Democrats (both supporters and the politicians) are constantly accused of being elitist, but can’t seem to get out of their own way trying to be clever or point out hypocrisy? I mean sticking with simple attacks and simple policy messaging would seem to be way more effective (eg clever policy insults against trump instead of just calling him “president slob” across the board)?
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Democrats (both supporters and the politicians) are constantly accused of being elitist, but can’t seem to get out of their own way trying to be clever or point out hypocrisy? I mean sticking with simple attacks and simple policy messaging would seem to be way more effective (eg clever policy insults against trump instead of just calling him “president slob” across the board)?
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We tried that. The ‘OK Boomer’ meme, the ‘weird’ meme … national political discourse called it insulting and concerning yo the average voter … I think that claim is full of shit but to each their own
Because a lot of Democratic leadership is operating under the politics of either the 1980s, 90s or 2000s
But probably a bigger thing is that the Democrats are a big coalition and they get advice on what various groups in the coalition want to hear from a bunch of people who have consistently shown that they don’t have the first fucking clue what those groups want to hear
So you can’t say this will help working people because you apparently need to say this will help working people, especially “black brown people”. You can’t say that you’re going to protect abortion rights you have to say you’re going to “protect abortion rights for women and trans men”. You can’t say that you’re working for working class people you have to say that you’re working for “working class people including our union jobs”.
Everything needs three qualifications and six adjectives.
>Why is it Democrats largely can’t seem to push simple messaging?
I’ve made the criticism of the protests that they’ve been ineffective because there’s no unifying message. No 2 signs are about the same issue. So there’s no call to action for the people the protestors are trying to reach.
I believe the issue is while the left is better at organizing organically than the right, they are not good at forming hierarchies which are needed for creating clear messaging.
Instead the left prefers to use a consensus approach, which is extremely effective in small groups, but unwieldy in large numbers with everyone having their own ideas but no one is in charge.
That’s been my theory at least.
There is a targeted media machine of propaganda that greatly skews to benefit the right. Fox news and alt right ecospheres in social media and talk show radio. Theyve developed and honed this infrastructure for decades. Anything the left suppsedly has in comparison is completely overshadowed by it. Cnbc and CNN and whatever other left slanted need are ultimately for profit news organizations and they simply don’t run with the central vision a propaganda network like Fox does.
The right also has an inherent advantage in that their loyal viewers/base are not very smart or critical of the news they hear from “their” trusted source. This let’s Fox basically set the tone for political discussion and be a powerhouse in aligning the messaging of Republicans to the entire country. Even if you don’t watch Fox news, the message will reach you as the core audience watches the highlights and parrots out the message to other sites and Facebook and eventually it’s the local topic your coworker is spouting off.
The left is less willing to fit all in the same box with a lot of sub groups of far left and center left people, all with their own views and messaging and are critical of some media and not others.
I’m paying attention to Bernie and AOC’s “stop oligarchy / stop authoritarianism” campaign. I think that’s sufficiently strong, simple messaging if the rest of Democrats can get behind it.
Of course they’ll need an actual policy to propose as well, but I’d be fine voting for a platform that ensures legal safeguards against what’s going on right now.
Because these problems are complicated and require complicated solutions. And we want to actually solve them. The republicans don’t. And they use the non-problems of the culture wars to district their base from their disinterest in zoning reform, unrigging the financial system, their disinterest in climate change…
Because too many of the base have their heads so far up their ass that they’re months behind what people are saying and expecting to hear. Everything needs to be run through focus groups or spat out by a “credible” person for them to get behind it and not reflexivly attack people who offer any sort of criticism.
For example, people have been saying that Democrats need to appeal to voters better since the election loss. That was met with jeers and dogpilling from many of the base, including people here. Now that it’s a talking point that many sitting (or ex sitting) Democrats and prominent media people have mentioned, its OK to express criticality of the party (although its best to site them since the reflex is still there to bash dissentors).
There is no way to construct an effective and coherent message when a large part of the base is incapable of getting behind anything until its old news.
Because a leftist would come along and screech about how they’re not focusing on gaza
Yes!!! We (liberals) need to change the way we communicate our messages. It’s obvious that our past tactics haven’t worked. We need to change our tactics. Aren’t we supposed to be the progressive ones??
Because the democrats are really just 2 or 3 parties in a trench coat that work together well enough to survive, but not well enough to agree on a simple message.
Because politics aren’t simple and their messaging tries to reflect that. Some guy from the House Democrats put out a video about Trump’s tariffs and started it with “Look, tariffs can be a useful tool” yadda yadda yadda. That’s not the point! Trump’s tariffs are doing great harm. That’s your message.
When you have histrionic crybabies who want all their toys or they go home (e.g., Tlaib), pussyfootin’ “leadership” with Schumer and Jeffries, a woefully incompetent mainstream media desperate for ad revenues and keeping their FCC licenses, and some great independent content creators otherwise screaming into the abyss… Yeah, it’s impossible as it is now for the Democrats to have streamlined, unified messaging.
The conservatives are – I hate to say it – 50 years ahead of us in terms of unified, cohesive messaging. We, libs, don’t need to be truly mindless lemmings, but we should take a page or 1,000 from the conservatives’ playbook. We should be united and vicious without becoming vicious (look to Raskin, Murphy, AOC, Crockett, Bernie, Al Green, etc. as examples). This should also mean leaving Viacom/CBS, NBC Universal, and Disney/ABC behind to clutch their pearls.
My opinion, as a Canadian looking in: the democrats represent too large of a group, but they also represent order and decency. They cant push simple messaging because thier base wants radically different things. The right side is pretty congruent with ideas, they didn’t used to be as we saw with he tea party split , but with trump the tea party took over the republican party and thuer messaging us very clear you either agree with it all or you are a rino. The two party system is really failing the states right now becuase there should be 4 not two, progressives, democrats, Republicans, maga. Maga has taken over Republicans but progressives and democrats are not unified, but if they split they will keep losing elections for the next generation.
They require unified leadership, strategy and messaging.
Who’s in leadership?
Messaging is harder than the “Dems suck at messaging” people seem to think
No, I don’t think calling Trump “president slob” would be a hit with normal people
I still think the dems need a pow wow and figured out the leader, or at least the messaging. The “orange man bad” has been beat to death for 10 years. Also, they keep picking fights on the 20 of an 80/20 issue.
I’ll give you an example from just a few hours ago:
I got a DSCC fundraising message from James Carville.
James fucking Carville.
Who the fuck is motivated by a call to action by James Carville?
Who under the age of 30 (which I am not) knows who the fuck James Carville is?
James Carville doesn’t move the needle for fucking anyone.
It’s enough to make you think that the Democratic Party really isn’t all that unique from their GOP counterparts.
At least that side has a ton of willful ignorance and unbridled anger to harness.
We have James fucking Carville?
GTFOH.
Because republicans control the media.
I think when it really comes down to it, it’s because the right is hierarchical and authoritarian, where as the left tends to be far more egalitarian and independently minded.
When the right pushes out a narrative, it’s pushed out from leadership or news entertainment and disseminated down every level with almost no pushback or internal criticism. This is why sometimes you’ll see right wingers question events before the narrative is crafted and disseminated, and then quickly fall in line once the message is out and they are reassured by their fellows falling in line. This is why you can have delusional narratives like CRT in public schools, or whatever with little pushback.
The left on the other hand does not have the hierarchical structures to craft an overarching narrative and align everyone to it. People on all levels will criticize Democratic messaging if there is anything to criticize, which means that only perfection is safe from criticism. Actually we’d criticize that too for being ableist. We certainly won’t fall in line and mindlessly parrot talking points handed down on high to friends family and coworkers. Not unless we thought about it and agreed with it. Even then is really our place to force our views onto coworkers who probably don’t want to hear it? Probably not…
Anyways the problem is structural. If we want to do better we need messages that have more universal appeal, but the modern left is often focused on special interests that are often divisive which means our message gets muddled and rejected since we can never get the whole left to unite behind it.
They don’t have the same media apparatus as the republicans do, and the media hold them to a different standard. Democrats are criticized on whether they should do something. Republicans are praised because they are allowed to do something. That’s why the argument over sending people to a foreign death camp with no due process isn’t over whether Trump should do it or not rather whether he is legally allowed to, the assumption is always that he will do whatever the worst thing he can get away with.
Peoples ignorance on Palestine and Israel is what cost us the election, besides the obvious voter suppression. Way too many virtue signalers make a mess of things.
>Why is it Democrats largely can’t seem to push simple messaging?
Because the Democratic Party is truly a ‘large tent’ party, with many, many voices within it. Because of this, the ‘direction’ the party takes is often the result of much force applied in many different directions, and becuase of that, the ‘voice’ that comes out is often fragmented.
Contrast that to the GOP, which, at it’s core is really a party of very wealthy people (that is, they are the people who actually control the party). The others in the GOP (including MAGA, Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists, others) are simply there to ‘fill the party out’. This is why when you turn on the TV, the GOP has the same talking points person to person to person to person.
The Democrats need to restructure our leadership hierarchy and messaging. We need to narrow the point, and put the input further down in the cycle.
Ian Danskin, who runs the YouTube channel innuendo studios, wrote a thread about this on Bluesky.
Basically it’s not that they are incompetent. It’s because they don’t want to. Democrats have no desire to challenge a system which privileges them.
https://bsky.app/profile/innuendostudios.bsky.social/post/3lmubzfl35s2i
Because the world is not simple. It is very complex. It is not easy to come up with simple short slogans that accurately describe the policy the slogan represents–see defund the police for a prime example of this in work.
Republicans also don’t care if they are lying or not–see every time Trump says something stupid or outrageous and then claims he never said the thing when it’s quoted back to him. So they can come up with simple messaging very easily.
In addition to many excellent points below:
Dems (and for that matter, non-MAGA Republicans) have been in a very reactionary posture for a while now. (u/rhinokeepr did somewhat touch on this)
Many of the ways Trump purports to make people’s lives better are demonstrably false. But he’s speaking directly to people and telling them he’s going to make their lives better.
Bernie did the same, and built a movement despite very different policy proposals. So did Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc
We’re buried under right wing influence operations, misinformation, and disinformation.
What little we’ve had in pushing back on that has now been abandoned by the tech giants and is being dismantled by DOGE.
I don’t think there’s a receptive audience that isn’t already aligned to the Democrats
Donors vs. regular Dem voters
Dem politicians are more afraid of donors than Dem voters.
It’s mostly that simple.
Republican politicians are more afraid of Republican voters than donors.
bc the right hates intellectualism
A few reasons:
Democrats in leadership today got their start in the pre-Trump era, with a much different political atmosphere. If you look deeply, many of them still retain the New Deal/Great Society outlook on things, when middle-class voters were more likely to vote for them than they apparently do today. It befuddles them that the party isn’t doing better and why their messages isn’t getting through. It’s not always clear what, if anything, they’ve learned since Trump took his escalator ride in 2015.
Decades of Republican/conservative misinformation that paint anything Dems say or do as elitist, out of touch, bad for America, etc. They’ve had lots of practice and lots to work with. Yes, it’s annoying and tiresome, untrue and malicious, but it’s proven to be effective.
The Democrats have taken it on themselves to try to solve some of our most intractable problems – affordable housing, universal health care, climate change, etc. That means they’re quite difficult to address in the best of circumstances. That’s not where we are now. When they get into power, they are never able to come close to their stated goals, making Dems look disingenuous. As such, it’s hard to articulate clear goals with so many shifting parts and moving goalposts. It’s hard to push simple solutions when you can’t stand still and you cant agree on how to move forward. Example: Medicare for All, Green New Deal, etc. .The Republicans don’t have this problem.
Too many Democrats, and especially the consultant and pundit class, appear to have taken too many of the same classes in graduate school about how to talk to voters without actually having talked to voters that don’t obsess over politics like they do. Too many Ds seem tiki think that once they tell people what (they think) they want, they’ll love them for it. Example: Kamala Harris’s focus on democracy and abortion rights when most voters were thinking of inflation.
There are two components to a public communication campaign: the message and the apparatus.
The apparatus includes platforms, media outlets, algorithms, grassroots organizing—all the structure that is needed to deliver the message to the audience.
Democrats have lost the apparatus. Fox, facebook, youtube, tiktok, x, joe rogan, are a highly functional apparatus that delivers a steady stream of conservative messaging. Until we have a similar apparatus—or hamper theirs—we won’t have the means to control messaging.
I don’t know how people can call the Democrats both “elitist” and “left-wing”. The classic definition of “left-wing” means you want society to become more equal. Feminism, civil rights, gay rights, labor unions, and welfare are all left-wing causes. Right-wingers by contrast want some kind of hierarchy, whether it be whites over blacks, rich over poor, men over women, or whatever. It’s right-wingers who are elitist.
Also, stop blaming the Democrats for their bad messaging. If we lived in a sane world, the Democrats could have slept through the 2024 campaign and still win. Trump is an awful candidate. He’s stupid, he’s a psychopath, he has 34 felony convictions, he attempted an insurrection, and still people voted for him! I’d sooner vote for a dead giraffe than Donald Trump, whatever party he runs with. No amount of clever argument or emotional appeal is going to open the eyes of his supporters.
Because good well thought out solutions are often not easy and simple
Because you’re not paying attention.
Do you follow any actual Democrats on social media?
Here’s an angle I hope doesn’t get thrown to the side:
Democrats will ask Democrats what the problem is, and they’ll come up the the reasons, XYZ, etc… now they “better understand.”
Yet if a Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Constitutionalist, etc, chimes in, it’s “no, that’s not the problem. You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about”
Even making this post, I’m almost 100% positive there will be Liberals that read it and go “oh, geez, look at this mess”. Then they’ll explain my thoughts are “unfounded”, I’ll ask why, and then they’ll suggest that I’m not providing “proof”.
Then raising this issue, the problem will go back to: “well, your side isn’t providing any proof”, but they fail to realize that the proof are the people, not the “statistical analyses”.
Democrats are not a “we are an organic culture” and cultural folkloric people, they’re sort of a social engineering people… that’s how it seems when dealing with them
Sure, they read books and go to college, but they’re not like “part of the folk people”, so to speak.
They’re the ones who are scientifically knit picking the folk people: “oh, this group over here is uneducated. This other group is suffering from racial discrimination. This group doesn’t know what they’re doing. We need to set this straight, because all of “these” people are messing up everything WE want”.
People will write folk tails about Trump and Bush Jr, probably even Reagan. Might even be bad songs about how much they’re hated, but they def get folk tunes at some point, cause they’re folkloric figures
No one’s writing folk tunes about Democrats, not even Obama… cause the party isn’t the “folk”, it’s the “theory people”, it’s not folkloric…
… it’s “above” folkloric
Because good “messaging” is about appealing to the most basic and simplistic forms of thinking. That’s why a demagogue can excel using propaganda featuring bigotry and prejudice. Those are very easy things for the average simple minded rural uneducated american to grasp on to. Dems excel on reason and fairness and other things that demand a greater deal of intellectual engagement from the every man which is a lot to ask of him.
“Brown people: Bad; Gay people: Sinners” is easier to sell than “the person you elected has fascistic and authoritarian tendencies that can slowly unravel democracy over time by using your own prejudices against you.”
Republicans are far more successful at simple messaging because their ability to convey misinformation and disinformation to their base relies on over-simplifying very complex concepts. Democrats have a much harder time because they don’t believe in lying to the public.
Because none of them have any clue about marketing or human nature. They give the American public more credit than it deserves at this point. More bumper sticker slogans, less Ted Talks. It’s what plants crave.
Any answerer here that is anything other than “the media is propaganda”
is a fool