The left doesn’t struggle with mainstream relevance—not culturally. There’s a reason right-leaning entertainment keeps flopping. Right-wing comedians can’t break through, their films tank, their satire doesn’t land. Meanwhile, their left-wing counterparts thrive.
But when it comes to politics? The right has a different advantage. They tap into intuitive biases—“there are only two genders,” “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “America was better back then”—ideas that feel simple and emotionally satisfying, even if they’re wrong. They rely on bad faith reasoning, deflection, hypocrisy, and low-hanging fruit.
The right takes inconvenient facts and weaponizes them, offering comfort to Americans who want to keep outdated beliefs. They don’t challenge their audience—they validate them. They sell permission to stay unchanged.
And that’s the uphill battle for the left: messaging. We bring bitter truths to the table—not to shame people, but to fix things. Climate change is real and urgent. Structural inequality is baked into our systems. These aren’t convenient truths, but they’re the ones that can lead to a better future if we act.
But truth is hard to package. Correct information doesn’t always translate easily into a soundbite. It often requires nuance, longform discussion, uncomfortable self-reflection. And for demographics that have been underserved by education or steeped in misinformation for decades, that kind of complexity is hard to message effectively.
Meanwhile, the right doesn’t need facts to win the narrative. They lead with bias, build around grievance, and if they need to lie first to pull you in, they will. The truth isn’t their burden.
We, on the left, are fighting a war that was lost years ago—the right’s victory in making anti-intellectualism a political brand.
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The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
The left doesn’t struggle with mainstream relevance—not culturally. There’s a reason right-leaning entertainment keeps flopping. Right-wing comedians can’t break through, their films tank, their satire doesn’t land. Meanwhile, their left-wing counterparts thrive.
But when it comes to politics? The right has a different advantage. They tap into intuitive biases—“there are only two genders,” “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “America was better back then”—ideas that feel simple and emotionally satisfying, even if they’re wrong. They rely on bad faith reasoning, deflection, hypocrisy, and low-hanging fruit.
The right takes inconvenient facts and weaponizes them, offering comfort to Americans who want to keep outdated beliefs. They don’t challenge their audience—they validate them. They sell permission to stay unchanged.
And that’s the uphill battle for the left: messaging. We bring bitter truths to the table—not to shame people, but to fix things. Climate change is real and urgent. Structural inequality is baked into our systems. These aren’t convenient truths, but they’re the ones that can lead to a better future if we act.
But truth is hard to package. Correct information doesn’t always translate easily into a soundbite. It often requires nuance, longform discussion, uncomfortable self-reflection. And for demographics that have been underserved by education or steeped in misinformation for decades, that kind of complexity is hard to message effectively.
Meanwhile, the right doesn’t need facts to win the narrative. They lead with bias, build around grievance, and if they need to lie first to pull you in, they will. The truth isn’t their burden.
We, on the left, are fighting a war that was lost years ago—the right’s victory in making anti-intellectualism a political brand.
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The Democratic partys messaging is reactive, aways on defense.
If Trump had passed the CHIPs or Infastructure Bill, every bridge would have his name on it.
Democrats need to change by putting the onus on Republicans.
The left has a very small footprint, and obviously no money behind it because no big company is pro left.
People want a story, and the right is spun as more positive. What sounds better?
The right: You want a better life? Just work harder. You can do anything with hard work and perseverance.
The left: You want a better life? Most of that is determined by where you’re born and generational wealth. You can work hard, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make it. Even if you’re poor, you’re incredibly privileged and other people have it worse, which we’ll always remind you of. Good luck.
The left needs to be better at spinning things in their favor
It’s mostly people who have been voting for the last decade. All they know as adults is trumpism.
Messaging is about much more than the content of the message. Democrats have to throw away focus groups, make their individual pet issues a second priority to regaining democracy, and speak the fuck up.
Good messaging comes from the chest. It’s easy to say because it’s what you genuinely feel you should be saying. If you’re a Republican executive that sounds like “everyone’s lying but me, everyone’s out to get me, I’m the biggest victim since Christ, give me all the power and things”. Because that’s actually how they fuckin feel.
If you’re a democratic representative, and that sounds like, “fuck these autocratic illiberal crooks we’re forming a resistance in every avenue available to us, starting with flooding every relevant court jurisdiction with suits.”
Then continue vocalizing your actual resistance while you do it
I’ve always been of the belief that large swaths of people would rather get a convenient one-sentence answer to a complex problem whether or not it’s true or effective than a complex but accurate one that may be inconvenient. That’s where the GOP gets a “messaging” win.
“If global warming is so real, then how come it’s snowing outside?”
Is an easier and more convenient answer than
“Well, weather is different than climate, but actually globally temperatures are objectively rising based on all the data that we have, which has led to seas warming and changing ocean salinity due to melting glaciers and that has created a polar vortex effect- uh this really makes more sense if I show you a diagram- and that causes more extreme snowstorms further south. 97% of research based on controlled tests of trapped carbon and its effect on stored temperature indicates… (Yada yada)”
Unless Dems can get answers down to one or two simple statements, they will always lose a lot of the audience. Worse yet, if they’re too verbose, they come off as smug and elitist.
It’s not even that the voters are dumb or anything, a lot of them are just tired. You get off a 10 hour day at the warehouse, you’re figuring out how you’re going to afford a housing payment and braces for your kid, you don’t want some smooth talking “liberal elite” giving you one more incredibly stressful thing to consider, you might just say, “ya know what? I’ll worry about it when there’s no snow in January.”
i totally agree that messaging change is considerably harder than messaging a support of the status quo. It doesn’t mean things couldn’t be better though. I don’t entirely blame the left for this, a lot of it is just the nature of social media, polarization and the right playing dirty first, but still, the tone coming out of the left in the pass years is much less hope and much more purity contest and gate keeping. Straight white men this, straight white men that, where do you think that goes? Now after the election some that didn’t learnt anything are wanting to add Latino men and some white women into the list too. Where are we going with this, having no friends at all? The unfortunate thing is that those angry people I talk about is not the majority, but they are the loudest on the internet and at protests and they serve such convenient sound bites straw man for the right.
Dems fail with messaging in two areas: 1) They focus on positive messaging even though research shows that negative messaging is more impactful. 2) They don’t seem to even be trying to address the fact that the GOP is flooding the zone messaging-wise on social media, podcasts and cable news. We are losing a propaganda battle.
> But when it comes to politics? The right has a different advantage.
Oh the right has far more advantages than that. In fact, I believe that it’s those advantages that allow them to have the advantage of tapping into intuitive biases.
> Meanwhile, the right doesn’t need facts to win the narrative. They lead with bias, build around grievance, and if they need to lie first to pull you in, they will. The truth isn’t their burden.
This plays into the idea that Dems have to be perfect while the right doesn’t.
Kamala got all kinds of flack form the left for messaging, Gaza, being Biden II, etc., even though her campaign was as close to “perfect” as a 3 month campaign could have been, and would have picked up a rather good economy (technically). Meanwhile, Trump got away with literal crimes, “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs”, and his party has a horrible track record of leadership, including him.
While he may have won the popular vote this time around, he lost it to win power the first time, and it kept him in the politisphere, available to continue to use advantages the party has, and ones he created for himself. He won by the EC, one of the many advantages Republicans benefit from that Dems do not.
Sound familiar? Bush had the same happen (though at least he was an incumbent). Both snuck into power by virtue of those party – then communicative advantages, but went on to become two of the worst presidents ever, regardless of however good the Dem candidate against them was. Dems end up with flawed – but closer to perfect candidates who get left by the wayside. It’s tragic, IMO.