Time to break glass. With less than seven months to the most consequential midterm election in our nation’s history, feelings of dread entwined with frustration are now the norm among Democrats. Not surprising given the scant evidence anything other than the statistical near certainty of a president’s party losing seats in the midterm awaits us in November. Regardless of what the Democratic Party may have thought was their election strategy in 2022, to the extent a cohesive one ever existed, it should be clear now, to anyone paying attention, that it’s not working.
Maybe you’re like me and following last November’s election you told yourself that within a few months, once Infrastructure, Build Back Better and Voting Rights were passed, we would begin to see a return on those achievements in the form of improved poll results for key indicators – namely, voter enthusiasm, generic congressional ballot and Biden’s approval rating. But here we are in April with only one of those accomplishments under our belt, and near zero chance of the other two happening courtesy of Senators Manchin and Sinema along with every Republican. Even with incredibly positive economic news month after month coupled with receding COVID-19 caseloads (the recent threat from a new omicron subvariant notwithstanding) there’s no sign that anything is helping. The poll numbers not only refuse to trend back in the Democrats’ direction, lately they appear to be worsening. Time is not on our side and the need to reevaluate strategy to determine a new, more effective course of action has never been more obvious.
But perhaps such a heavy reliance on policy accomplishments to drive approval thereby leading to electoral success was the wrong approach to begin with. Presidents tend to get shellacked in the midterms even when there are significant legislative victories and strong economies. Think 1966 where President Lyndon B Johnson, with the GDP at 6.5%, unemployment under 4% and Medicare, Medicaid and the 1965 Voting Rights Act all signed into law, managed to lose 47 House seats and 3 Senate seats in the midterm election. Had Biden fully delivered on his agenda are we really that sure we would not still be facing the same outcome?
The purpose of this essay though is to focus on solutions not dwell on the current despondency. Searching for a glass half full, there seems to be at least hints that some sort of reboot towards a more assertive approach among Democrats could gain some traction. Whether there will be a broader effort with full leadership support remains to be seen, but recently at least some Democrats have taken a much sharper tone at Republicans (some examples in Daily Kos here, here, and here). We need a lot more of this. In fact, nothing less than a fierce, coordinated, unrelenting attack on the Republican brand between now and November is needed to have any chance of retaining control of the House and Senate.
Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, best known for her spot on prediction (within 1 vote) of the Democratic Party’s recapturing of the House in 2018, is among the leading advocates of this approach. She recently sat down with Nicole Sandler for a one on one interview (begins at 6:25) and provided a great explanation of brand assault and how it can be used to control the narrative and keep Democrats on offense and Republicans on defense instead of the other way around.
Bitecofer’s premise makes logical sense and helps take a lot of the mystery out of the ‘awful poll numbers despite great economic news’ conundrum. Low information voters forming negative opinions about Biden and the Democrats, however unjustified we may find these feelings, are not likely to change their minds just because they’re reminded about monthly jobs figures or that the infrastructure bill passed, or that Democrats really tried hard to enact the Freedom to Vote Act and Build Back Better but just didn’t have the votes. Same too with better informed voters who supported Biden and his legislative priorities but are now discouraged by the lack of results. Those in the latter group may not all vote Republican in the midterms, many may just stay home and not vote at all. Bitecofer urges that we reach these groups of voters by making it personal with sharp messaging that drives home what’s at stake if the Republicans win.
To help illustrate the opportunity here, a recent Morning Consult Poll shows that among voters who received the expanded child tax credit in 2021, more support the generic Republican candidate over the Democratic one if the election were today. A similar poll in December, before the credit disappeared with the defeat of Build Back Better, showed the Democrat leading that indicator by twelve points.
Taking a step back we should ask ourselves this question: Does it make logical sense for a person to lose something of such importance only to support the very party responsible for taking it away? Perhaps in a non-polarized political environment with everyone getting their information from well sourced reporting, the answer would be an emphatic no, of course that makes no sense! But that’s no longer the world we live in. Today the Republicans are beating the Democrats at messaging to such a degree, usually through outright lies, that not only constituencies like those surveyed in the Morning Consult poll, but even traditional party stalwarts like African Americans and Latinos are slipping into the Republican column. Add to that the mainstream media focusing more on the discord between two Democratic senators and the rest of their party in the Build Back Better debacle instead of the entire Republican Party refusing to even consider that bill and you can better understand the predicament we find ourselves in. The opportunity then is for the Democrats to beat Republicans at their own messaging game. Target the conversion pool of voters by wedge issuing the hell out of this. The Republicans just raised your taxes and they’re planning to do it again when they take control of Congress!
There is a richness of messaging opportunities given how extreme the Republican Party has become. They pose a real and direct threat to so many people’s lives that it would be malpractice not to make this the centerpiece of the 2022 campaign. Abortion is another prime example. They have already begun criminalizing abortion at the state level anticipating an overturn of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court. The recent arrest of a Texas woman, charged with murder allegedly for an induced abortion and then released wasn’t a mistake so much as them jumping the gun. One state Republican representative in Texas recently went so far as to introduce a bill enabling physicians performing and women having abortions to be charged with homicide, punishable by the death penalty. The bill went nowhere but that’s hardly reassuring. This is where we are heading if they are not stopped. Even contraception is on their radar. Messaging which sounds the alarm on this needs to be sharper, louder, more frequent and everywhere.
There are a whole host of reasons why the Democratic Party would be well advised to execute a full-throated brand assault strategy and to do so immediately. Here are a few:
- It’s worked before. In 2018 the Democrats trounced the Republicans and took back the House of Representatives. Sure, Democratic candidates may have run on policy to a degree but that’s not what decided this election. Voters were expressing a visceral revulsion to Trump and Trumpism and were taking it out on everyone with an R next to their name. The only difference between then and now is that Trump did the heavy lifting for us by assaulting the Republican brand through his own unrestrained incompetence. Today the Republican Party has become even more extreme and radicalized than it ever was under Trump but it falls to Democrats to take over on damaging their brand. The key challenge here is to keep the messaging on the party, more so than on any individual person. Anything anyone in the party does the party owns. In other words, Rick Scott goes and releases an 11 Point “Rescue America Plan”, chock-full of awful ideas like sunsetting Social Security and Medicare and making everyone pay taxes. Mitch McConnell, apparently caught off guard, was unhappy with the plan being so transparent. Well, that’s too bad. It's there in writing and can never be walked back. Now the party, and by definition anyone running as a candidate in that party, owns it. Same with all of the forced birther measures enacted at the state level. They now belong to every Republican running in 2022. Let them waste precious time and resources trying to distance themselves from their own party on these issues.
- It’s an effective way to unite Democrats. The Democratic party is a big tent with a diversity of viewpoints which is generally a good thing. It makes consensus on legislation particularly tough at the moment, however, given the tight seat margin in the House and the even tighter 50-50 Senate. At times divisions on policy approach can surface leading to conflicts being played out publicly. We all know we have a messaging problem, but singling out individual coalitions within the party claiming they’re the ones responsible for the party’s woes is not a smart strategy. James Carville exemplifies this problem when he begins his argument by trashing wokeness – in other words propping up a disingenuous right wing trope. Eventually he pivots to some pretty good stuff like “They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it.” Too bad it comes at the end - just look at the awful headline we get as a result. But clearly with some better discipline Democrats from both the progressive and moderate wings of the party can get behind a unified offensive messaging which keeps the focus on Republicans attacking our democracy, standing with Putin, subjugating women, ending Social Security, ending Medicare and Medicaid, raising taxes on working people, identifying with white supremacists, and destroying our planet to name just a few.
- It does not rely on events occurring that we cannot control. Praying the next monthly jobs report will deliver good news for Biden and the Democrats is not a winning strategy. Nor is releasing one million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve hoping for a decrease in oil prices leading to lower gasoline prices. It may happen or maybe not. It can also undermine our ability to deal with climate change. I will go out on a limb here and say that there are more within the base of the Democratic Party bothered by the prospect of an uninhabitable planet than there are those bothered by paying more for gasoline. Oh, and by the way in November 2016 when there was a Democrat in the White House, and Donald Trump won the election to become president, taking the House and Senate as well, average price for gas that year was only $2.25 per gallon. So, there’s that. Whatever limited benefit you may reap from the conversion pool by seeing gas prices go down may cost you in support from the base. Brand assault on the other hand does not require wishing for certain events to happen. We simply take the “gifts” that the Republican Party has already given us and weaponize them. And my oh my, can they possibly have been more generous with these gifts? Hell, they even gave us “coke orgies”.
In developing a messaging strategy Bitecofer’s Twitter feed is a good source for starting points. Here are a just a few of them:
It's not that policy and legislative achievements do not matter when it comes to winning elections. The things Democrats have accomplished and would still like to accomplish are what separate us from Republicans. It’s just they need to be delivered as part of a strong offensive strategy or as Bitecofer puts it in the interview “we take our really popular shit and bludgeon them with it”. If you have 7 seconds to drive home a message in a campaign ad, isn’t it more impactful to stress how your Republican opponent is against lowering the price of insulin than to simply say you support it?
The stakes in this election are simply too high to not pull out all of the stops. It’s understandable that brand assault as an overall strategy may not be an easy sell for some in the party establishment. Favoring bipartisanship as a campaign theme and fear of being perceived as “going negative” still passes for strategy these days even though it’s been shown to be ineffectual. If it didn’t work in the 2020 election when the fundamentals were great for Democrats yet we still managed to lose House seats, how could it possibly work in 2022? And perhaps more importantly, when someone is about to jump off of a cliff by voting Republican is it “going negative” to try and stop them by telling them how far down it is and how hard they are going to hit the ground? A skillfully executed brand assault can reach those people helping to save them and the country from the catastrophic assault on our democracy that the Republican Party has in store for all of us.