On Messaging

I speak from experience.

As someone who has worked and volunteered for the last three presidential campaigns, I have had the unique opportunity to speak directly to voters in swing states and sway them to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. I've been part of targeted lists focused on core demographics: seniors, women, Black voters, Latino voters, AAPI voters, college students, and everyone in between. While I've been given scripts to read, I've also used my own firsthand knowledge and experience to hear these potential voters' concerns and to allay their fears. My overarching philosophy has been simple: highlight what the Democratic candidate supports instead of bashing the Republican opponent. Meet voters where they are at. Provide both accomplishments and future plans to address the voter's key issue. Do everything possible to provide a positive, uplifting message that genuinely provides hope for the voter. Having done this with thousands of voters over the past three election cycles, I have acquired one key takeaway: 

Voters don't listen to reason. 

Not in the least. When talking to undecided voters, the key takeaway is to know that very few, if any, are actually undecided. They've already been swayed, likey by misinformation and manipulation. While you cite sources and statistics, they cite obviously biased websites or already debunked stories. When you combat this information, they get defensive. They can't acknowledge that they're the ones being manipulated. They go on the attack. They claim that you're the one who is being manipulated and that you're the one who doesn't understand the truth. Rather than considering that maybe, just maybe, they might have gotten their information from an unreliable source, these voters double and triple down on their false beliefs. Even with facts staring them in the face, these voters are unable to see the truth about the world in which they live.

And yet somehow, these are the people we need to reach.

At least, that's the impression one gets when she or he reads the majority of all these post-election analyses by people who haven't done a single campaign volunteer shift in the past 8 years. In trying to figure out how and why 6 million Democrats sat home, the consensus is slowly building upon this idea that Democrats' messaging was the problem. The emerging theory is that if Democrats had communicated more efficiently, then the bulk of those 6 million missing Democrats would have returned to the polls and cast their vote for Kamala Harris, just as they had for Joe Biden. The armchair political pundits believe that Democrats didn't do a good enough job announcing their accomplishments or sharing their values or their vision for the next 4 years. If Democrats could simply have better messaging, they would have easily defeated Trump and kept the White House. To this, I have a single-word response: 

Bullshit. 

And I call bullshit because 75 million of us easily understood the assignment. As always, Black women did it best with 92% voting correctly. Black men came in second at 77%. Latinas came in third at 58%. While there was a significant shift from Latino men to the GOP, white men and women gave in to their white supremacy heritage and voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Making up 71% of the voting electorate, white people once again put the most unqualified and uncouth man to ever hold the presidency back in the position for a second time. The youth vote again disappointed, making up only 14% of the overall electorate, which was half the number of those 65+ and 40% of those aged 44-65. The people and groups that most needed to show up simply didn't.

But how and why they didn't show up is much more than a messaging issue. After all, Black women showed up. Why is it that they got the message but their White counterparts did not? Why did boomers show up at two-and-a-half times the rate of Generation Alpha? How would different messaging have altered voter turnout? 

Simple answer: it wouldn't. Again, as I shared in my experience, the missing 6 million Democrats had all the information they needed, they simply chose not to act. How and why they made this decision is on them. Was the price of eggs simply too excessive? Were Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala not doing enough for Gaza? Was the Democratic Party's removal of Joe Biden at the top of the ticket too much of a deal breaker to then go and vote for his chosen successor?

The truth of this election is that Democrats did the best they could with the circumstances provided. After all, the information and messaging were there if you knew where to look. Kamala Harris' website had 82 pages of policy proposals. Democrats and pro-Democratic groups spent $1.8 billion on ads, often microtargeting for those priority voting groups. Harris and her team elevated social media influencers to help spread the word about her and her accomplishments. You could do a simple YouTube search and see dozens of high-quality ads throughout the campaign cycle. There were also the frequent travel and campaign stops of the Harris/Walz campaign, especially in the 7 key swing states. If you didn't know who Kamala Harris was or what she stood for, then you were intentionally not paying attention. 

That right there is why Democrats don't need to blow up their existing messaging strategy in the months to come. Any voter claiming to not have known about Kamala Harris is lying. Any voter claiming not to know what Joe Biden had accomplished is lying. Pundits love to criticize Democrats for not bragging about their successes. Yet every single infrastructure project has a sign that the project is being funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Voters who were overly concerned about inflation could have done a simple Google search to learn that the United States had the strongest economic recovery of any country in the world when it came to overcoming COVID-19. Voters concerned about the price of eggs could have very easily learned that the increased price is due largely to a strain of bird flu that has consistently wreaked havoc on the industry over the past two years. All of this information is publicly available and to be uneducated or misinformed on the issues was an intentional choice made by the 6 million Democratic voters who sat out 2024.

While messaging can always be tweaked and improved, the hot take claiming that Democrats need to start from scratch is simply false. The information was available in 2024 if you chose to seek it. What today's armchair pundits won't acknowledge is that it's not about reaching people, it's about understanding the new reality we're facing. While pundits love to laud folks like Pete Buttigieg for going on Fox News, the truth is that even with Secretary Buttigieg presenting a counter-narrative to the Fox News audience, very few, if any, viewers suddenly become Democrats after hearing him speak. There's this continued storyline that Democrats need to change their messaging to reach rural Americans. But the question isn't how to reach them but instead why they aren't processing the reality on the ground. Why are union workers voting against Joe Biden even though he saved their pensions? Why do farmers consistently vote GOP even though the Biden administration provided financial assistance to more than 43,000 of them this past year? And why don't more rural voters vote for Democrats, whose work around the child tax credit helped temporarily cut child poverty by 30%? 

These people should all be voting Democrat. But they don't and will continue not to do so. Yet pundits will insist they are reachable and that the Democratic Party should mightily invest in them for all future elections. 

The moral is that you can't help those who don't want to be helped. To stand up and say that different messaging will reach voters who consistently vote against their own best interests is a lie. It's easy to armchair quarterback the 2024 election and stating that improved Democratic messaging is a cure-all is simply lazy and ignores the reality on the ground. Unfortunately, for the 6 million non-voters it's going to take some hardships these next 4 years to finally understand their reality. We, as campaign volunteers, can talk to them until we're blue in the face but until they personally feel the impact of a second Trump administration, we simply have to wait. These fairweather Democrats didn't understand the assignment in 2024 and the only thing that will make them understand it in 2028 is knowing and understanding that what is happening to them is a direct result of the decisions being made by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. 

That is the only message that these voters will understand.