bad (not of course just some silly rhetorical flourish) and unpopular.
Cortez Masto knew who her voters were and what messages they needed to hear. The DNC could really learn from bot her and John Fetterman's campaigns and refine how they do things.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't think the message "I will work with law enforcement to make our community safe" is blah or boring. I hate to throw the p-word around, but I think you have to be pretty privileged to think that law enforcement/safe communities are "blah." If you live in a high-crime neighborhood, you sure as heck don't think that effective law enforcement is boring.
All of them seem like Democratic positions (in a commons sense world)
All of them also seem like Republican positions (in a common sense world)… except possibly the Medicare billing one… buts it’s a stretch.
Instead…. Let’s take the opposite position… and see what happens.
#1. I worked to defund the police. Police have to many resources. We need to downsize them.
#2. The economy isn’t a big deal. Skills training is a waste of money. Big businesses are better.
#3. Exporting jobs to China is good. These are jobs we don’t want. We need to increase globalization.
#4. Our healthcare insurance system is good like it is. We need to let insurance companies operate. We should let drug companies use the market.
Out of all of these counter positions… only #4 would clearly be associated with Republicans
#1 would be associated with the hard left and more likely to be associated with Democrats.
#2 is nonsensical. Except for the non-skills training thing could be read as college for everyone which is sort of an intellectual look down on blue collar position which is how people perceive Universities types.
#3 is mostly nonsensical. I think the globalization thing might be slightly leftish but also big business like. So it’s a wash.
Isn't the opposite take on #3 more like, "lowering cost of living is good, lower the cost of goods, even if they're made elsewhere. " Or "improving world production is good, all countries deserve to be able to compete in the world market".
For almost every policy there is an "opposite" that isn't necessarily an opposite but emphasizes different values.
Democrat voters care about crime and equality. 'defund the police emphasizes one of those at the expense of the other". These nornie messages emphasize the more popular one without throwing the other under the bus.
In other words, if democrats would simply get their messaging from the non-whites they profess to want to help, rather than from extremely wealthy, white, female, suburban, college-educated, radical progressives, they could implement effective policy rather than virtue-signaling to alleviate the upper-class status anxiety of the champagne liberal set.
"Fetterman’s version of this nods a bit more to the left by mentioning oversight and accountability, but is also even more straightforwardly tough on crime than Cortez Masto’s. He talks generically about violent crime instead of centering more feminist concerns like sex trafficking and sexual assault."
Sex trafficking is also an issue that gets a lot of attention in some conservative religious communities. Talking about sex trafficking may be a way for some Democratic politicians to signal to certain types of religious voters that "I share some of your values related to human sexuality and the fact that I support (abortion, LBQTQ rights, etc.) doesn't mean I have a completely 'everything goes' attitude towards sexuality and I do think some kinds of sexual behavior are completely unacceptable and wrong." Not going to make a difference for hard core religious conservatives, but may be helpful with some audiences who hold more conservative views on sexuality but find other aspects of Democratic messages appealing (or are totally freaked out by wacko candidates, including the sexual improprieties of some candidates, eg Trump, Walker, that Republicans have fielded lately).
theoretically i get the police for america idea, but i think the issue that prevents people from becoming cops isn’t bad vibes as much as like…you can get other jobs that have less (perceived) risk of dying/bodily harm?
Also - have you every watched what police have to do? My idea of a fun Friday night is not busting up a fight between drunks or getting involved in a domestic dispute.
“Democrats needed either to win more Senate races in 2020 or more House races in 2022 (or both)”. Is this post from 3 years ago ?
I would be interested in identifying a very specific type of Democratic candidate who overperformed partisanship in the 2022 election, specifically:
- Non-incumbent. Incumbency matters a lot for being able to define a message of success and raise money.
- Non-politically established. Manchin already had a reputation as Governor. Tim Ryan was already a Congressman. Other examples Matt has used over the years like Steve Bullock were also established.
Especially in some areas without a Democratic bench, you've got to do what you can with the candidates willing to run.
"The point is that just being a Democrat who says loud and clear “I think it’s good when the cops arrest criminals” actually moves the needle meaningfully because people’s baseline impression of Democrats on crime has become so bad."
The quotes from the study do not explicitly say that arresting criminals is good. This means that the optimal rhetorical path is wide enough to accommodate those who believe that there are good ways of using police to fight crime that do not resort to arresting people and putting them in cages for long periods of time.
Arresting people does not mean putting them in cages for long periods of time! It might just mean dragging them to jail overnight and then releasing them the next morning.
Asking 77,197 registered voters what political message works best for them is like asking 77,197 people who tune in to watch the Super Bowl but are otherwise totally uninterested in football questions like, "Is a ball control approach or a wide-open fling it down the field offense more likely to win the Super Bowl?" You'll probably get answers, but it's a fool's errand to dig too deep into them for what they mean. (What they may actually mean to the person may just be: ball control means the damn game will end sooner, or hey I really like scoring so yeah fling it.)
My theory of American politics is that absent a true emergency, the median voter doesn't want the government to do much at all. That's why they like bland, safe messages whose meaning really is "I won't upset the status quo." That's why they like modest/moderate Republican governors in blue states with blue legislatures -- not much will get done! That's why they tend to see activists from both parties as similarly radical, whether it's throw the healthcare system away and replace it with Medicare for All, or Stop the Steal by overturning elections. Both are scary.
Democrats did pretty well in the midterms because they came off as sensible, moderate and not prone to rocking the boat. The Republicans . . . not so much.
Is there a substantive reason we actually moved beyond hippie-punching? I was thinking about how, if the Defund the Police movement had happened while Bill Clinton was president, how he would have handled it. He would have found a city with a black police chief and jetted out there, then immediately held a press conference with the chief talking about all the hard work most cops do and X bill or executive order he can claim credit for helping fund police, and he would have had some kind of stern, disappointed lecture that certain activists don't appreciate all the hard work police do for marginalized communities.
Follow it up with a sop about improving training and community policing and partnerships with local community groups or something, and then he jets back to Washington. And the whole "democrats want to defund the police" idea would be much weaker in the minds of median voters, even though Fox news would still be pushing this narrative.
I feel like almost all democratic politicians today don't push crazy progressive ideas, BUT the groups push them pretty loudly to their friends who are journalists, who publish articles in the media about how great it will be when Democrats enact these huge changes, and then median voters think most democratic politicians support these progressive ideas because moderate democrats don't go out of their way to publicly push back.
I think this underestimates the impact that staff has on a campaign/administration. Biden historically was supportive of the Hyde amendment, but had to switch on this in 2020 because of pressure from his own staff who found this unacceptable. Similarly, if the majority of your staff is very "hippie" then they are going to feel like you are hitting them when you do "hippie-punching."
You make a good point. A third of those hippies or activists are your own staff, another third are journalists, and the remainder are the ones who went to work for a nonprofit group and network with your staff and journalists on social media constantly about how they have to stay true to the progressive vision they all had in college. Getting your staff member to write up a speech basically slamming themselves, and then having their buddies report on it in any way that doesn't make you look bad, is pretty difficult these days.
But I'm not sure of the answer then. It's not enough for politicians to be silent when the groups make huge demands, especially when those demands are widely circulated in the media. Normies are going to assume that whatever Democrats say, they will enact some radical agenda if given power as long as they refuse to condemn said agenda as "radical." That was the entire point, historically, of hippie punching, and it worked.
This sounds good - very much an economic argument - but completely ignores the political realities. How strict a police dept can be about discipline is not about economics but about the enormous power of hard-core police unions which back even obviously abusers and laws and policies that are designed to protect cops from consequences and make it difficult to fire them. Do better Matt!
"How strict a department can be about discipline is, at the end of the day, largely a function of how hard it is to replace officers. In any workplace, if vacancies are very hard to fill, you’re going to be reluctant to let anyone go, you’re going to be sad to see anyone quit, and you’re going to have a relatively low bar in terms of the mid-career people you’re willing to employ. "
I think the counterargument would be that the spicy takes are constructively more effective, even if no particular spicy take is.
After all, the spicy non-persuadables had to be persuaded at some point and, given their spiciness, those spicy messages must have turned them from maybe-Democrats to always-Democrats (or, at least, never-Republicans).
It wouldn't hurt to take a swipe at someone who really does say something objectively bad (not of course just some silly rhetorical flourish) and unpopular.
Cortez Masto knew who her voters were and what messages they needed to hear. The DNC could really learn from bot her and John Fetterman's campaigns and refine how they do things.
Love the direct communication with progressives about their perspective.
If you say all cops are bastards, only bastards will become cops.
Hey, maybe this can be a campaign slogan!
Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't think the message "I will work with law enforcement to make our community safe" is blah or boring. I hate to throw the p-word around, but I think you have to be pretty privileged to think that law enforcement/safe communities are "blah." If you live in a high-crime neighborhood, you sure as heck don't think that effective law enforcement is boring.
Hello from Santa Barbara. Vacation, not work. I’m obviously at a disadvantage time wise, but my two cents.
How are these Democratic messages?
It seems like the most effective messages are politically neutral and possibly even a little conservative.
Am I missing something?
It was democrats that were saying them.
That’s my point I guess. The best Democrat messages aren’t actually Democratic policies.
Which of the examples in the post don't seem like democratic policies?
All of them seem like Democratic positions (in a commons sense world)
All of them also seem like Republican positions (in a common sense world)… except possibly the Medicare billing one… buts it’s a stretch.
Instead…. Let’s take the opposite position… and see what happens.
#1. I worked to defund the police. Police have to many resources. We need to downsize them.
#2. The economy isn’t a big deal. Skills training is a waste of money. Big businesses are better.
#3. Exporting jobs to China is good. These are jobs we don’t want. We need to increase globalization.
#4. Our healthcare insurance system is good like it is. We need to let insurance companies operate. We should let drug companies use the market.
Out of all of these counter positions… only #4 would clearly be associated with Republicans
#1 would be associated with the hard left and more likely to be associated with Democrats.
#2 is nonsensical. Except for the non-skills training thing could be read as college for everyone which is sort of an intellectual look down on blue collar position which is how people perceive Universities types.
#3 is mostly nonsensical. I think the globalization thing might be slightly leftish but also big business like. So it’s a wash.
Isn't the opposite take on #3 more like, "lowering cost of living is good, lower the cost of goods, even if they're made elsewhere. " Or "improving world production is good, all countries deserve to be able to compete in the world market".
For almost every policy there is an "opposite" that isn't necessarily an opposite but emphasizes different values.
Democrat voters care about crime and equality. 'defund the police emphasizes one of those at the expense of the other". These nornie messages emphasize the more popular one without throwing the other under the bus.
I guess my point is, none of the the messages was distinctly Democratic.
If a Republican said the exact same things (except possibly with Medicare) it would be expected.
it just seems that the most powerful messages are new in which aren’t distinctly partisan.