I hear your frustration, and I get where it’s coming from. There is an entire media apparatus designed to delegitimize Democrats, especially women, people of color, and queer candidates. That distortion is real, and we have to confront it. The answer isn’t to deny when messaging falls flat or assume every failure is purely due to bias. It’s to ask: what actually connects?
You say Kamala “frequently talked about” working at McDonald’s. But it’s not just about saying the words. It’s about whether those words land, whether they form an emotional through-line. Did most voters come away feeling she saw them, felt their struggle, and was fighting for them? I don’t think so. The dominant affect of her campaign was not solidarity, it was resume. Competence. Justification. That’s not a Fox News spin, that’s what millions of disengaged or reluctant voters felt.
So yes, you’re right that bias exists. People absolutely hear messages differently based on who’s delivering them. But bias isn’t destiny. Obama cut through it. Why? Because his message felt real, rooted, consistent, and aimed directly at the material conditions of people’s lives.
You also say you haven’t seen much media criticism from me. Fair enough, but it’s been beat to death on this board. I’ve spent much of this thread talking about how Democrats are filtered through a hostile media ecosystem, and how the liberal class fails to understand narrative power. What I’m trying to do is name the emotional and rhetorical gaps that do exist so we can close them. That’s not giving in to Fox, it’s learning how to beat them.
If we want to win, we have to be able to say two things at once: the media environment is toxic and our messaging needs work. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.
OK, now that you've recycled the same post 15 times, maybe we can switch it up at halftime? For a poster talking incessantly about persuasion, you're doing a pretty poor job of persuading people here. Let me offer some suggestions.
1.
Stop invalidating. Do you know how long I have been a Democratic activist? Since I was 16 years old and organizing college students at the tail end of the Reagan Bush years. Some here go further back than that. I've been doing this for considerably longer than you've been alive. I've been through some shit, man.
So why shouldn't I be offended by your tired derogation of our efforts over the years? Or the stupidity of saying, "Democrats have never tried this strategy" even after it's been repeatedly pointed out to you that Democrats and liberals have, indeed, tried this? I promise you this: if there was a universalist message that would resonate with the working class, Dems would have seized it long ago.
There's almost no meat on the bones you offer. It's all about, "we need a message" with no thought given to the obstacles to the development of that message. It's more or less pure optimism. You've said this is a message board and not a peer review board and that's fine, but if you can't offer anything but derogation of our past efforts with essentially nothing constructive, your shtick gets old fast.
Or, to put it another way, what if you had more curiosity about what emotional and social dynamics have caused us to not to trust working class white people? What if you didn't just slap on a label like "neoliberal" or "corporatist" and move on?
2. Let's take a close look at this thing you wrote, and I'd like you to justify it or apologize. "You point out that they vote against their material interests but you don’t really ask why. You don’t show any curiosity about what emotional and social dynamics fill the void where trust in government used to be. You just slap the label “bigot” on them and move on." To this I want to respond: Fuck you, little twat. I don't respond that way because I'd like to be polite to good faith actors, but it's also true that some of this shit makes my blood boil and I'm not the only one. I don't think you really appreciate what you are implicitly saying.
Never have I just slapped the label "bigot" and moved on. To the contrary: I have spent more than half my life, more years than you've been alive, trying to figure out why they vote against their material interests. Genuine asking. Good faith study. Reading about people. Listening to people. Teaching law students, some of whom are MAGA.
"Bigotry" is not my assumption. It's my conclusion after these decades of observation. See, you were in high school when Trump came into office. My guess is that most of your political education occurred during college, probably from other students as that's the way it usually works. And maybe some of the college students in 2019 just assume that it's bigotry and move on.
But just because it happened this way for you doesn't mean it happens this way in general.
If you can't respect that my positions are thoughtful, informed and personally felt, then why should I give you the time of day? And I'm not alone here. Not everyone has time, memory, interest and/or ability to expound their thoughts and experience as clearly as I do, but a lot of posters have similarly thoughtful, informed and personally felt experiences. You get so much pushback because your posts so utterly fail to appreciate that. Usually you give a sandwich response like, "I hear you, I do, but [a whole lot of invalidation]" that gives no indication of meaningful engagement with the ideas you dismiss in the brackets. Maybe that's not what you mean, but that's the message you're sending.
3. I would say that you have repeated yourself over and over on this thread. That suggests your message isn't landing or isn't persuasive. And again, coming from someone who is preaching about persuading people, connecting with them over their lived experience, it's quite rich that you're doing neither.
I don't fault for you that, by the way. The message here isn't that you're a hypocrite. It's that things are much harder than want to acknowledge. If you can't get through to this audience, maybe the persuading thing is not so easy. While you've agreed with those words, I don't think you've really understood the message.
4. FYI, I did a lot of politics in Missouri in the 1990s. When I started, Missouri was a bona fide swing state, a bit more blue than red. When I left, it was on its way to becoming the red state Gilead that it is today. So I had my feet on the ground during some of these big shifts. What's more, the campaigns didn't have me go talk to black inner city voters. Probably a good choice. So they sent me to county fairs to talk to the blue collar white folks. I wasn't so good at that because I had trouble identifying with them, but I listened.
At the time , I was optimistic like you. Sure, we have racial struggle, but material concerns are important. In fact, my candidate's signature issue was protecting social security. He was a bit of a cultural liberal, a law professor by trade, but he had a long and distinguished resume with regard to social security.
Here's what I heard: very little about economics or money or trade or social security. This was around the time of NAFTA. The unions were perhaps making a lot of noise about it, but not so much the folks on the ground. Probably most of them didn't belong to a union. Not a single one ever expressed any interest in joining one, and a couple visibly recoiled when I asked them if they thought maybe unions might be helpful in solving some of the state's economic issues (there were a few Missouri-specific things that formed the basis for that chain of thought). Unions are for commies, they said.
By contrast, I heard A LOT about cultural grievances. Hillary was a lesbo. Slick Willie was a fraud, a fake Christian who sins and pretends to be repentant. Feminazis. Oh, man, did I hear a lot about feminazis. And yeah, plenty of hard rs. My only exposure to that, really. It usually came up in the following context: one of the leading candidates for the Dem primary that year was black. My candidate was less known, which is why we were out at the county fairs. So when I approached people, saying the standard line of "can I trouble you to talk about [ ] for a minute" or whatever we had been trained to say, a fair number of responses were, "that's not the n****" candidate, is it?" Hard r.
That's an anecdote, to be sure, but it's also backed up by data. And by discussions with others of similar age and experiences.
