About That Messaging...
Democrats have been in a blind panic these past few weeks over the upcoming mid-term elections. Some, assuming their loss of Congress and some consequential state-level races, are offering presumptive post-mortem assessments of this outcome. John Harris, founder of Politico, offers his review of such in "Democrats Debate Themselves: Why Do We Suck?"
He, like so many others, misses the crux of this election. And, like so many others, continues to show an ignorance of what has been staring them all in the face since the moment the last election cycle completed.
The writing was on the wall.
Despite winning the White House, the Dems lost seats in the House, and but for the gracelessness of Trump would have been the minority party in the Senate.
The wall read "we kinda like the direction of the nation, we simply don't like Trump."
The Democrats ignored all that. They ignored that Biden, who presented himself as the most moderate of the primary candidates, was singled out from a basketful of more-progressive-than-thou wannabes in the primary. They ignored that Biden won with a message of moderation and normalcy. They ignored their House losses in a year that their party won the White House. They ignored the outlier reality and 'squeaker' margin of their victories in the Georgia Senate races.
They treated the 2020 election as a "transform the nation" mandate. Politically, they pursued an agenda to the left of Obama's. Culturally, they bent the knee to the most wild-eyed progressive's demands, and ignored even common-sense moderates' reticence about transgender athletes, people with penises in women's locker rooms, and grade-school sex-ed.
Now they're on the precipice of paying a steep price for their dismissals of the zeitgeist.
That they're wondering what went wrong is nothing more than willful blindness and self-delusion.
Willful blindness and self-delusion that persists, even in Harris's navel-gazing article.
I read, in many places, that the Dems have failed in "messaging." That, if only they put a better spin and more emphasis on their legislative victories, people would appreciate what they've done. That they didn't do a better job selling the abortion story, or their pandemic management, or their economic successes. That they didn't talk enough about how their policies would help the crime problem. That they didn't sufficiently tout their pro-worker bona fides. That they didn't sufficiently sell the importance of their decarbonization agenda.
On the cultural front, Obama, the most accomplished scold in recent history, lamented that the Dems went too far with "woke."
Well, no shit.
But, even apart from the culture-war aspect of this election, there is the delusion that the Dems' failing was about poor marketing.
I don't care if your ad-man was Don Draper himself, you don't build a brand hyping stuff people don't want. Or by flat-out lying to the public (see: pandemic, economy, and a bunch of other things). Those "legislative victories" - wholly partisan bull-rushes - ran in direct contradiction to the aforementioned zeitgeist and voter desires. They were what the party leadership wanted, not what the people wanted. Touting them as big wins reveals the Left's problem: a 'voters should like what we do' rather than 'give the voters what they want' arrogance.
Here's another message to ponder.
Mr. Obeidallah (if I can presume the honorific) is echoing a common bit of last-minute, hail-Mary stridency: that giving Congressional majorities to the GOP will spell the end of "democracy" itself. This, based on the continuing silliness that the GOP is all about voter suppression, coups, and one-party rule, when it’s not about stealing elections from the Democrats. Apart from the fact that the nation is a republic, not a democracy, this is just more deceitful arrogance. The "democracy" these folks want want is akin to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the German Democratic Republic, or the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. They dream of one-party rule, where everyone gets the privilege of voting for that party, and everyone is free to do as the ruling class wants.
If the Democrats do indeed lose Congress, the reasons will have nothing to do with poor messaging and everything to do with bad policies and a misreading of the electorate. They will have only themselves to blame. The masses made their wants quite clear. The Dems chose, instead, to listen to the 2% who dominate Twitter.
They deserve to lose, and lose big. Maybe, next election, they'll run on a moderate platform and mean it.
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Peter.
It never fails to amaze me that Democrats tend to fall back on the notion that the party just didn't message their agenda properly, ie the populace wasn't smart enough to understand the topics. Such arrogance.
Willful blindness and self-delusion, obvious from day one of this administration. Immediately overturning the pipeline and immigration policies. Biden acted from the clearly false belief that he had a mandate, the joy of ridding the nation of Trump blinded him and his ilk to every other indicator in the election. His first actions were anti-Trump and nothing else. BTW “the gracelessness of Trump” resonated with me. So good Peter, as always zeroing in on the problems.