Persuasionism, Not Popularism

A previously unpublished memo-manifesto from early 2021 on how Democrats can better adapt to change, and why they haven't

Today we are publishing a manifesto of sorts: an unedited, slightly redacted draft of a memo written by Way to Win media consultant and strategist Dan Ancona, first drafted in January of 2021. Dan has grudgingly agreed to have his raw copy published in the service of understanding larger forces of media and culture so we can rebuild our movement and party on a stronger strategic foundation—and because substantively, we were right. We identified the pitfalls that sunk Democrats in 2024, back in 2021. The problem isn’t that Dems have gone too far left or woke or any of this nonsense: the problem is that both the media environment and the entire US culture are going through dizzyingly rapid changes, the rich have taken $50 trillion from the rest of us, and the Democrats have failed to alter their strategies to adapt to any of these new realities. We will have much more to say based on this analysis this year, but for those who want a deep dive on where Democrats need to go, we think you will find this to be a rich and intriguing read.

“On the battlefield of ideas, winning requires moving toward the sound of the guns.”
—Newt Gingrich

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Persuasionism, Not Popularism

BY: DAN ANCONA | DATE: EARLY 2021

While many electrons forming many, many tweets and substack posts have been spilled in arguments both for and against popularism, and while certainly it has no shortage of detractors, to the best of my knowledge no one has assembled an alternative theory of the case into one place. This is an attempt to sketch out just such an alternative.

The Popularist metanarrative is that, in short, Democrats are losing elections because they’ve turned hard left.¹ This hard left turn has been an inevitable result of their staff and the pressures of the nonprofit industrial complex, who tend to be more educated than—and to hold policy positions to the left of—the voters they need to reach. Ergo, the path forward is for Democrats to focus on the median voter—which, since this is a 55 year old, high school educated white guy, means they have to tack right—and to emphasize their support for popular things. They should avoid culture wars and hot button issues including race and policing as much as possible, or when they have to engage, do so by forcefully, publicly and repeatedly denouncing those to their left, letting 1,000 Sister Souljahs bloom.

But consider this alternative metanarrative: what if, instead, Democrats are losing elections due to five decades of underinvestment in media, research and persuasion by both Dems and movement organizations, which has now collided with a newly atomized media landscape that greatly incentivizes engagement and makes tribalization and epistemic closure easier than it’s ever been. These media shifts were a part of the civic battlespace even before 2016, when Trump re-energized the Southern Strategy by weaponizing fear and division with strong, compelling, persuasive, and divisive status threat based messages. These status threat based attacks, besides being well crafted and politically resonant on their own, have landed in fallow mental terrain in many voters because of real, epochal changes happening in the world. This is only a partial list:

• Increasingly obvious effects of climate change including multiple major climate disasters

• Another wave of profound changes in gender roles and sexuality (#metoo, ongoing LGBTQ changes, trans freedom)

• Seismic shifts in media, social media, tech, and the broader information landscape

• Ongoing and slow but relentless demographic changes: the new multiracial reality (unsurprising this is particularly apparent in schools, leading indicators of demographic changes)

• Newly invigorated calls for social justice, led by the Movement for Black Lives, triggered by a series of summary executions by police so ghastly that even conservatives (briefly) called for reform

• A truly wild amount of churn in the labor market in 2021: “In total, 75.3 million workers were hired last year, while 68.9 million quit, were laid off or discharged. Out of these so-called separations, 47.4 million were voluntary quits.” The US working age population is 205 million, so more than a third of people switched or got new jobs last year.

And all of those processes are happening against the ongoing, relentless grind of predatory capitalism, which continues seemingly inexorably to shift risk and “essential” work under increasingly brutal conditions to the working class, extract rents and increase precarity for the middle, and reserve true security and wealth only for the most obscenely rich. And because the whole thing feels so unstable right now, even those objectively at the top frequently don’t feel remotely secure or wealthy. This is how you get people flying in on private jets to racist insurrections.

And all of this, in turn, was happening before a global pandemic stuck gigantic, Wile E. Coyote style ACME sticks of dynamite into practically every pattern of daily life and subprocess of our economy.

When you step back from the day to day of politics and think about the sheer volume of changes that have happened over the past few years, it’s easier to understand why voters are grumpy, scared, and more open than usual to conspiracy theories, disinformation, or stories that may be wrong or socially destructive but are comforting on some level.

What’s going on isn’t that “Democrats have turned left,” in any meaningful or substantive way, particularly if you use their paid media as a proxy for the messages they are trying to deliver to voters and the positioning those messages reflect. (This is an admittedly imperfect way of gauging this, but millions of dollars in ads is certainly a better corpus to shed light on this question than, say, party platform texts) Majorities—often significant ones—do still want Democratic ideas. The problem is that Republicans have gotten better at both connecting with and scaring all kinds of voters, and in a world that’s already changing and scary, this has given Republicans an unusual and prolonged electoral advantage.

Four Objections to Popularism

As I see it, there are four big objections to Popularism: campaign staffer education differentials aren’t new or a problem only for Dems; activists with extreme views aren’t remotely symmetrical (and if anything, this should be a vastly bigger problem for Republicans!); median voters don’t exist and don’t win elections for Democrats while multiracial coalitions do; and you can’t run away from salient issues.

Taken one at a time:

First, campaign staffer education differential isn’t a new development, nor is there any evidence it’s somehow worse for Democrats than Republicans. Campaigns have been staffed by people generally more educated and with different political views than the voters they are trying to reach essentially forever. This shouldn’t be surprising or novel; having political views is frequently (although certainly not always) why people who choose to work in politics do so. But the staffers that work in the mid level of campaigns are VERY far removed from the message development and positioning discussions that typically occur only between consultants and candidates, and sometimes with input in the form of positioning memos and research from the party campaigns.

Second, if having activists with extreme views truly was a death knell to a party’s electoral chances, obviously this would impact Republicans as well, as their activists hold numerous views far further from the mainstream than left activists. The Popularists have never adequately explained how it is that this phenomenon afflicts only Democrats, even while Trump’s supporters march through the Capitol carrying confederate flags.

Third, this focus on the median voter obscures two things: first, the fact that any conceivable winning Democratic coalition is multiethnic and multigenerational to a much greater degree than the Republican one…

…and second, that it’s less helpful to think of a lone median voter and much more helpful to think of persuadable (if sometimes problematic) uncles, or at the very least, the Seitz Triangle, which takes into account the crucial question of whether voters will be motivated to vote at all. Finding stories that persuade across demographics is more complicated than just trying to talk to a 55 year old white guy with a high school education, but one thing I’ve found after three cycles of testing ads specifically for this objective is that stories that resonate with one group often (but not always) tend to do well with others. And this isn’t to say that older, whiter and less educated men aren’t worth going after: they certainly are, as Biden’s improvement with this segment demonstrated. The Democratic agenda has plenty to offer them over the economic crumbs and chaos that Republicans offer. We’re not going persuade them by swapping out one laundry list of policies for another, but if we tell them a story about a more perfect union being torn apart by racial division (and if we’re clear about who is doing the dividing and why, which they have been lied to repeatedly about), we’ll be able to at least persuade some of them.

Fourth, as a matter of political strategy—and while there is some data on this, ultimately I think it comes down to a question of strategic judgment that’s difficult to support quantitatively—ignoring divisive issues your opponent has the ability to both differentiate on and make highly salient across broad groups of voters is not going to be an effective strategy, over either the short or long term.

How is This Happening?

If the solution isn’t popularism, the question still remains:

How is a party that’s responsible for 95% of job creation since the fall of the Berlin Wall having such a hard time putting away a movement led by an obviously narcissistic, incompetent tin pot authoritarian whose only discernible policy goal (shoveling more wealth towards the rich) is wildly unpopular, and whose most energetic activists are obsessed with continuing to fight the Civil War?

The realities of a changing world (multiplied by COVID) have activated the potential benefits of status-threat based positioning and messages, creating numerous opportunities that Trump, MAGA and conservative media have easily exploited. The deep research that groups like Way to Win, Future Majority, HITstrategies and Equis and others have been doing over the past two years has found a lot of congruence that this positioning problem is no less of a problem (and sometimes even more so) with diverse communities. It’s not hard to see why: a persuasive, status-threat based argument against CRT or trans freedom is going to raise the salience of these issues for a working class Latino new immigrant as well as for a rural white person, or a middle class mom of young kids who has been pushed to the breaking point over the past two years.

A recent big-reach interview with David Shor was headlined as what Democrats Don’t Want to Hear. I think this is… not right. The opposite of right, even. Telling DC Democrats they can ignore difficult issues like racial division, stick to kitchen table issues, focus even harder on persuading that 55 year old white guy, and win by kicking the shins of the left is precisely what they most want to hear.

So this is what DC Democrats really don’t want to hear (but don’t worry, there’s good news too, which I’ll get to in one second): we can’t run from racial division and all the other hot-button culture war issues. Look at the Virginia Governor results, or the 0–27 that Dems went in Cook rated tossups in 2020. Clearly some of this was due to systematic polling errors, but there’s no question: Democrats failed to make their case, and effectiveness of paid media was part of it. If you’re unconvinced, I encourage you to pick a race and look for yourself, in the TV Congress dataset that I built for Way to Win early in 2021. To see the tossup races: click on the Big Table, filter Cook rating to tossup, click on the “Dem Spending Advantage” link for the contested races, and from there you can watch the D and R TV ads for that race.

So What Do We Do About All This?

My wife and I were walking to brunch in our neighborhood and we noticed a guy wearing one of those Keynes’s aggregate demand curve t-shirts, so of course we stopped and chatted with him. Even in a quick chat, the same question that got me started down this path in 2016 came up: “Why are the Democrats ads so bad?” I don’t think it’s just as much about the ads, but their overall message and media and inability to get a clear message through.

In short, the thing we have to do is fix this problem. Random neighbors should not be pointing out how Dems can’t get their message through. It sounds simple enough but operationally, it’s bloody complicated. A framework I’ve found useful in understanding the overall landscape is the acronym POSE: Paid, Owned, Social and Earned. They all interact in various complicated and unpredictable ways and right now, Democrats and lefties are getting absolutely clobbered across all of them. There are a few bright spots emerging though.

How the Persuasion Gap Emerged

But before I get to those, a somewhat long tangent, speculating how this situation came to pass:

Why we’ve fallen short in this is a little outside the scope of this piece, but it’s a downright fascinating question. It’s not the Dems or the left aren’t spending money on this—at the House level, Dems spent 37% more than Rs in 2020. ($243M D vs $178M R, according to AdImpact—$65M is a lot of money!) And it’s definitely not that there aren’t a lot of incredibly smart and talented people working on the problem. (although I think the number of people focused on it has increased over the past few years, which is a good thing, since part of the solution has to be that we just need to throw more brains at it) From my perspective, it’s been a combination of things. Many progressives and groups have been powerfully reluctant to invest in persuasion and ads, for an array of not great reasons but one very good one: many lefties and progressives very much do not want this to be how the system works. I argued for years in favor of putting more budget into organizing and field—not in addition to media, instead of it. But I also eventually had too many experiences realizing whatever message we were carrying at the door was getting drowned out by whatever folks were seeing on their screens. Where I’ve landed is that field—and permanent, ongoing state and local level infrastructure—is all super critical. But we have to change the media story, too.

On the DC Dems side, they really do see the left as an opponent that’s nearly (or sometimes more!) of a problem than the Republicans. This has either implicitly or explicitly colored their strategy, and the way financial incentives and blacklists are structured in the Dems consultancy space certainly hasn’t helped either.

But a bigger problem, I think, is that Dems haven’t invested as heavily in persuasion in marketing because they simply haven’t needed to. Putting most of the focus and spending on persuading a shrinking band of mostly white swing voters while siloing off diverse communities into a mobilization universe sort of worked, up to a point. One thing we’ve found in studies is that the Democratic brand is in better shape than we would have guessed. Our ideas are so much better, the outcomes for our ideas are vastly better for nearly all Americans, and consequently our ideas and candidates start out more popular. Voters basically know what Dems are for and they like it, but then our candidates get ripped to shreds by the conservative media superiority. Republicans have had to go so deep in this because it’s actually fairly challenging to convince non-rich people it’s better if our democracy doesn’t work or that they’re going to benefit from tax cuts for the rich. It’s hard to convince people sharing is bad! And one of the things about marketing is that it’s iterative. It’s difficult and complicated, and you get better at it the more and longer you do it. So Republicans and conservatives collaborate in a way that lefties and Dems don’t, and between both groups, they have racked up decades of accumulated advantage in this domain.

Three Positive Examples of Fixing the Persuasion Gap

Ending positive is a good persuasion strategy, so take two positive examples of the kind of thing we need a lot more of—one in owned media, and one in paid.

The first hopeful project is in owned. It gets overlooked too often but the [REDACTED due to recent developments and shifts in the media landscape]

The second hopeful project is a paid media effort: Way to Win’s Midterm Message Project. Since last summer, the MMP has been a sort of Manhattan Project for trying to close as much of this decades-old marketing gap as quickly as possible. [And full disclosure, this project is led by my genius wife, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, and I’m subcontracting on it, doing research and writing, producing and evaluating ads.]

You might call the approach MMP is taking… well, as lefties, we are never going to have one term. I like Persuasionism, but I tweeted that I was from the "polarizing magnetist, persuasionist-vibesist-solverist” wing of the Democratic Party, and that got 6 whole likes, which is truly smoking engagement for me on the bird site. So let’s go with that, and you can shorten it however you like.Whatever you call it, this is what it involves: back to basics, a focus on the fundamentals of persuasion like naming the bad guys and obstacles and plucking emotional strings. MMP is going heavy on all kinds of research modalities across diverse audiences, and not on just understanding where those audiences are at, but how to move them. The distributed team is pretty far outside the DC orbit, so we’re bringing fresh brains to the problem. (and we do hope to influence that orbit) The approach we’re taking is to make political ads that look more or less like political ads, but tell strong stories, make a gut emotional connection, name the bad stuff our opponents are doing, and remind voters they’ve got heroic amounts of agency and are part of a really beautifully diverse coalition. There’s been a bumper crop of studies and think pieces obfuscating the usage and results of the Race Class Narrative, but in our experience, RCN is a very sharp, very sturdy and practical tool: a set of best practices that have led to some very effective ads. This 2020 ad, What’s Possible, went viral starting from a channel with almost zero reach and later won a Pollie award, and the two best performing ads we wrote last year (detailed in our November content memo and this twitter thread of Jenifer’s) were based on it and showed exceptionally strong results in Way to Win’s comprehensive evaluation program.

What we’ve found so far is that it’s true that it’s tough to run hard left, but also that Dems don’t need to run to the right, either. They just need to take their own side in the debate. There’s plenty of largely unexplored maneuvering room in the positioning space between running as a full on Bernie-style socialist pushing M4A, UBI and the GND, and the total capitulation to conservative narratives that running as anything in the vicinity of “anti-woke” would represent. And, progressive ideas are not only good and popular, they work! Going big on the ARP led to the shortest US recession in history; a stark contrast from the post 2008 recovery that was the slowest since the Great Depression.

There’s LOTS more to do in this space. The Crooked folks are always telling everyone to help them figure out Facebook. And in paid, we need a lot more creative and experiments. Which brings up a third, bonus bright spot: [REDACTED]

Since the Democratic brand is wide open and built collaboratively by all of us, changing the conventional wisdom around who we are and what we stand for is one big group project.

It seems likely Democrats are doomed this year no matter what, and if so, it’s going to make 2024 more challenging. But the problem isn’t that they’ve turned left, it’s a confluence of historic underinvestments colliding with a changed media environment and an opposition exploiting fears (some of them real) about a changing world. It may yet be impossible to make a future built on multiracial solidarity sexy. We may not be able to stop the authoritarian faction—powered by absurd wealth and extractive industries trying to divide us so they can keep that system locked into place—whether it mutates into more coded and sophisticated form like DeSantis and Youngkin or more blunt forms like the various MAGA representatives or what a Trump 2024 campaign would look like. But if Dems are going down, let’s fight. As a character in the final season of the fantastic near-future sci-fi thriller The Expanse put it recently: it’s better to get shot in the front than the back.²

1.  Part of what’s challenging about the the “Too Far Left” narrative is that it’s baked into so many arguments. Almost every David Brooks or Ross Douthat piece includes at least a small genuflection to it. Here’s a small catechism of pieces where the case is made explicitly: Thomas Edsall Democrats Can’t Just Give the People What They Want (NYT, 13 October 2021), Ruy Texeia There Just Aren't Enough College-Educated Voters! (Liberal Patriot substack, 30 Sept 2021), Jonathan Chait Study Shows Anti-Racist Messages Hurt Democrats (NY Magazine, 23 April 2021), Ezra Klein Opinion | David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don't Want to Hear - The New York Times (NYT, 8 Oct 2021)  

2. A reminder that this was written in 2021. It feels a bit too real now. We pray as always for peace and hope we all get through this with no one getting shot at from either direction.