What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[The Brain]

What is the Democrats' message to conservative Americans who plan on voting GOP?

Subsidized brain surgery.

Isn't civilized healthcare one of their bugbears?

[The Minsky Moment]

Isn't civilized healthcare one of their bugbears?

Only when it has Obama's name attached.  Otherwise, it's get your government hands off my ACA.

[The Brain]

Isn't civilized healthcare one of their bugbears?

Only when it has Obama's name attached.  Otherwise, it's get your government hands off my ACA.

Gotcha.

[garbon]

So there is something wrong with the messaging, with the politics on the left.

Is there political messaging that can get through to them or is there something more structural that needs to fundamentally change?

On my way back from the airport, I took a car service. The driver (American citizen living in UK with family in Bulgaria) spent a lot of time talking to me about coronavirus and how it was a plandemic and it couldn't be a pandemic if we don't see people dying in the streets, ineffectiveness of the vaccine, people's eating habits making them susceptible to bad complications, people shouldn't drink milk as animals don't once they are adults, importance of alkaline water, Trump being disagreeable but having the right idea on the lying MSM, importance of looking up information outside of CNN/BBC, how America is the one to blame for the invasion of Ukraine, the Bidens and their shady dealings in Ukraine, how Bulgarian communism was better than our so called democracy, billionaires oppressing us all among other topics like how him speaking his political views kept him from being selected to participate in a Bulgarian reality tv show about farming.

While, I put in a few things like 'well, the people who I knew didn't die in the streets because they were in the hospital and that's where they died,' it was clear he wasn't interested in a discussion just his set diatribe that he'd cribbed from various places on the internet. Accordingly, I mostly just sat saying nothing or chimed in places where I could agree (like Musk as a douche).

I raise this man as an example as it is unclear to me that there would be any messaging that would resonate unless it conformed exactly to his amorphous mass of opinions.

[Berkut]

I think that is outcome though.

The failure in messaging happened before, and the result was that he is listening to Fox and Qanon for information instead of the BBC or whatever.

I suspect there are people who simply cannot be reached anymore, or rather, they won't change until their world narrative changes - when Fox shifts, they will shift.

So I guess for many, I would answer the latter - something structural needs to change before you are going to get through to the reallly committed right wingers.

That guy has clearly put effort into his insane world view. Probably not reachable by means any of us want to contemplate.

But what about the ones we are really talking about - the people who don't listen to Fox all day, but don't listen to MSNBC either? They might vote, but they don't put a lot of thought into it, they mostly go along with what their friends or parents or loved ones think, or what they hear in church.

I don't know the answer, but I am sure we have to figure something out. They are the key to actually winning elections.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Do you think that the Democrats are a little anemic in their response to the current political landscape in the US?

If so, what do you think the causes may be?

Do you think the leadership of the party has some responsibility here, even if they shouldn't shoulder the entirety of the blame?

As I said before, "messaging" is not that important to me.  I care about outcomes, which means policies, spending initiatives, changes to laws, changes to tax codes, etc. 

I was thinking before about successful Democratic messaging.  Bubba says "hope," Barry says "change" and girls throw their panties on the stage and guys scream themselves hoarse.  That stuff just made me chuckle.

A lot of messaging from the left wing is about who they see as villains: the rich, corporations, transphobes, to name a few.  None of those work for me personally.

The one area I think should be talked about a lot more, and I hope Democrats will do this come election season, is that Republicans represent a threat to democracy.

This was me for a long time--not caring about messaging. I don't know the precise moment when, but sometime between 2018 and 2020, I came to realize that policy only has a meaning to a very, very small number of voters. Messaging is everything, reality is essentially meaningless, and how policy intersects with reality is even more meaningless still.

I'm not convinced that a lot of Democrats realize this, given how much importance they continue to focus on "deliverables", which are usually some form of wealth transfer, that they think will just rocket them back to widespread popularity. It just isn't true. The working class wants messaging that appeals to them, they don't care that much about policies. It's a good sociology or maybe psychology question as to why that is, but that is how it is. The Democrats can play the game by the reality they live in, or continue to run it like West Wing or Government Camp for Political Science Wonks, and we'll see how it goes.

[Berkut]

That really is pretty damn depressing when you think about it.

[Sheilbh]

I'm not convinced that a lot of Democrats realize this, given how much importance they continue to focus on "deliverables", which are usually some form of wealth transfer, that they think will just rocket them back to widespread popularity. It just isn't true. The working class wants messaging that appeals to them, they don't care that much about policies. It's a good sociology or maybe psychology question as to why that is, but that is how it is. The Democrats can play the game by the reality they live in, or continue to run it like West Wing or Government Camp for Political Science Wonks, and we'll see how it goes.

I think a lot about an article I read after the Virginia election where Democrat consultants said what they'd learned was that a focus on Roe and the Supreme Court doesn't work, so Democrats should go back to "kitchen table"/"pocketbook" issues.

That's been the advice of Democrat consultants for decades - and for many who came up in the 90s and 00s it was probably very good advice.

But I find it baffling right now. Abortion is being severely restricted through a number of state laws. Only about a third of Americans support those policies. Roe is coming up for challenge in the Supreme Court shortly. And this is an issue many Democrat-supporting activists and Democrat politicians are really passionate about. Despite all that - they're choosing and their consultants advice is don't talk about it. It's madness.

Same goes for the risks around democracy.

And by all means talk about pocketbook issues but it needs to be real, tangible and understandable. No-one cares or should care about policy - that is the purpose of politics. If you need three sheets of A4 and a complex understanding of tax credits to understand your policy - then it's not a pocketbook/kitchen table policy. That, incidentally, was the genius of Bill Clinton - not "hope" - but his ability to explain policies to a normal audience. I still don't think there's anyone better at that.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The problem is that you're not going to get the outcomes you desire if Democratic messaging is so deficient that they don't even get elected (or they get elected so infrequently that Republicans deal more damage than Democrats can fix).  With better messaging Sinema and Manchin wouldn't be ensuring that the talk about the threat to democracy is the maximum that can be achieved.

If someone can come up with some catchy slogans that get Democrats and Democratic leaning voters stampeding to the polls, I'm all for it.

My reservation is that there is no objective way to determine what is great messaging and what is "anemic" messaging.  Is there a science of messaging?  Can people who know this science predetermine what will work and what will not?  Do you or anybody else know what exactly the Democrats have to change in their messaging?  I think not, and I think the people who are criticizing the messaging are simply reflecting the age old bias of blaming the big cheese instead of the little guys when the formula can't be solved.

There isn't a science, but there is absolutely an aptitude right? There is almost a blueprint for how to appeal as a populist--simple messaging, repeated claims, simple solutions for complex problems, vilify an identifiable enemy.

That sounds like Trump, but go read about FDR's campaigns some time, he could literally have written the book on running campaigns like that--and FDR didn't invent the technique, he just ran it well. The old school Democratic machine, which kinda died off sometime after Nixon became President, knew how to do this and the Republicans were often left struggling to find a response. The table started flipping in the late 70s, and by the time Atwater was running Papa Bush's campaign it was flipping hard, so this isn't even that new of a situation that the GOP knows how to play populism. What's bad is at some point around the middle of Clinton's Presidency the Democrats as a party lost any form of populist messaging competency.

The Democrats, tracing their lineage back through the New Deal, the Populist movement of the late 19th / early 20th century, have never had sustained success without a populist appeal. It is unlikely they will do so in the 21st century.

The problem I think a lot of Democrats are struggling with is they probably "get" some populist rhetoric they could use--and some of them have even tried (see: Tim Ryan, Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Bernie, AOC), but nothing has "ignited" like it has for the right. Why is that? My personal theory is because in modern politics where we no longer have the party political "machines" that amplify messaging to all the country's union halls, women's clubs and etc (because many of these institutions no longer exist), the Democrats have lost the fuel or lighter fluid needed to get the low fire roaring.

The old Democratic populism relied on institutions that, for various reasons related to how our society / culture have developed and changed, have atrophied away almost to nothingness.

The Republicans were not, historically, a populist party. While they had some flirtations (as both parties did) with the early 20th century Progressive and Populist movements, that didn't hold much after the Taft Presidency.

As the 20th century came to a close, Republicans found in a corner of the country a movement that kind of helped them become populist--the evangelical movement. Through their catering to evangelicals in the 80s they got in to early forms of heavily propagandized media--Christian television and Christian radio, this lead quite quickly to the early far right terrestrial radio shows, which built up a sort of low level far right propaganda machine. Then in the later 90s Fox News comes out, and suddenly they have their own cable television network to run with the same things they'd been doing on more niche outlets previously. Fox News has never been that important in terms of raw number of viewers, in fact cable news in general never has been. But it has been quite important in influence.

Building out the right-wing propaganda machine on cable news required building out a whole ecosystem of right wing propaganda. For there to be a right wing news network you need right wing experts to interview, you need various right wing celebrities to fill air time. The experts came from the conservative Think Tanks, which had been bubbling around among the elite Republican wing of the party for decades. The celebrities they made out of whole cloth sometimes, and they were a veritable Rogue's Gallery, some of them are still prominent today.

In parallel the early conservative internet was building out. The Drudge Report was an early right-leaning internet only news source that became very prominent on right wing internet. Unlike modern fake news, Matt Drudge really isn't much of a hack, and I'm not even sure he identifies as Republican, but he made sure his site had a certain bent--articles and commentary surfaced that was mostly negative news for Democrats, and negative news for Republicans tended to not get as much play. Drudge was of course child's play compared to what would come.

During the 2000s as an old cadre of Old Guard Republicans and Neoconservatives ensconced themselves throughout the Bush Administration and in other positions of power, the populist right was steadily building out its internet ecosystem.

The Gateway Pundit started in 2004 as sort of a far right equivalent of the DailyKos, and didn't get much traction for years, but the seed was planted (The Gateway Pundit was the fourth-most visited website by Trump supporters in 2020--and often peddles noxiously fake news.)

Breitbart starts in 2007, probably the leader of its class, while more respectable back then, this was kind of the beginning of right wing propaganda ramping up even more. Right wing podcasts are started, right wing TV, insurgent right wing online news sites, etc all start to coordinate. Billionaires start funneling money into some of these ventures. Another new round of celebrities, often more virulent, hateful, and demagogic than the hack conservative pundits of the early aughts and late 90s.

Little of this is really accidental or organic, entire organizations existed and were built up to propagate it, funded by wealthy politically involved conservatives. Steve Bannon becomes important in this movement, probably more important than most would like to admit. The late 2000s and early 2010s is when the insurgent far right also begins to realize that for message discipline to work you can't have internal debate. The conservative who were not on board started to be either hounded out of the party, hounded into silence, or scared into mimicking the extremists. Several Republican politicians show examples of these behaviors:

-Eric Cantor, Jeff Flake, Lincoln Chafee, John Boehner are examples of moderates being ran out
-Mitch McConnell, Mike DeWine are examples of more conservative but "sane" types who realized they had to shut up and never directly cross the extremists
-Lindsey Graham is the archetype of just fully becoming an extremist because you can't imagine life outside of politics and you realize your existing path was too close to the center

Meanwhile we're into the 2010s and social media is becoming really big, and this stuff is starting to flood social media. Having already mastered non-mainstream media, the far right was in a much better position to get into social media and elevate their propaganda efforts even further. The Democrats then and even now seem almost absent from this space.

Now come to where we are now, the GOP has a massive propaganda machine. It has huge presence on very popular podcasts, there are almost no significantly popular left of center, or centrist equivalents of podcasters like Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Dana Loesch, and that's not to mention what I call "conservative-adjacent" podcasters who are not ideological Republican authoritarians but who hate a lot of things about the Dems (mostly politically correctness, but also typically gun control and anything related to taxes)--your Joe Rogans, Sam Harris, Bill Maher types. These people are all stars, the left basically has Rachel Maddow who by herself has less influence than almost any of these people I named.

Married to those popular podcasts you have multiple highly rated Fox News shows that all these podcasters appear on. All of these podcasters have huge social media followings, their shares, likes, retweets, YouTube vides etc get shared and re-shared and shared and re-shared. There is OAN for even more further right shit. When you hear some imbecile far right person today say "I don't watch TV or read the newspapers", but they are conversant in all the conservative grievance war stuff--this is where it comes from. And note that a lot of these people have influence even if someone doesn't religiously listen to their daily/weekly podcasts, because of how clips of their shit gets massively re-shared on social media--there is no Democratic equivalent whatsoever.

The party also can't create this, because the GOP didn't create this and wouldn't know how. The Democratic party can't either. But what the Democratic party can and should do is be finding its richest and most engaged donors and making them understand parallel Democratic institutions needs to exist, right now there is literally nothing[/i]. We are in a war with slick, professional propagandists, and we're sending in Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, who because they still adhere to 20th century standards of journalism won't even say anything rude about these people. It's literally a one sided fight, and the Democrats don't even have guns or ammunition.

[Admiral Yi]

I disagree with you Biscuit about the milk toastinesss of CNN.  In fact I think it's somewhat ridiculous how much time they spend on new revelations that Ivanka's hairdresser got emails about the coordinated attack on the Capitol.

The left has things like MSNBC and Bill Mayer, basically all the late night guys.

I'm willing to concede the possibility that the Democrats need Tamany Hall and need to repeat, ,repeat, repeat or whatever, but I think you should consider the possibility that outside a small shrill twitterati minority Democratic voters are just apathetic.  It explains things as well as your theory and is as consistent with the available facts.

[Berkut]

The irony is that Sam Harris is a full on, total progressive left wing liberal. Same with Bill Maher.

It is the left that has demanded that he be defined otherwise. And he is has a huge following.

[Sheilbh]

If that's what the left has, I'm reminded of Peter Cook's line: "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War".

They seem like they're doing very different things, no?

[Barrister]

Now come to where we are now, the GOP has a massive propaganda machine. It has huge presence on very popular podcasts, there are almost no significantly popular left of center, or centrist equivalents of podcasters like Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Dana Loesch, and that's not to mention what I call "conservative-adjacent" podcasters who are not ideological Republican authoritarians but who hate a lot of things about the Dems (mostly politically correctness, but also typically gun control and anything related to taxes)--your Joe Rogans, Sam Harris, Bill Maher types. These people are all stars, the left basically has Rachel Maddow who by herself has less influence than almost any of these people I named.

Here's a ranking of US political podcasts (on Apple):

https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-politics-podcasts


1
▶–

Crooked Media
Pod Save America
2
▶–

WarRoom.org
Bannon's War Room
3
▲6

Blaze Podcast Network
Louder with Crowder
4
▶–

NPR
The NPR Politics Podcast
5
▶–

The Daily Wire
Candace
6
▲2

Breaking Points
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
7
▼1

The First TV
The President's Daily Brief
8
▼1

Premiere Networks
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
9
▲20

FiveThirtyEight, 538, ABC News, Nate Silver
FiveThirtyEight Politics
10
▲5

Tim Pool
Tim Pool Daily Show

#1 Pod Save America is run by former Obama aides.  Lets call them left.
#2 is Steve Bannon.  Right
#3 is from Blaze (Glen Beck).  Looking at recent episodes - yup right.
#4 NPR.  Left.
#5 Candace Owens - right.
#6 Krystal ans Saagar.  Never heard of them.. Looking at recent episodes my best guess is centre-left.
#7 President's Daily Brief, attempting to summarize the days news in 20 minutes.  Centre
#8 Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.  Their blurb talks about border crisis and cancel culture.  Right.
#9 538.  Going to call it centre-left.
#10 Tim Pool (man this is more work than I thought).  Looks like a former lefty who is now Trump-sympathetic.  Right.

Seems like a fairly even distribution honestly...

[Admiral Yi]

If that's what the left has, I'm reminded of Peter Cook's line: "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War".

They seem like they're doing very different things, no?

Not that different from Limbaugh's mockery and satire.

[Sheilbh]

Not that different from Limbaugh's mockery and satire.

I couldn't say.

I think the media side of things matters - but I think it matters less than the more fringe media on the right and the think-tanky side of things. What powers the media on the right is that set of institutions which, I think, is swimming in some pretty deep and dangerous waters right now (but that's always been a temptation) - the right-wing mediasphere is at the end of that production line. The thinking side which also includes more respectable figures on the right like, say, Ross Douthat is I think what is different and that feeds through into the right media - with enough distance to have plausible deniability as it alters more and more the further it goes from seminar to Shapiro.

I think that's what's lacking on the left (I think for reasons to do with their donors) - so all the left media, if that's what you think they are does, is skewer and satirise conventional wisdom, the media and/or conservatives. That's not enough - and crucially that's not a political agenda (though it is an agenda of stance or style).

I think media, messaging, disinformation, misinforamtion are secondary and a more comfortable reason. I think the issue is strategy and the way the Democrats work. One just requires saying the same thing one more time until people realise the truth and if you fail it's because you wouldn't stoop to there level; the other requires work.

I think OvB is totally right on those points around other institutions that supported democracy - trade unions, women's clubs etc. I'm reading an interesting book on technocracy and populism (and that they basically overlap) which has a lot of thought on that - I'm relatively convinced on their argument about those institutions - although it's from a very European perspective so not totally applicable. It's called Technopopulism - I'd recommend by some of the guys who were regular guests (especially on France and Italy) on Talking Politics.