Speaking of Messaging…

Note: I see that James and I are on the same wavelength. And maybe that means I should trash this, but instead, OTB readers get two separate, but similar takes on the same topic!

An organization called Third Way has a post in the form of a memo addressed to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA” called Was It Something I Said? The memo will, I expect, resonate with some readers here at OTB who often are concerned about what language Democrats are using in trying to communicate with the broader public. It reminds me of James Carville ranting about “faculty lounge” politics.

The memo starts thusly.

For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.

In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions. But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths—words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.

This sounds very much like gripes I read here at OTB all the time.

But there is a tiny problem: the evidence for this is lacking. (Although two words, “their allies,” could be said to be doing a lot of work here).

I turn to Lindsay Cormack, a political scientist who specializes in studying Congressional newsletters, and her post Was It Something The Democrats Said?

She notes,

I agree that many of the words listed have more negatives than positives in political arenas. But the idea that Democrats have been the ones driving these terms into the public sphere is worth checking against the evidence. Terms like “woke,” “critical race theory,” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” didn’t come out of Congress, they migrated from leftist activist or academic spaces…and then were repeated endlessly by Republicans more-so than Democrats, but in a way to complain that Democrats had been using them too much. In fact, this is the topic of a book I’m working on (and if that’s interesting to you, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter).

So far, she is on board with the notion that some words and concepts might not be the wisest to deploy.

She further notes the following based on her ongoing, comprehensive analysis of Congressional newsletters, which is a key way that member of Congress communicate with their constituents. Granted, this does not cover other kinds of communication, but if it were, in fact, the case that these words were frequently flowing from the mouths of elected Democrats, you would think they would show up in the newsletters as well.

However,

Looking at actual usage, the Third Way memo reads less like an audit of Democrats’ language and more like a list of terms Republicans tell us Democrats are saying. The data show that many of these phrases barely exist in constituent communications, and when they do, Republicans are often the ones writing them either to lampoon Democrats or to spotlight them as proof of “wokeness.” But again, these are not campaign emails, and I’m far out of campaign world for the most part.

All of this reminds me of the way in which one quote from one interview that was several years old from Kamala Harris about trans persons in prisons was made to make it appear that Harris was actively campaigning for president on the topic of trans rights.

This NBC News piece from November of 2024 is telling on this topic: Some Democrats blame party’s position on transgender rights in part for Harris’ loss. The piece is paragraph after paragraph about why some think trans rights were a major problem for the Harris campaign. And yet it is not until the 14th and 15th paragraphs (more than 2/3rds of the way down the piece) that we get this (emphases mine).

Ads that mentioned Harris’ past support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming care treatments were repeatedly aired during NFL and college football games last month. The ads ended with the tagline: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

Harris largely avoided the issue on the trail and in interviews and it was notably absent from this year’s Democratic National Convention.

But, you know, Democrats need to stop talking about it!

Look, I know she said what she said and was videotaped doing it, making it possible for the Trump campaign to exploit it. But the notion that the loss, or that Dems in general are suffering, because they keep talking about these things, is just empirically false.

As Cormack notes,

as long as Republicans can keep defining Democrats by terms Democrats themselves rarely use, and everyone comes to believe this through repetition is a much bigger challenge for the impressions of the Democratic Party than any lefty words they might on occasion.

And yes, we can circle back to “their allies,” but that is a huge category. Sure, some “liberals” or people “on the left” say any number of things. But the Democratic Party can’t control all “their allies,” and since the goal of Republicans is to weaponize this stuff, it is essentially impossible to contain or control language.

I will conclude by quoting Scott Lemieux at LGM:

I’m honestly not sure what to do about the general media consensus that Democratic politicians are responsible for everything ever said at an obscure academic conference, but Republicans are not responsible for the rhetoric of Republican presidents.

So much this.