Watching the listings on news blogs like this one or listening to pundits going over post-election results, I can’t help but notice the avalanche of hotly debated questions concerning how Democrats can craft messages that resonates with various demographic groups we feel like we’re missing at any one moment. It never ends. I can only speak for myself, but I get the sense that there’s a consensus that we need a new approach.
But which message? What balance? Who can deliver it with which regional accent? Who can wear cowboy boots or dye their hair pink in order to appeal to this or that group? But for myself, I also get the sense that in our hearts, this cosmetic, shallow, marketing approach to politics has worn out its welcome among American voters.
Whether it’s Jon Tester or well-meaning people on this blog who are trying to untangle the ever elusive knot of competing, contradictory, and ephemeral characteristics needed to hit just the right note to sell as much soda pop secure enough voters to win elections… I have the sinking feeling that none of it will matter, that their efforts in marketing to us are futile.
So what if we gave up on these endless debates about marketing, both among ourselves and in particular by Democratic politicians and pundits?
What if we put all of the time, energy, money, and other valuable resources we put into dressing up as this or rebranding ourselves as that… and focused all of that pool of energy on the work of crafting bills and showing them to the American public? What if rather than spending so much of our time trying to get them to trust us to do the job… what if we just did the job and showed them what it would look like?
Because you know what? Americans don’t trust Democrats. They don’t trust Republicans either, but for different reasons. I’m a lifelong Democratic voter and there’s a whole heap of Democrats I don’t trust... and both Jon Tester and Chuck Schumer are on that list. A big tent party isn’t something anyone is going to have much inclination to trust because it’s composed of too many different kinds of people… and many many people in general don’t trust those who are different than themselves. It’s a lot easier to market to a homogenous group of people, as conservatives do. For them, marketing is as natural as breathing, because it’s straightforward and easy and has been since cross burning... since before that.
So what do I mean by a post-marketing approach to politics? It’s relatively simple and it’s how we decided to run our business, with quite a bit of success I might add. We decided to disregard the commissioning of or any studies related to marketing or trends. We focused only on the work. We diverted all the resources that similar firms pay to specialists or do in-house on unpacking what people want and relied on common sense, experience, and those extra resources to offer better quality work for our clients’ money. It resulted in a lot more good publicity than advertising and marketing studies have brought our competitors.
So rather than spending the next 4 years trying to unpack how to appeal to the American people via specially crafted messaging by various groups or fighting it out on the blogs about which words are OK for activists to use and which will lose us rural voters, let’s save ourselves a lot of wasted time and energy and recognize one unchangeable reality first.. the reality that led me to the conclusion and the proposal that I’ve made here so far. We can’t control how activists, or bloggers, or a fed up local politician, or any other group behaves or what they say, and especially what they say and do while protesting or in their online activities. So, it’s pointless debating whether certain phrases or beliefs should become memes. They will regardless, because the principles of viral phenomena will make sure of it. It’s beyond our control to stop people, and especially young people, from calling for a defunding of the police or controlling how it’s phrased… for example. And it’s certainly beyond the control of Democrats in office.
So what are Democrats to do? I propose that they should do their jobs. What I want to see are bills. I don’t care if they have a chance in hell of being passed. And the ones that don’t should be crafted to be so simple that a child could understand them, because I think these should be our new “messaging.” Doing the job is the message. Don’t tell us about the words you want to use or the commissions you want to form or the studies you want to do and how they should be worded to appeal to whatever demographic. Democratic leaders should get together, as we pay for them to do, and come to a consensus among themselves and then craft many many more bills that reflect that consensus. Then show us those bills and tell us how they work to solve problems. Bills may not be easy to understand, but their bottom line solutions are… solutions crafted via consensus by politicians we pay. Focus on telling us about what you’ve done and stick to that, not what you plan to do.
Don’t ask us to trust you. Don’t argue about how to say the right things to the right people to get them to trust you. That smacks of insincerity. Anything that smells of marketing or advertising is precisely the thing that Americans are so tired of in our politics. That’s part of the reason that people who shouldn’t be are voting for Republicans, because you get what you pay for, at least the impactful part. It may be awful, but when you vote for a Republican, you know exactly which groups of people that you may hate that are going to be hurting more if they win. And that’s guaranteed. And on the other hand, the American people already generally know what Democrats believe in and that there’s a range of opinion in our party all the way from pure socialist to average everyday capitalist to pure Wall Street-sucking fat cat, though the latter is less and less I would argue. That range means that Americans really don’t know what they’ll get. They know what they might get, a general sense… but it’s a very very big tent.
Republicans have it easy. They know from decades of rock solid evidence that all they need to do is beat up on non-whites and on black people most of all, because almost every other group of folks have a big enough contingency that hate blacks that Republicans can create their 40% coalition without getting out of their bathrobes in the morning. And they couldn’t care less about the problems that face our country or crafting laws to address them. They don’t believe in crafting laws because they don’t want any more laws on the books that rich people might have to obey. It’s easy to do the job when you don’t believe the job should exist but are still promised tenure anyway. Democrats actually have to do the work of running a country. It’s a lot of work, doing the Republicans’ jobs for them, on top of our own.
So, my proposal is to accept that in the Internet age, messaging is largely beyond our control and focus our energy like a laser on other strategies to connect with voters. My proposal is to focus on the job rather than introduce some new-fangled strategy that merely displaces our American obsession with marketing as the miracle cure for everything that ails us and wastes so much energy needlessly. Promises of broadband, or green jobs, or police commissions with proposals, one day, maybe… nobody’s listening, people. Show us laws that would implement these things.
Stop wasting time arguing about how to say it and just get together and put it down on paper. Come back to us and show the American public what laws you want to pass and what reforms you want to make, in writing. Nobody buys anything unless it’s in writing. We voted, you’re in office. That’s the extent of what we can control. BLM will do their thing and so will the farmers. Democrats in office, show us what you can agree on and make it concrete so we can see it and don’t have to trust you.
Put the messaging on hold and do the job. There may be more technocratic voters out there than you think, waiting for someone to simply just show them the fruits of all of our voting and donating. I sure as hell can tell ya that nobody I know is breathlessly waiting for y’all to figure out whether “defund the police” or “reform the police” is the right sound bite in the New York Times and then approvingly looking on as you spend thousands and thousands of hours second guessing it that could have been spent on doing the job.
Legislation is the only trustworthy product that proves Democrats in office believe this or that and such bills are what the American people need to see to trust them in my opinion. The rest is just mindless desperate spending on marketing in the hopes that it’s the miracle cure it’s not... another of the billions of postings on Instagram that DON’T blow up into the next viral sensation… far more wasted energy than us Democratic voters can afford anymore.