Democrats Lost the Propaganda War
Democrats Lost the Propaganda War
The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way.
The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way.
They weren’t really trying very hard. Neolibs just wanted corporate money and enrichment. They didn’t really care about the working class so long as they shut up and do their jobs. Status quo must be preserved and the corporate money must flow, preferably into their pockets.
Corporate stance on the election:
It's easy to lose a war when you choose not to fight.
One of the best and worst things about the Democratic party is that they listen to experts. They are technocrats, through and through. This is honestly a great thing, most of the time. It's good to listen to public health experts, or climate and environmental experts, etc. What's not so great, however, is when the experts get it wrong. The technocrats end up following them because that's what technocrats do, they listen to experts, or they are the experts themselves.
The political science and economic experts in the US have been suffering from chronic hubris ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This hubris has infected the Democratic party. The political science and economic experts aren't learning from their mistakes, and thus neither are the Democrats. Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
In other words: The traits that make you good a governing also make you bad at winning elections.
They certainly can, but they don't have to. The problem is the experts who are slow, or unwilling to change their theories and ideas, even as real world events expose those theories as incomplete, at best.
Many mainstream economics experts did not see the great recession coming. They were blindsided by it. Did those experts humble themselves and try to figure out how they had such a significant blind spot? No, most did not. Most just wrote it off as an anomaly and doubled down on their theories. This was a massive mistake, because the great recession was a major contributor to the US becoming the politically chaotic country it is today. Being a good governor, and being good at winning elections, are both served by officials and experts who are willing to admit when they are wrong and make the necessary changes.
The traits that make Democrats good at governing make them bad at winning elections. There are other ways to be good at governing and definitely better experts they could be listening to. There is no reason they should have been listening to experts on how to win elections in the 1990s for a campaign in 2024. Hell, Trump is more of an expert in Winning elections than corrupt Democratic consultants.
The political science and economic experts in the US have been suffering from chronic hubris ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This hubris has infected the Democratic party. The political science and economic experts aren’t learning from their mistakes, and thus neither are the Democrats. Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
The thing about these experts is that these fields have major physics envy where they use complex math to solve these problems which hides massive incorrect assumptions that break everything. They want to be like physics where math can be used to predict what is happening but politics and economics are not controlled by nature but things made up by humans. They are fundamentally more interconnected and random. With these fields its better to be incorrect like all of your peers than being the lone voice that is correct.
Did they even try? Social media was absolutely flooded with non-stop comments about egg prices, gas prices, housing costs, Israel’s war, money to Ukraine, money going to immigrants after the hurricane, blaming a VP for not making policy changes, and then a dump of various conspiracy theories and religious posts.
I really mean flooded.
Then it disappeared as soon as trump won.
Sure, there was official campaign material for public presentation on msm, but there was a well-funded online blitz in the months leading up to the election.
A better way would be finding out what the people want, instead of what the corporations want.
Messaging. Democrats are dog-shit at it. Granted, they don't have the literal propaganda apparatus equivalent of Fox News, but... Polls and traditional ads depend on people watching network TV/news. Other than boomers, the rest of the country has moved on...
Many psychologists have said the biggest advantage the Trump campaign had in influencing the average person was their use of memorable and repeatable phrases.
Winning the average vote in the US is not unlike training a puppy.
It makes sense, really.
I believe that people really don't want to live inside a perpetual political cycle; they have lives. They (sometimes) want to show up on election day, vote, and delegate all the work to someone that makes them the least uncomfortable. The hope is that the politicians then go fuck off and leave everyone alone for at least 20 months, and maybe things don't get worse. Shoehorning your whole platform into everyone's life on a 24hr news diet is not the way to go - success here is surgical, discrete, and yet, memorable.
Thing is I don't vote for a party based on being the best at propaganda. I generally vote for the one with the least propaganda. So somehow they have to be sober and factual to get people like me while also being all showy lip service. that is going to be hard to pull.
I think any different messaging besides denial of a bad economy would have done better than telling Americans they should like the economy when 80%+ live paycheck to paycheck
I don't think that was the message though. As a sober, factual person I heard the economy is better than under trump. Which it was. Its clear the inflation that reared up two months into bidens administration was from trump and this was mentioned but its just a hard sell because regular folk don't get the lagging effects. Biden would talk about this stuff in his speeches but the press was all. Oh he sounds so old and tired. No one cared about the content unfortunately.