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Matt Hagy's avatar

As Yglesias has said repeatedly, a lot of this comes down to Democrat staffers being far more progressive than the median Democrat voter; let alone the median voter. This strong bias filters what accomplishments that they focus on and shapes their own perception of events. The result is counterproductive messaging.

I’ve been hoping that fear of electoral victories for Trump and his compatriot politicians would focus Democrat staffers on winning at all costs; even if that meant compromising and moderating on policy and messaging. My personal thinking has definitely been influenced that way. It’s one thing to lose due overly ambitious political goals when the downside is four years of Romney and a Republican congress cutting taxes and deregulating. When it's Trumpism the cost of losing is higher.

Yet such a change in strategy and tactics among Democrat staffers hasn't happened. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to the “progressive mobilization” delusion. As long as staffers and activists continue to believe that there is a large number of demotivated potential voters yearning for revolutionary progressive changes then I don’t think we'll have a more productive messaging discipline. We need to do anything and everything that we can do to push back on this false narrative and correct staffers’ mental model of the American electoral landscape.

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Brian's avatar

The part about the earned media reminded me of my frustrations with the child tax credit. Instead of framing it as "a tax cut for families with children" it was talked about as this broad, sweeping, transformative, anti-poverty program that was *so progressive* (squeeee!), which is not what most people wanted to hear.

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