Here’s an Idea for Liberals: Propaganda

After every election, Democrats seem to talk about how they failed to craft a clear message. So how about bombarding people with a new kind of campaign ad?


What does the Democratic Party stand for? What do voters think the Democratic Party stands for? How can Democrats communicate to voters that they actually do stand for things? These are vexing questions for Democratic politicians and the people who run their campaigns.

While Republicans in the age of Trump prefer not to dig too deep into their own failures in elected politics, relying instead on House districting and the very nature of the Senate to guarantee their political dominance, Democrats are continually looking for some strategy or message or type of candidate who can win reliably or defend marginal seats. After elections, they regularly ask why whatever they tried last time failed.

Two of these analyses have surfaced in the past week. On June 6, The New York Times reported on a 2020 postelection analysis produced for Democrats by “Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund.” On June 8, NBC News covered a new strategy memo produced for the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, based on focus groups conducted by Lake Research Partners. These documents were both ostensibly created to help Democrats get elected, but they are also both really designed to absolve some people, and blame others, for Democratic failures, while arguing that success will come from doing what the groups paying for these reports wanted to do anyway.

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In the progressive view, conservative propaganda is something in the air that true swing voters (as opposed to dedicated conservatives) largely tune out. In the Third Way view, it is incumbent on Democrats (and, implicitly, Democratic supporters) to avoid doing or saying things that might provoke the bear. (Like, for example, calling to “defund the police.”) Neither side really asks how Democrats expect to perform a task that Republicans have mastered: actually reaching marginal voters with these messages at all.

“While Joe Manchin is demanding both parties agree on any further federal voting-rights legislation, a new study quantifies how completely Republicans have excluded Dems from the passage of the restrictive voting laws proliferating in red states”