Read on Twitter
A basic failure of Democratic leadership is that they don't even know where to begin looking for their failures. They treat the correct POLITICS as obvious and perceive shortcomings as coming from the technical, operational, organizing side of campaigns. https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1334879140680523778
But there's limited evidence that campaigns matter at all, whether run well or poorly. Lots of fabulously-run campaigns flop, lots of awful campaigns succeed.
The Democratic flop is deeper. It's IDEOLOGICAL and RHETORICAL in nature.
The Democratic flop is deeper. It's IDEOLOGICAL and RHETORICAL in nature.
Democrats have spent so long as the party of triangulation, consultants, and focus groups that they've completely lost the ability to be effective at basic politics and political rhetoric. They don't know how to take good fights or tell compelling stories or make good enemies.
The 2020 election is the strongest evidence yet: confronted with a train-wreck presidency led by an corrupt idiot, during a recession and horrific pandemic, they... simply ran the same issue-oriented kitchen-table campaign, with the same mediocre results.
The rules Dems follows are hoary and predictable:
-focus on kitchen-table issues
-avoid conflict
-invoke bipartisanship
-lower the volume
-don't get distracted
But worse than they, they're rigid. The party refuses to treat politics as a give-and-take, something to be adapted to.
-focus on kitchen-table issues
-avoid conflict
-invoke bipartisanship
-lower the volume
-don't get distracted
But worse than they, they're rigid. The party refuses to treat politics as a give-and-take, something to be adapted to.
In the interest of fairness, and with all due respect to Adam, this is a different version of the same problem! It assumes up front that we know the correct message. There's nothing magic about an "economic" message any more than there is about health care https://twitter.com/AJentleson/status/1334890771737169921
We don't KNOW what the right message is. The smart tactic is try lots of things - to try everything, really - and go with the stuff that seems to work.
But DC conventional wisdom is infected with lots of assumptions about how things should work, assumptions that are grounded in a lot of premises that aren't actually proven, like the idea that economic messaging is somehow more fundamental and universal than other things.
It FEELS right, that economic messaging is more fundamental and universal, and therefore stronger. It feels like the world should work that way. But does it? What's the mechanism? Is the primacy of economics proven? Or do other, more parochial things often seem to matter more?
We don't know, you don't know, nobody knows - the world is vastly more complicated and unpredictable than our Politics Knowers will recognize or admit, and there is tremendous uncertainty about even the most basic premises of political change and persuasion. Start from there.
