The club Republicans use to beat Democrats. It works ever time.
Democrats Can’t Win for Losing. Lets be honest if it wasn’t for Republican defectors Trump would of been reelected. IMHO it was the Republican Dog Whistles that cost us House seats and just may have them keep control of the Senate.
So what is a Dog Whistle?
The Root has a good piece from 2014: 8 Sneaky Racial Code Words and Why Politicians Love Them.
Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, says it's not just the promotion of old-fashioned racial stereotypes that we need to worry about. Rather, he argues, it's the manipulation of racism in service of very specific goals.
The article goes on to list some popular whistles from 2014, Inner City, States Rights, Forced Busing, Welfare', 'Food Stamps, 'Shariah Law', ‘Illegal Alien’, ‘Law and Order’, and the ubiquitous, ‘Tax Cuts’. The last three are super prevalent today.
'Cut Taxes'
Dog-whistle politics is partly about demonizing people of color, but it's also about demonizing government in a way that helps the very rich, says López. So, when Ronald Regan said "cut taxes," what he was communicating to the middle class was, "so your taxes won't be wasted on minorities." A key Reagan operative admitted as much in an interview quoted in Lopez's book, saying, " 'We want to cut taxes' … is a whole lot more abstract than, 'N*****, n*****.' " It continues to be more abstract, and it continues to work.
The dog whistles that Republicans use to club our candidates, and us with are ever present and lethal, and many aren’t even raciest; ‘socialism’, ‘radical leftest’, ‘ANTIFA’, ‘BLM’, ‘looters’, ‘rioters’, ‘raise you taxes’, ‘take away your doctor’, ‘defund the police’, and the list goes on and on. (Please feel free to add whistles of your own.) They even scare me to vote Republican (not). They also could very well be why we lost so many House, Senate and down ballot races.
Not only do they use dog whistles effectively they use them over and over.
Trump unleashed a fusillade of them at his Georgia senate and whine fest. Only, to be repeated verbatim at the senate debate. Do Democrats even have talking points?
And, the worst part is, they sick to us like super glue. We neither have answers for them or potent whistles of our own to hit them back with.
Not that the opportunities are not out there, ‘take away your healthcare’, ‘preexisting conditions’, ‘end democracy’, ‘COVID vaccine’, ‘impeached’, ‘Putin’s Poodle’, and so on. Sure, we used some of them, but did they stick, did they help us win elections, not.
Is it the message, the messengers. I think both.
Dan Wagner, Chief Analytics Officer on the Obama 2012 campaign, said on a recent episode of Pod Save America:
People like the Democratic product, but they don't like Democrats at the same rate that they like the product, and that's the definition of a brand problem.
Yes Democrats have a branding problem. But the dog whistle problem is much bigger, and much more pernicious.
Until we find an antidote, and an aggressive strategy to fight back with, and the right people to carry the message, we will always win for losing...
