Volume, variety, vehemence

Democratic messaging instincts are shaped around a media ecosystem that no longer exists. Time for something different

Democrats are stuck in a Sisyphean loop.

Each election cycle, they carefully develop a message. That message centers around the kitchen-table stakes of the parties' respective policy agendas. Dems plug away at this point for months, trying to reassure voters that their real economic concerns are being heard, and Democrats are the party that will help.

Then that message fails to break through. Maybe Republicans win, or maybe Democrats simply underperform. Democrats go through a period of hand-wringing and self-reflection. They emerge from this period with renewed conviction: next time, they will focus even harder on the kitchen-table stakes, with even greater discipline. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The cycle recurs forever. To various degrees, Democrats have resolved to refocus on kitchen-table economic issues after the 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections.

Curiously, Democrats never seem to notice that they are continually readopting the same plan. To them, no matter how many times they rediscover it, the strategy always appears intuitively correct. They backstop that intuition by commissioning polls, which show that messages that don’t break through can nevertheless be popular with a captive audience of survey takers.

Nor do Democrats ever seem to notice that, by this standard, their opponents should always lose. The modern Republican Party is all-but-incapable of maintaining a disciplined focus on pocketbook issues. It constantly strays into lurid culture war topics. Trump has built the GOP into an outright cult of personality. Nonetheless, Republicans remain more than competitive with Democrats in national elections.

Democrats' logic has become circular. Because kitchen-table issues win elections, they argue, any election winner must have focused on those issues. Thus, if Democrats win, it's because they maintained a disciplined focus on economic concerns. But Republicans win, it proves that the GOP was doing a better job of listening to voters' economic pain.

Of course, applying this logic to the 2024 election strains credulity. Donald Trump spent the entire campaign in an ever-intensifying spiral of rage and grievance, mostly centered around himself. The GOP's main forays into policy were xenophobia, transphobia, and culture war noise. Kamala Harris, by contrast, was careful to harp on her plans to reduce grocery prices, make homes more affordable, and improve the economic lives of Americans. Nonetheless, Trump won handily.

And yet, the latest iteration of the endless Democratic loop has already begun. NBC News reported Tuesday that Democrats had decided to respond to Trump by "tuning out the noise and focusing on economic issues." Democrats remain in messaging purgatory. Sisyphus gathers up his boulder for another march up the hill.

What's happening?

I'd argue that Democratic messaging instincts are badly tuned for the modern media environment. Messaging strategies that seem intuitively correct to many Democrats—that seem like common sense, even—are in fact tailored to a media ecosystem that no longer exists. Those strategies do not function in the modern political ecosystem.

To many Democrats, it seems almost self-evident that the ideal message is short, sharp, succinct, and pithy. It is built on issues that appeal to the broadest range of Americans, with the least controversy. Inevitably this means economic issues, since virtually no one minds cheaper stuff or better family finances. And that ideal message, once discovered, shouldn't be diluted with focus on other topics, even high-wattage issues like Trump's corruption or unfitness. After all, if you've already got the single best possible message, anything else can only be a controversial distraction. Disciplined focus on this ideal message, everyone agrees, is the key.

A lot of this made sense in an earlier era. Thirty years ago, the main avenues for reaching voters were a handful of television channels, radio stations, and newspapers. These were the only mass media that reached substantial numbers of Americans, and there were few alternative sources for most people. The media environment was a bit like being plunked into a theater with all of your neighbors, and shown a series of ads and movies. Most people ended up watching the same thing. Politicians, like any other advertiser, could be confident that plenty of people saw their messages, as long as it was playing in that theater. The challenge was to ensure the message landed and resonated. Basic advertising principles applied: slogan-like simplicity, repetition, and, since you were playing to a broad audience, a message chosen for the broadest appeal.

The media ecosystem isn't anything like this at all anymore. Today, most Americans consume media primarily through the internet. Americans spend more than six hours a day online, compared to only about three watching TV. About half of that internet time is spent on social media.

There is no online "front page" that all viewers reliably read. Instead, there are hundreds of different sites, apps, publications, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Everyone has a different set of sources. On social media, this reality is magnified a hundredfold: every social media user has a different experience, even of the same sites, depending on whom they follow, and, in some cases, what the site's algorithm chooses to show them. Meanwhile, traditional media has also become more fragmented. People no longer rely on a single hometown paper or the nightly news, but instead watch a variety of national and local sources, usually supplemented with lots of online material.

If the traditional media environment was like being in a theater with your neighbors, the modern media environment is more like being in a vast, labyrinthine convention hall with those same neighbors. In the hall are hundreds of vendors, all shouting for your attention. Some booths are more interesting than others, and everyone is floating between a bunch of different booths, depending on what appeals to them most.

How do you get a message out in this fragmented ecosystem? The things that were once common sense—simple messages, broad appeal built on mundane economic concerns, disciplined repetition—are suddenly liabilities, not strengths.

In that noisy convention hall, the main factor determining if anyone hears what you have to say isn't the overall agreeability of your message, it's whether your message attracts any attention. And a broad, uncontroversial message focused on mundane kitchen-table questions is also frequently the most boring. Simply put, why would anyone bother to come listen to you? You have hundreds of competitors, many of whom have emotional, authentic, or exciting things to say. You're offering a dull lecture about health care and prices, and next door someone is screaming bloody murder. The audience's attention is drawn elsewhere.

In this ecosystem, the GOP's chaotic messaging suddenly looks less like a weakness, and more like a strength.

By flailing wildly at hot-button issues, Republicans ensure that whatever they are saying, many people will pay attention. The GOP's refusal to enforce any kind of message discipline—chasing after every single ball and freely shifting from one topic to the next, rather than focusing robotically on a single predetermined subject—helps it occupy as much space in the "convention hall" of media discourse as possible. And by engaging in aggressive culture-war conflicts, it perpetually engages public interest, drawing in curious onlookers who want to cheer for one side against the other.

Certainly, the GOP doesn't test its messages with the same religious fervor as Democrats, or adhere as closely to ideas that poll well. But message-testing can only ever replicate the captive audience of the traditional theater, not the chaotic modern convention hall. Its willingness to test its ideas live, to a real audience, gives it more flexibility in an unpredictable and complex environment that can't be simulated in a focus group.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the GOP's approach invites further discussion. This is a massive advantage in a fragmented media ecosystem. Since there is no main channel or front page that everyone sees, the best way to reach many, many people is to get as many sources as possible to repeat your message. In other words, Democrats might have a broadly appealing kitchen-table agenda, but no independent media personality is ever going to want to talk about it, because it's inauthentic, carefully manufactured, and dull. It would be like reciting a car insurance commercial on your podcast. You know what isn't boring? Culture wars and authentic political combat. By constantly engaging on these levels, and never leaving any fight unfought, the GOP ensures that their priorities get repeated by countless minor nodes within the diffuse public discourse. There is always some controversy or conflict to discuss. In the process, the GOP's worldview is pushed constantly into the eyes and ears of millions and millions of voters.

Democrats have discipline and restraint on their side. But those are the precise characteristics that handicap them in the freewheeling, chaotic modern media ecosystem. For all of their professionalism and careful planning, Democrats are engaged in a well-funded, highly focused pursuit of the wrong thing entirely. In the words of one clever Blue Sky commentator, there are three qualities that help a message spread in today's media ecosystem: volume, variety, and vehemence. Republican messaging exhibits them; Democratic messaging doesn't.

Democrats should stop trying to push the same boulder uphill every election. It's time to accept that there is no perfectly tuned, perfectly focused kitchen-table message that will reach a huge mass of voters and change their minds. Instead, they should free themselves to do what comes more naturally—to go out and simply argue about the issues, using their genuine voices, expressing their genuine concerns. If something outrageous is happening, they should say so, with as much volume and sincerity as possible, rather than worry about being "distracted" from some pre-scripted performance. They should accept that everything they say will not reach every voter, and that's okay. In today's media ecosystem, politicians take up a lot more space in the public mind by being loud and aggressive, engaging on every front, than by designing a perfect slogan and waiting for voters to notice it.

This piece was originally published at Off Message. Please consider subscribing!