It is noteworthy that all of these effective Democratic messaging examples avoid using any academic language. E.g., “structural factors” or “birthing persons”. I think avoiding such esoteric and alienating language is one of the simplest ways to embrace popularism without having to compromise on policy.
Conversely, adding such academic language to generally popular messages is the quickest way to make it unpopular. E.g., everyone is opposed to surprise medical billing and supportive of policies to regulate that away. But if we dress that up with language about “inherent capitalistic exploitation” and “structural factors that victimize historically marginalized groups”, voter’s will just think we’re a bunch of unserious weirdos.
An interesting thought experiment is to ask, “what totally banal message would make a GOP candidate slightly more appealing to me?” For me specifically in Ohio, the fact that Mike DeWine believed Covid was real, empowered a (female) physician to lead his Covid response early on, backed her up in the face of right wing maniacal attacks, encouraged people to wear masks and then get vaccinated, all that left me (and a lot of other Dems in the state) hugely impressed. If we’d had any Georgia-like election shenanigans, I’m confident he would have pulled a Kemp and stood firm for election integrity.
Merely standing up for common sense on the topics your party has most lost their damn minds over is the biggest thing you can do to stand out. But it’s not easy- it takes an independent mind to be able to break out of your own tribe’s group think enough to even SEE where they’ve lost their minds.
I feel like there is an under-appreciated opportunity to move to the center AND improve actual policy outcomes by pushing to make jobs in areas like law enforcement into better jobs. I would also lump teaching and a few other service professions into this category. These are not terrible jobs, but the pay and benefits put you solidly middle to lower-middle class, and they are difficult in terms of mental, emotional, and physical labor in ways that many white collar jobs just aren't. I basically view all the teacher appreciation days and blue line flags as an attempt to cheap out on what we actually need to do as a society, which is to provide people who do important jobs with resources, staffing, and pay commensurate with the significance of their role in building a better society.
I would be much more comfortable with a tough on crime message if it were paired with innovative prison reform. Prisons are not only factories of human misery, they are where human potential goes to die. Waiting in a cage for a clock to slowly tick by is soul crushing and enervating.
Some people are broken and cannot be fixed. They need to be warehoused in places where they won’t hurt normies. Plenty of criminals just need to learn discipline and self respect-- if they could perform healthy, physical labor and gradually win privileges for demonstrating virtue, I’d be much more comfortable with incarceration. A prisoner who has worked honorably for three months should be able to get weekend furloughs conditioned on taking a urine test when he gets back. Three months of that, and the urine test could be dropped as long as he’s fit to worth Monday at 8. Three months of that and he could get parole. The jails I’ve seen are so horrible that any talk of rehabilitation is Orwellian.
I’m a progressive who does a lot of doorknocking in PA and you are mostly right- if we want to do something about climate change, we need to elect more people from the party that wants to do something about climate change, with means talking normally about things reachable voters will like without hippy punching. The only thing I would add is that it is still important to have things to run on that energize your base and to clearly point out that the Republican Party no longer supports democracy or universal rights. A good campaign needs more than one note.
I'd like to see Matt make a better case for popularism instead of repeating the same points. Matt's message to progressives is "accept a small L to avert a risk of a big L". But they don't want a small L, they want to win.
They wants real change to American society as the most unequal among its peers and an egregious outlier on multiple metrics, be it healthcare coverage, paid leave, police violence or incarceration.
I'd like to see Matt make a serious case for how popularism really delivers for progressives, because it's extremely evident that they do not believe that it does. That's the only way I can see to get them onside. You don't persuade people by telling them to abandon their aspirations.
I really liked this article right up to the conclusion
Part of the problem is that the small numbers of "people who care about racial justice and procedural fairness in criminal justice" who do sign up to be cops get driven out because the culture of most police departments is hostile to them. There are plenty of stories of cops being disciplined for not shooting someone, of cops being denied backup because they reported another cop. Etc.
It is really important that if we're going to try recruiting people who don't have traditional cop attitudes that there is some really tough leadership prepared to stand by those non-traditional cops.
> A little blowback for saying something very normal is, I think, a good thing. It means that you get to be normal without being boring, to ensure that people hear what you are trying to say
I like how this evolves the popularism strategy to at times deliberately court some controversy. That addresses Ezra Klein’s critique that messaging needs to not just be popular, it also needs some virality to spread and become salient among voters.
Ideally, we’d court controversy with Republicans rather than the left flank of our coalition. Like, it would be great if we had normie and popular messages that Republicans engaged with using their own less popular messaging. That would provide a clear contrast about the difference between the two parties and the controversy would boost the salience.
As usual, you make good points, but I'm a little distressed by the defensive tone of the essay. I think the single biggest problem the Democrats face in winning elections is the rhetoric of the progressive left. Why should you apologize for implying this?
What the progressive message borg thinks is not so much that the exciting but ineffective message will go viral, but that the exciting message will inspire offline activism. And they think it will be effective because charlatan message strategists cite Cialdini’s concept of “social proof.” Basically if someone with unformed political beliefs (which is the only way they conceptualize a persuadable voter) hears enough messages from people around them, they start to believe them.
They cite this theory, even though the necessary conditions for its implementation (shared identity ties between progressive activists and persuadable voters) largely don’t exist because of education polarization and old fashioned racism.
>>This from John Fetterman apparently worked really well, too:<<
Dollars to donuts that unfortunate incident from some years ago—when Fetterman chased down and wrongly apprehended a non-offender—didn't hurt him with the Pennsylvania electorate. (Might even have helped a bit).
(Ok, maybe not one of my better takes; but it *feels* like it could be true).
And, no, I'm not suggesting racial profiling isn't wrong (it is wrong); nor am I suggesting aspiring Democratic politicians should take up free lance law enforcement. But I do think liberal political leaders hurt themselves when they're not credible on public safety, and I also suspect Republicans are given the benefit of the doubt on this issue more so than Democrats are. Not fair, but life isn't fair. So liberals running for office have to have their ducks in a row on this issue.
"But I also think that people who are more left-wing than I am will find a fair amount to like in this story because it suggests the possibility of making substantial gains in public opinion with very superficial gestures to the center." I worry that these kind of gestures, superficial though they may be, are anathema to a certain part of the left. Not my part, I would be all about trading some superficial gestures for real policy gains, but I think there is a certain type of lefty who wouldn't go along with it.
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.
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.
The candidate that will get my immediate support in the next election cycle is the one who will promise a return to “normality”. As in, using the clearly-superior term “normality” instead of its mediocre synonym “normalcy”.
I don’t know how “normality” has managed to lose this fight so badly, but in particular post-COVID it feels like “normalcy” has become the default in our language. A tragic loss for the English language.
It is noteworthy that all of these effective Democratic messaging examples avoid using any academic language. E.g., “structural factors” or “birthing persons”. I think avoiding such esoteric and alienating language is one of the simplest ways to embrace popularism without having to compromise on policy.
Conversely, adding such academic language to generally popular messages is the quickest way to make it unpopular. E.g., everyone is opposed to surprise medical billing and supportive of policies to regulate that away. But if we dress that up with language about “inherent capitalistic exploitation” and “structural factors that victimize historically marginalized groups”, voter’s will just think we’re a bunch of unserious weirdos.
An interesting thought experiment is to ask, “what totally banal message would make a GOP candidate slightly more appealing to me?” For me specifically in Ohio, the fact that Mike DeWine believed Covid was real, empowered a (female) physician to lead his Covid response early on, backed her up in the face of right wing maniacal attacks, encouraged people to wear masks and then get vaccinated, all that left me (and a lot of other Dems in the state) hugely impressed. If we’d had any Georgia-like election shenanigans, I’m confident he would have pulled a Kemp and stood firm for election integrity.
Merely standing up for common sense on the topics your party has most lost their damn minds over is the biggest thing you can do to stand out. But it’s not easy- it takes an independent mind to be able to break out of your own tribe’s group think enough to even SEE where they’ve lost their minds.
I feel like there is an under-appreciated opportunity to move to the center AND improve actual policy outcomes by pushing to make jobs in areas like law enforcement into better jobs. I would also lump teaching and a few other service professions into this category. These are not terrible jobs, but the pay and benefits put you solidly middle to lower-middle class, and they are difficult in terms of mental, emotional, and physical labor in ways that many white collar jobs just aren't. I basically view all the teacher appreciation days and blue line flags as an attempt to cheap out on what we actually need to do as a society, which is to provide people who do important jobs with resources, staffing, and pay commensurate with the significance of their role in building a better society.
I would be much more comfortable with a tough on crime message if it were paired with innovative prison reform. Prisons are not only factories of human misery, they are where human potential goes to die. Waiting in a cage for a clock to slowly tick by is soul crushing and enervating.
Some people are broken and cannot be fixed. They need to be warehoused in places where they won’t hurt normies. Plenty of criminals just need to learn discipline and self respect-- if they could perform healthy, physical labor and gradually win privileges for demonstrating virtue, I’d be much more comfortable with incarceration. A prisoner who has worked honorably for three months should be able to get weekend furloughs conditioned on taking a urine test when he gets back. Three months of that, and the urine test could be dropped as long as he’s fit to worth Monday at 8. Three months of that and he could get parole. The jails I’ve seen are so horrible that any talk of rehabilitation is Orwellian.
I’m a progressive who does a lot of doorknocking in PA and you are mostly right- if we want to do something about climate change, we need to elect more people from the party that wants to do something about climate change, with means talking normally about things reachable voters will like without hippy punching. The only thing I would add is that it is still important to have things to run on that energize your base and to clearly point out that the Republican Party no longer supports democracy or universal rights. A good campaign needs more than one note.
I'd like to see Matt make a better case for popularism instead of repeating the same points. Matt's message to progressives is "accept a small L to avert a risk of a big L". But they don't want a small L, they want to win.
They wants real change to American society as the most unequal among its peers and an egregious outlier on multiple metrics, be it healthcare coverage, paid leave, police violence or incarceration.
I'd like to see Matt make a serious case for how popularism really delivers for progressives, because it's extremely evident that they do not believe that it does. That's the only way I can see to get them onside. You don't persuade people by telling them to abandon their aspirations.
I really liked this article right up to the conclusion
Part of the problem is that the small numbers of "people who care about racial justice and procedural fairness in criminal justice" who do sign up to be cops get driven out because the culture of most police departments is hostile to them. There are plenty of stories of cops being disciplined for not shooting someone, of cops being denied backup because they reported another cop. Etc.
It is really important that if we're going to try recruiting people who don't have traditional cop attitudes that there is some really tough leadership prepared to stand by those non-traditional cops.
> A little blowback for saying something very normal is, I think, a good thing. It means that you get to be normal without being boring, to ensure that people hear what you are trying to say
I like how this evolves the popularism strategy to at times deliberately court some controversy. That addresses Ezra Klein’s critique that messaging needs to not just be popular, it also needs some virality to spread and become salient among voters.
Ideally, we’d court controversy with Republicans rather than the left flank of our coalition. Like, it would be great if we had normie and popular messages that Republicans engaged with using their own less popular messaging. That would provide a clear contrast about the difference between the two parties and the controversy would boost the salience.
As usual, you make good points, but I'm a little distressed by the defensive tone of the essay. I think the single biggest problem the Democrats face in winning elections is the rhetoric of the progressive left. Why should you apologize for implying this?
What the progressive message borg thinks is not so much that the exciting but ineffective message will go viral, but that the exciting message will inspire offline activism. And they think it will be effective because charlatan message strategists cite Cialdini’s concept of “social proof.” Basically if someone with unformed political beliefs (which is the only way they conceptualize a persuadable voter) hears enough messages from people around them, they start to believe them.
They cite this theory, even though the necessary conditions for its implementation (shared identity ties between progressive activists and persuadable voters) largely don’t exist because of education polarization and old fashioned racism.
>>This from John Fetterman apparently worked really well, too:<<
Dollars to donuts that unfortunate incident from some years ago—when Fetterman chased down and wrongly apprehended a non-offender—didn't hurt him with the Pennsylvania electorate. (Might even have helped a bit).
(Ok, maybe not one of my better takes; but it *feels* like it could be true).
And, no, I'm not suggesting racial profiling isn't wrong (it is wrong); nor am I suggesting aspiring Democratic politicians should take up free lance law enforcement. But I do think liberal political leaders hurt themselves when they're not credible on public safety, and I also suspect Republicans are given the benefit of the doubt on this issue more so than Democrats are. Not fair, but life isn't fair. So liberals running for office have to have their ducks in a row on this issue.
"But I also think that people who are more left-wing than I am will find a fair amount to like in this story because it suggests the possibility of making substantial gains in public opinion with very superficial gestures to the center." I worry that these kind of gestures, superficial though they may be, are anathema to a certain part of the left. Not my part, I would be all about trading some superficial gestures for real policy gains, but I think there is a certain type of lefty who wouldn't go along with it.
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.
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.
The candidate that will get my immediate support in the next election cycle is the one who will promise a return to “normality”. As in, using the clearly-superior term “normality” instead of its mediocre synonym “normalcy”.
I don’t know how “normality” has managed to lose this fight so badly, but in particular post-COVID it feels like “normalcy” has become the default in our language. A tragic loss for the English language.