This week on The Brief: How Democrats can craft successful messaging that gets through to their base
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This week on The Brief, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld talked all things messaging and how Democrats can shape an effective narrative that will pay dividends come November. Guest Jenifer Fernandez-Ancona, vice president of Way to Win, joined the show to talk about the group’s work shaping progressive messaging and what she’s learned about how Democrats can effectively combat the GOP’s aggressive (and often much more successful) messaging.
Moulitsas and Eleveld opened the show with conversation about the importance of the upcoming midterm elections, and Moulitsas in particular highlighted the importance of making these elections not only a referendum on Biden, but also one on Trump and the GOP as well. As Eleveld put it:
[There’s] this idea that you have to have a hero and a villain in every story. If Democrats are just talking about their accomplishments and they’re trying to sell themselves solely on their accomplishments, there’s no hero or villain in that story. It’s just, ‘Do you like what Democrats have done?’ versus ‘Do you like what Democrats are doing and would you like it if Republicans were in charge right now?’ Just think if Trump were president right now and the war in Ukraine had unfolded under his watch. I mean, I just can’t imagine what a debacle that would be and how quickly we would be shifting toward siding with authoritarianism as our democracy itself slid that way.
Fernandez-Ancona joined the hosts to share crucial takeaways from Way to Win’s work crafting messaging that works for progressives. She emphasized that the organization works on building power with lasting results through year-round organizing, as opposed to focusing on last-minute cash influxes towards the end of a race:
Our donors were all wanting to do something that was going to last beyond a given election cycle. They were tired of giving and giving to candidate campaigns and then feeling like they weren’t getting anything from it, you know, it just goes away at the end of the election. So they were wanting to build more lasting infrastructure, and we wanted to do it in a real political strategy context. So we formed Way to Win … [along with two other women-led organizations], we’ve moved over $200 million to the field since 2017 to grassroots organizations doing this community-based organizing.
Fernandez-Ancona also shared more about how the organization shapes messaging that works through their Midterm Message Project, an R&D project that was created in order to figure out how to create lasting influence on both the Democratic Party and its base through messaging:
We actually spent almost the entire year last year diving in doing a lot of research, both quantitative and qualitative, you know, listening to voters. And we were wanting to understand, who elected Biden? It was a multiracial, multigenerational coalition. We couldn’t have won any state with just white voters, or with just older voters. All of it was needed to actually win. So what makes them tick? Not only ‘them’ as individual groups, but how do you find a message that resonates across the whole? Because that’s one of the things that we find, that in Democratic messaging one of the challenges is just how much it’s sliced and diced by different audiences and various micro-target[ing], and it kind of misses the forest for the trees. And that’s really what the GOP does so well: this idea of telling one strong, emotionally resonant story, over and over and over again—because we know repetition also matters—that would actually work well across ideology. So we want to be getting our liberal activists excited about what we’re saying. We don’t want to turn them off, because we need them to help us turn out the vote, but we then we also want to persuade folks who are a little bit more in the middle. So that’s what we were trying to do with our messag[ing] project.”
“That is a tall order,” Eleveld said, as compared to Democrats, the GOP is mostly only having to target older, white Americans—so their audience is not as diverse, and narrower messaging might work on a larger group of them.
Fear of change and “things being taken away” is creating a climate of scarcity, Fernandez-Ancona added, and this has to be taken into account when creating messaging now. Way to Win has conducted focus groups and looked at the research to figure out what works, centering its campaigns around 30-second ads to capture the central focus of their arguments:
We test those ads in a tool called Swayable, where it’s a randomized controlled trial test. So it’s sort of like a poll. They watch the ad, they see the survey, there’s a control group. So you can then see, ‘How does this message actually move people across demographics? That’s a lot of the quantitative data that we have. So we did this throughout all of 2021. We tested our messages, we also tested the opposition’s messages that we see, you know, all of the GOP ads. And we tested a lot of our other kind of Democratic ally counterpart’s ads to see what’s going on. And where we really landed … [is that] we need to start, actually, with a positive, concrete [message about] what Democrats have done, because … people don’t know what Democrats have done … voters don’t know it, they’re not connecting those dots at all. So we need to be really clear: Here’s who we are, here’s what we do.
Fernandez-Ancona also noted that the GOP needs to be held accountable for what they are doing with regards to rolling back abortion rights, promoting anti-trans legislation, and fomenting a false moral panic over critical race theory: “Republicans are just getting off scot-free. They are not getting blamed for any of this stuff, there has not been enough attacks on them out there in the paid media landscape at all, and it’s just mind-blowing because there is so much to work with. I think what they have done has gone too far, but they’re getting away with it—but they don’t have to. I think we actually have to talk about it.”
Eleveld asked Fernandez-Ancona to share the top few issues Democrats should be focusing on in messaging, and what she believes to be the top few “Achilles heels” for Republicans.
Fernandez-Ancona named job creation, the recovery from the recession, COVID aid, and infrastructure as major issues that Democrats should discuss and address: “In ignoring it, they’re actually leaving so much on the table.” With regards to the GOP’s weaknesses, she listed the following: trying to overturn the election results with violence, trying to divide [communities] by pitting parents against teachers, banning and burning books, attacking the freedom to vote, and attacking a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body.
Fernandez-Ancona also noted that given the complexity of messaging that both highlights Democrats’ victories and addresses the issues, Democrats must understand how they are innately intertwined, not mutually exclusive:
We actually can do both, and should do both. We need to talk about the ways that the Biden team has helped shepherd this economic recovery. We can talk about that, even though there is inflation—we can still talk about [how] this is the greatest recovery we’ve ever seen. We can talk on and on about that. But we can’t only talk about that, and my point is that you actually can do both. Politics isn’t solitaire … You can’t just expect to talk about your thing. But when the other guys are talking about this other thing, if you don’t address it, you can’t win. My point is to resist that idea that, ‘Oh, we just have to focus on these kitchen table issues.’ … My point is we can do both: we can address the culture in the contrast.
She believes in a three-part approach:
- Start positive
- Go negative
- Story of voters—us, the collective voter—as the heroes and multiracial solidarity
The organization has tested this messaging with abortion, CRT, transgender youth, and other issues with much success. Fernandez-Ancona believes all of this is necessary to lift the Democratic Party brand.
Messaging that breaks through to the base and really rallies voters remains of utmost importance, according to Fernandez-Ancona. “We’re going to have to kind of do it ourselves in some way and show the way. I feel like this cycle is really important for us to do that, to build towards the 2024 cycle. Like, we can’t be figuring this out in 2024,” she said. “We need to actually get alignment on this basic framework and sort of overall story that should sort of carry us actually all the way through to 2024. It’s not cute to keep reinventing a message. You just need to pick one, and stick with it.”
Moulitsas picked up on this point, noting that consistent messaging simply gets the job done and likened it to the marketing strategy that major corporations employ: “There’s a reason [Coca-Cola] and Ford and Pepsi spend money year round, advertising at major events and major shows and sponsorships to create that brand. And the Democratic Party brand is trash. So why not spend that energy on a broad[er], values-based campaign to talk about what we are for. I’ve never even seen anything remotely close to that happening.”
Democrats can really capitalize on consistent messaging to close the gap and defeat conservatives at the messaging game, one from which “they never take an off day. They were spending on really good, really effective messaging in all of 2020 and 2021,” Fernandez-Ancona urged.
Moulitsas asked Fernandez-Ancona to share how viewers and listeners could support Way to Win’s work. Fernandez-Ancona asked the audience to support the organization’s PAC, Way to Lead, and also shared some a research hub filled with the organization’s messaging documents, which shed light on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to messaging about Democrats.
You can watch the full episode below:
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