This article at Hullabaloo should be required reading for the folks currently running the Democratic Party, but there’s little question that while it correctly identifies a fairly obvious problem with the Democrats, it would be completely ignored.
The article, which refers initially to a New Republic article by Alex Pareen, relates that the Democrats are sort of stuck in a prior error, and have failed to adjust to the realities of the modern age.
The Republican Party does not control the conservative propaganda network that keeps it relevent despite the party’s failures. Conservative media drives the party. But the two are at least symbiotic. Democrats rely on an outdated model of staging events and votes designed to get corporate mainstream media to tell their story for them for free (“earned media”). It is a strategy, Pareene suggests, that dates to when there were only three network news outlets. But after decades of the right “working the refs,” the media’s framing of Democratic narratives often goes sideways.
One thing the article notes would be effective, and which of course the Democrats don’t do, is sell the party as an entity, rather than solely individual candidates:
Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter “conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists” with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, “people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads,” and that “higher doses of party-promoting ads” could influence people’s voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. “Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior,” the political scientists wrote. “By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.”
Here at this humble blog I’ve been arguing forever that the Democrats have to come up with a narrative that they repeat like a drumbeat. Everyone should be singing from the same page, as the Republicans do, with those not inclined to sing obediently sitting quietly on the sidelines, doing what they’re told when the time comes. Right now, Republicans are actually trying to sell themselves as the party of the working class, and they’ll be successful if the Democrats don’t effectively counter them, and they can’t rely on MSNBC or CNN to do that for them. As the article notes, there are plenty of skilled writers who would be more than happy to help craft a message to shape the Democratic Party’s brand.
The article implies what appears to be the case with the Democrats who have seized control of the national party apparatus: they care more about keeping the money flowing and directing it to their favored recipients than in winning, much less actually effectively governing.
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