Years ago, I was volunteered to help out at Freshman Registration Day at my college. No automation, just a continuous day-long line to sign up for classes and a group of uncertain people who were new to this. My job was to hand out a blue card and ask them to fill it out and detach the perf-ed top that contained their brand-new official student number. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Any message that’s new has to be repeated at least three times to be properly grasped. Don’t sigh, don’t get testy, don’t act like you’re “being patient”. Just realize going in that even the brightest people won’t completely get it the first time. So Dan’s message is a bit more complex than what I had to get across, even for people who think about this stuff. I know Dem messaging gurus get this and will come up with many interesting ways to get these ideas out, and will sustain those efforts through the next nine months. But the ground troops need to do the same.
Here in FL there is a campaign manager named Susie Wiles. She is the reason DeSantis won, the reason Trump won here twice, and the reason Rick Scott was a two-term governor and now a Senator. Her messaging is pretty obvious stuff, nothing special. Her secret is this: absolute message discipline for the candidate and the campaign; ground game (enormous door knocking efforts); and dem campaign managers ALWAYS sell her short. In other words, pounding a message and saying it in person works.
I agree with your entire article. I would like to point out that Bernie Sanders made the same points about corporations raising prices as the main cause of inflation while using the pandemic, wage hikes, and the supply chain as plausible cover. Democrats need to demonstrate to low income workers especially that their wage increases are being wiped out by inflation. Democrats need to hammer home on the fact that Republicans want to blame inflation on modest wage hikes while conveniently ignoring the actual erosion of working class standards of living over the past forty years.
My biggest question on messaging that I haven't seen sufficiently addressed is the Republican reliance on using the English language to gaslight their intentions. I remember bringing up the "Clean Skies" initiative of the Bush Administration who had just relaxed power plant emission standards to my students at the time to reinforce why they needed to pay attention to what was really going on. It's been in the Republican toolkit for a very long time and we haven't found a good way to combat that. How is storming the capitol patriotic? Our words still have the same dictionary definitions but don't mean the same thing anymore. What do we do about that???
Great insight, as always. Would just add that big national brand manufacturers are even more guilty of price gouging than retailers, particularly in the grocery sector. Procter & Gamble and others are using inflation as an excuse to pad profits with higher prices on essential household items, while also cutting back on traditional promotional discounts to retailers, forcing supermarkets to pass along higher prices to their shoppers. This is a basic pocketbook issue that needs greater exposure.
Let's not forget that bringing more jobs home from abroad and building infrastructure that creates new jobs likely would occur with low unemployment and a lower labor force participation rate in part due to baby boomers retiring. Our current labor force is not big enough to fill all of these new jobs. May mean relying more on immigrant labor or increasing productivity.
Concerning Exxon, a retirement income newsletter that I subscribe to said they have used some profits to pay down their debt which supports continued dividend payments to shareholders, including retired people.
I agree with this messaging, but would also like to turn the tables a bit and ask what Republican candidates would do to stop inflation. What is their secret recipe to this very complex problem? Maybe this would expose their lack of plans and policies and allow us the space to talk about our very real policies to help the American people.
"The Connor Roy of the Doocy clan." That is a great valentine to us all and possibly my favorite thing you have ever said (out of many.) So true. I love where McCain said it right to his face. Go Joe.
It really comes down to messaging. It’s just a fact, people have to hear the exact same message a thousand times all day every day before it sinks in. Our messaging is all over the map, while GOP shouts INFLATION all day every day. Sadly it doesn’t appear that Democrats recognize that simplification, repetition, and amplification is key. I don’t know what the endless message should be. We need to hire the most expensive Madison Avenue Mad Men we can get to figure it out.
Years ago, I was volunteered to help out at Freshman Registration Day at my college. No automation, just a continuous day-long line to sign up for classes and a group of uncertain people who were new to this. My job was to hand out a blue card and ask them to fill it out and detach the perf-ed top that contained their brand-new official student number. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Any message that’s new has to be repeated at least three times to be properly grasped. Don’t sigh, don’t get testy, don’t act like you’re “being patient”. Just realize going in that even the brightest people won’t completely get it the first time. So Dan’s message is a bit more complex than what I had to get across, even for people who think about this stuff. I know Dem messaging gurus get this and will come up with many interesting ways to get these ideas out, and will sustain those efforts through the next nine months. But the ground troops need to do the same.
Here in FL there is a campaign manager named Susie Wiles. She is the reason DeSantis won, the reason Trump won here twice, and the reason Rick Scott was a two-term governor and now a Senator. Her messaging is pretty obvious stuff, nothing special. Her secret is this: absolute message discipline for the candidate and the campaign; ground game (enormous door knocking efforts); and dem campaign managers ALWAYS sell her short. In other words, pounding a message and saying it in person works.
I agree with your entire article. I would like to point out that Bernie Sanders made the same points about corporations raising prices as the main cause of inflation while using the pandemic, wage hikes, and the supply chain as plausible cover. Democrats need to demonstrate to low income workers especially that their wage increases are being wiped out by inflation. Democrats need to hammer home on the fact that Republicans want to blame inflation on modest wage hikes while conveniently ignoring the actual erosion of working class standards of living over the past forty years.
My biggest question on messaging that I haven't seen sufficiently addressed is the Republican reliance on using the English language to gaslight their intentions. I remember bringing up the "Clean Skies" initiative of the Bush Administration who had just relaxed power plant emission standards to my students at the time to reinforce why they needed to pay attention to what was really going on. It's been in the Republican toolkit for a very long time and we haven't found a good way to combat that. How is storming the capitol patriotic? Our words still have the same dictionary definitions but don't mean the same thing anymore. What do we do about that???
Great insight, as always. Would just add that big national brand manufacturers are even more guilty of price gouging than retailers, particularly in the grocery sector. Procter & Gamble and others are using inflation as an excuse to pad profits with higher prices on essential household items, while also cutting back on traditional promotional discounts to retailers, forcing supermarkets to pass along higher prices to their shoppers. This is a basic pocketbook issue that needs greater exposure.
Judd has been talking about corporations using the pandemic as an opportunity to raise prices (under the guise of "inflation") for a little while: https://popular.info/p/how-concentrated-corporate-power and (in video form) https://popular.info/p/inflation-exposed-the-real-reason
Let's not forget that bringing more jobs home from abroad and building infrastructure that creates new jobs likely would occur with low unemployment and a lower labor force participation rate in part due to baby boomers retiring. Our current labor force is not big enough to fill all of these new jobs. May mean relying more on immigrant labor or increasing productivity.
Concerning Exxon, a retirement income newsletter that I subscribe to said they have used some profits to pay down their debt which supports continued dividend payments to shareholders, including retired people.
I agree with this messaging, but would also like to turn the tables a bit and ask what Republican candidates would do to stop inflation. What is their secret recipe to this very complex problem? Maybe this would expose their lack of plans and policies and allow us the space to talk about our very real policies to help the American people.
"The Connor Roy of the Doocy clan." That is a great valentine to us all and possibly my favorite thing you have ever said (out of many.) So true. I love where McCain said it right to his face. Go Joe.
It really comes down to messaging. It’s just a fact, people have to hear the exact same message a thousand times all day every day before it sinks in. Our messaging is all over the map, while GOP shouts INFLATION all day every day. Sadly it doesn’t appear that Democrats recognize that simplification, repetition, and amplification is key. I don’t know what the endless message should be. We need to hire the most expensive Madison Avenue Mad Men we can get to figure it out.
Dan, why do you cringe at Biden Boom?