Everyone agrees Democrats suck at messaging. How can they do it better?
In this episode, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona of Way to Win discusses the ins and outs of Democrats’ notoriously ineffective political messaging, and what needs to be done about it.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
If there is one thing upon which almost everyone in US politics agrees, it is that Democrats suck at messaging. They constantly find themselves on the back foot, struggling to respond on culture war issues that make them uncomfortable. Biden's approval rating remains abysmally low and the enormous accomplishments he and congressional Democrats have secured despite the barest of majorities remain almost entirely unknown to most of the public.
But why? What exactly is the problem with Democratic messaging? That is where the agreement breaks down.
Is it too liberal or not liberal enough? Has a young vanguard distorted the party's perspective and alienated it from swing voters or is an old guard holding back a diverse new coalition? Is Democratic messaging using the wrong words and phrases, or is the problem that it simply doesn't control enough media to ensure its messages are heard?
To dig into some of these questions, I wanted to talk to Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder, vice president, and chief strategy officer for Way to Win, a Democratic research, analysis, organizing, and fundraising group that came together in the wake of the 2016 election to make sure its mistakes were not repeated.
Way to Win just released its final report on the 2022 midterm elections, digging into who exactly bought advertisements, where they ran, and what they said, as well as how they performed with various demographics. I’m excited to talk to Ancona about what Democrats are saying, what they’re not saying, who’s hearing it, and how they can do better.
So with no further ado, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona
Thank you so much for having me.
David Roberts
I'm excited to do this because like anyone who's followed U.S. politics for many years, I have beefs about Democratic messaging and theories about it and all sorts of stuff to say about it. And I found over the years that everybody has a lot to say about Democratic messaging and everyone feels that they're an expert on it. But what I've come to see over time is most people, probably including me, are full of it and are just going off instincts and hunches and projecting their priors overinterpreting their own particular epistemological bubbles on and on and on.
So I'm extremely glad to have, I think, probably the closest thing the world has to an expert on this subject, on the pod to discuss it by way of bolstering that claim. Before we get into the details, let's just talk about Way to Win. Like, why did it come together and what has it been doing since the 2016 election?
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona
Well, we came together essentially in the wake of that election when we felt like the same strategies that led to that complete failure. And honestly, a lot of the losses that we had seen over the course of the last four years across the country at the state level and local level, that we needed new strategies to change, that we weren't going to get out of this crisis using the same strategies that got us into the crisis. And that is what we were hearing as we were in Democratic big, major donor funding circles at that time, a real inability to recognize that major shifts were needed and an unwillingness to even confront what had led to Trump's rise and ultimate power.
David Roberts
And one wonders what could shake people out of that kind of complacency if not that.
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona
Exactly. Yeah. So a bunch of us came together, and
