The election is over and within the next few weeks you’re going to see a lot of finger pointing, a lot of blame throwing at what possibly went wrong. It started within a day of the results. The reason the Democratic candidate lost? It was the leftists. They conflated morals with political ideology and protest voted. They didn’t turn up. They didn’t agree with either candidates campaign and so in order to once again prove a point they refused to vote. Or was it the Stein voters. All of those Green Party members drawing votes away from what was effectively the incumbent. On first observance you might learn that neither of these two theories will provide a good answer. Real leftists, the ones that are actually about that life, don’t have the numbers people think they do. And the Stein vote drew less than a small percentage of the total electorate. Nowhere near the number of people who stayed home. Or then again maybe we were undone by the price of eggs.
There are two theories, somewhat backed by preliminary data, that show what happened. First, that non college educated young white men (again, somehow the most important electorate in the US) either stayed home or shifted right. Second, a lot of people assumed to be voting blue this year (Latino men, white women over 45, young men) went red. So, in a way if you were to pick any of those two theories you’d have a lot to roll with. But then the next step would be figuring out why exactly these groups didn’t vote or voted for the orange guy.
We could say a few things. If I was an analyst at one of the big political intelligence firms the Democratic party pays millions of dollars a year to I might say that the groups they were communicating with somehow weren’t persuaded by the message being sold to them.
So the Democratic party has a communication problem. They don’t communicate successes well. They don’t communicate with specific parts of the electorate well, if at all. From my point of view, Democrats have always treated constituent engagement as a bureaucratic process. They don’t like having to approach and talk to prospective voters. They don’t go to where voters are, not really. They don’t attempt to foster growing relationships with people who may be future voters. They don’t really speak to certain parts of the electorate at all. I say this because as an urban black man who served in military, I have never once been contacted by a Democratic politician outside of an election cycle. I have never once seen them at a place where I have an interest. Nor have I seen them at community meetings I attend, large gatherings of veterans, anything of the sort. Democrats seem to see engagement generally as intervention, not development. Hence why they communicate tentatively with unions until there is a strike or some emergency in which they appear. Reference Biden’s response to auto workers a few years back. Couple all of this with a near suicidal addiction to norms and you get a party incapable of adapting to new ways of approaching their own voters.
As a side note, if you’re still mystified by the prospect of rural America drifting further and further from the Democratic party I suspect everything I said above is echoed by perhaps millions more Americans. It’s certainly echoed by friends and associates I have in my close network.
The actual communication in any constituency is happening in places the Democrats just aren’t going to anymore. If this era is about how much time from already fractured attention spans we can hope to carve from the American mind then persuasion is only a portion of the battle. Most politicians are persuasive. Saving democracy, combating climate change, protecting women’s healthcare rights, etc., are all persuasive reasons to vote. If you care. Problem is a lot of people don’t. People are watching Youtube. They’re playing Minecraft and Fortnite. They’re watching sports. They’re going to concerts with outrageous ticket prices. They’re watching porn. They’re going to conventions for their interests. They’re spending their time watching political streamers on Twitch and elsewhere. They aren’t paying attention to you. Where are conservative influencers? They’re in these spaces. Aggressively. Kamala Harris does not have a Youtube channel (not really). The influencing work is generally done by liberals in the media space. Reference Pod Save America, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Keith Olbermann are not enough. They will readily self admit that they do better with engaging high propensity voters and those who are well informed already. To get the information they sell you have to already be genuinely interested in that kind of content. Joe Rogan though? The Nelk boys? They tickle the lizard brain. They are ubiquitous, constant, and they have the ability to persuade independents and draw skeptics. They’re always persuading because they’re always engaging. Democrats take themselves too seriously. They’re all afraid to look like they sometimes take the suit off. Someone might think they’re unserious. You might point to AOC as a counterexample but remember AOC wants to actually govern. She goes into conservative spaces to talk and does well, but her battles with Nancy Pelosi in 2018 and 2019 reminded everyone the yoke of norms applies to all things new and exciting. Your job is to appeal to corporate donors. Look nice and smile.
What’s maddeningly frustrating is this is an easy problem to solve. How hard is to be constantly engaging where the people are? The Democrats really have said that maybe the problem is who is doing the talking. They think they need an Andrew Tate, a Rogan, a Ben Shapiro clone. They think they need a 24 hour behemoth of influence. It can be done. You have to try. You can do all the things. If you want to fill the party with intellectual grifters you have plenty of Andrew Yang’s to go around. I don’t think they need that at all. Fundamentally, their voters, the ones they say they have trouble getting to (white guys, aged 18 to 34) are not paying attention to them if they don’t have a reason to. They aren’t moved by democracy and abortion or healthcare or climate change. or Gaza. They are watching porn and playing Fortnite. You should be at EVO, watching the Tekken 8 tournament with them. Other conservative influencers are.
Way Past Policy 