Common Sense

Dems have a messaging crisis

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Like so many of you, I spent yesterday absorbing the fact that the United States has voted to turn the White House over to a fascist. Because that is who Donald Trump is: a mentally unfit autocrat who demonizes women, racial minorities and everyone else he thinks stands in his way and has threatened to use the power of his office to wreak vengeance.

And yet, all those groups voted for him in large numbers in a free and fair election. He over-performed among suburban women, among Latinos, even among Generation Z voters.

Trump picked up the Senate and is on his way to picking up the House of Representatives. There is no way to spin this: it is a nightmare scenario.

What happened?

Democrats are no longer perceived as the party of common sense. In our quest not to offend anyone, we come across as totally out of line with how regular people think.

Last spring, a group of students shut down parts of Columbia University in New York City because they wanted “justice for Palestine.”

What did Columbia do? It hemmed and hawed and debated how these students had the right to protest and where, even as it was obvious that they were disrupting their campus, their fellow students and their entire community. Tenured professors at Columbia sent missives back and forth among themselves and to the Administration about whether students had the right to shut down a lawn or part of the campus or even Hamilton Hall, which pro-Palestinian protesters occupied and trashed. Eventually, the president of the University called in the police, which led to another round of outrage from students and some faculty about violations of free speech. Meanwhile, the campus remained on lockdown.

If you are someone living in the real world, what does this look like to you? A bunch of young people literally shut down a university and prevented others from learning. An entire institution and the very accomplished adults who run it looked like they were being held hostage to drumming, chanting, disruptive students.

Most people across this country all but kill themselves to send their kids to college and most of those kids don’t end up at places like Columbia. Those parents don’t save up or take out loans so their kids can learn how to become socially aware in college. They send them there so they can crack a book and attend classes — which a hell of a lot of Columbia students reported that they were prevented from doing because of all the noise and disruption emanating from these protests.

Where were the high-profile Democrats who said, “This is nuts. If you want to protest, do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt everyone else?” For that matter, where were the high-profile Democrats who said, “Safe spaces don’t exist in the real world. If you can’t function among others who disagree with you, you better start here or go elsewhere?”

Nowhere. Because they were too afraid to speak common sense for fear of alienating some cohort that their models showed their campaigns needed to turn out.

All cycle, Republicans ran ads attacking transgender people. It was a gross exploitation of a vulnerable community that is already endangered on so many levels. But how many people in Saginaw County, Michigan, which Trump won on Tuesday, said to themselves, “You know, it’s probably not fair for my daughter to compete in sports against someone who is biologically stronger than she is?”

To them, that’s fairness. More than that, it’s common sense. If you have more testosterone in your body than I do, you will run faster than I can. If we are competing for the same medal, the field is not equal.

It goes on and on. Several years ago, Democratic leaders fell over themselves to give in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. For what it’s worth, I fully agree with that policy. But in every focus group I have ever observed, Latino voters actually find it condescending that this is what Democrats think would incentivize them to vote for the party. If the goal here is to attract Latino voters, why in the world would we think that these voters, who are already citizens, care whether someone else gets benefits purely because they happen to come from the same region of the world where their ancestors once lived?

The same goes for all the “Defund the Police” rhetoric. The loudest voices shouting about that a few years ago were white, affluent young people who could do keg stands in front of a cop and face zero consequences. Where was the high-ranking Democrat who went out to tell these kids that defunding the police meant putting in danger the very people whom they thought they were protecting?

Democrats have a horrific messaging problem. We are so busy trying to figure out how to speak to specific cohorts of people that we forget how to speak common sense to everyone.

In our quest not to offend anyone, we have offended too many people who just want to hear us speak plainly and clearly in ways that normal people do. Stop calling Latinos “Latinx.” Stop putting pronouns after your name to virtue signal. If I happen to call you by the wrong pronoun, you can correct me and I won’t do it again.

To be clear, Trump is deeply unwell both physically and mentally. So the very fact that voters actually think that he is the one speaking common sense says a great deal about the messaging problem Democrats have.

There is literally nothing I would say to my gay friend that I would not say to my Muslim friend that I would not say to my Protestant Midwestern friend. I don’t parse out my words or use intricate language to appeal to their respective backgrounds. We all just speak with one another like normal people. Democrats would be better off communicating with voters in the same way.

Odds and Ends:

Speaking of Common Sense

Sometimes, it looks like our political operations are built on memes to appeal to some discrete audience. From the day Joe Biden entered the White House, his successive press secretaries relished trying to create viral moments by sparring with Peter Doocy of Fox News. This was great for Doocy. It was not so great — and dare I say, stupid — for the White House.

Does anyone outside the Beltway media know or care that the White House press secretary owned Doocy at a briefing? Do you really think that you are appealing to some Fox News viewer in Bucks County, Pennsylvania by proving that you can go toe to toe with their morning anchor’s semi-sentient son? No Fox News viewer is ever going to believe that you got the best of Doocy, even if he started crying and begging for mercy live on television. No normal person cares if you have.

So what’s the point? Why in the world would you waste even a moment shooting down dumb straw man questions from Doocy, rather than looking into the camera every day and telling the American people how you are helping them? Common sense would dictate that a press secretary’s time would have been better spent explaining how Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure package finally paved over that annoying pothole on Route 212 in Bucks County. Maybe that won’t go viral on TikTok but it might make the Morning Call newspaper, which voters in the Lehigh Valley actually read.