2017 was pretty “easy” in that “Hillary Clinton was bad, don’t do that again” was more or less enough. Today there are 4-5 really hairy issues that are hard to address.
Earlier I looked up Dem approval polls and in Oct 2017 they were at 37% approval, and they're at 36% approval as of yesterday, so I don't think things were as great in 2017 as we're remembering them.
Not a criticism btw, I was surprised when I looked it up! I didn't know approval was so low in '17
I don’t think he was saying that they were GOOD, more that Democrats failed to address obvious issues and as a result met them fester into ones that are now harder to fix.
There are hairy issues politically speaking but the actual solutions are pretty straightforward. So focus on real solutions. Democrats have no clarity of purpose right now. What specific things do Democrats want to do? I have no idea.
Interested in what you think those 4 or 5 hairy issues are. Are they actual, actionable issues, or just made up Republican talking points like "woke" and fearmongering over trans kids?The only real hairy issue I can see is immigration, and even it has been hyped out of all proportion.
I like to read, am a democratic committeeperson and I’m definitely not reading all that. Perhaps this should be like 10 different infographics plus videos saying the same thing that tell a story that needs to be told.
My unsolicited advice would be to tap as many deep-pocketed donors as possible and attack the 3 special elections with every round of ammo possible. Narrowing the GOP’s House majority is really the only practical option they have until 2026 …
Gonna be tough finding anyone with deep pockets who isn’t either happier than a pig in fresh mud or already relocated to a less psychotically suicidal country.
2017 was also still possible to say “this is not really who we are.” He lost the popular vote, it was 3 states that were so close, the Russia stuff, the Comey stuff. Maybe “Bernie people who didn’t understand the stakes.” It was possible to attribute it to a fluke. This win is very different.
Hillary was easily the worst major candidate since at least Dukakis. She was a nepo pick at a time of anti establishment sentiment, she was smug which played into female stereotypes, she didn't have the stamina to do the hours on campaign, and she blamed voters directly (deplorables) over Trump
With nearly 3 million more votes in Clinton's favor? It WASN'T close. If we were not saddled with the outdated, unbalanced, slaver-favoring EC, we wouldn't be here now.
You unaffiliated leftists need to stop whining and working to make Democrats as unpopular as possible and fix the damn problems that so concern you. It's not up to us Democrats to do everything without any help from the 90 million of you lazy do nothings!
I'm an independent. And I agree, Dems need to fix their messaging. But to look at someone winning, decisively, the popular vote and declare everything they did was wrong? Buys right into the ridiculous idea that the EC is somehow valid and the only votes that matter are swing.
Lol that's bullshit, Bernie campaigned harder for Clinton than she did herself, and that's not an exaggeration, you can literally compare campaign visits.
Figure it out, lib. You're more of a problem than Bernie was.
We just need a leader and three to five major points. No more.
They can have all the other things but they are things to achieve not communicate. Ffs look how much stuff was in project 2025 and did we hear about that?
But ffs they need and leader who is a communicator.
People are not going to read all of this and then they will turn around and blame voters. A single spaced, 10pt font bulleted list does not evoke the urgency of the moment.
I’m a person who reads books, in fact I write and edit books, but I glance at this and my eyes glaze over. This is Exhibit A in how NOT to communicate with voters!
Short of AOC, Cuban, or Murphy, no heirs apparent to leadership. Has Harris spoken up since Inauguration? Past time to “break glass” and get the most popular person in the party off the bench and in the game, Michelle O
I did zoom in and immediately barfed in my mouth as I realized the whole thing is just personal self promotion of politicians. There is literally no substance. It’s so bad
The party desperately needs to bring in some messaging consultants. Outside of a handful of Dems, the majority if the party is clueless on how you communicate with people in the current media environment
I mean yes, I’d definitely rather have that and that’s why I’ve been speaking out against politicians like Schumer and Jeffries who aren’t fit for the current times. But they aren’t going to be voted out for a bit, and Dems can’t wait that long to keep losing ground in the media + messaging space
Yeah, but how will more messaging consultants help? It’s the consultants who keep telling them to go further right, appeal to moderate Republicans, etc. The consultants are useless. They’re just as out of touch as the politicians.
I'm going to confess.
I didn't read the list.
But I'm willing to bet that no Democrat lawmakers got arrested for civil disobedience when they were denied access to any federal agencies they tried to enter.
Why?
Would John Lewis be afraid of an arrest after "Bloody Sunday", Selma Alabama?
And yet won’t create and run a shadow cabinet, house, and senate.
Won’t leverage YT, socials, pods, all algorithms really.
Inexplicable given the threats.
People complain “do something!” because they don’t pay attention so democrats put out a list of things they’ve been doing every week, and now you’re complaining about a new thing. How about you shove it? Shove it deep and hard and stfu.
I actually thought this was a joke at first. I do comms for a living. Thought this was a parody of how Dems overthink comms.
They can’t get out of their own way.
Dems: call pros from outside of DC. We can help you.
Example: boil down laundry list to 1-3 overarching themes. Everything fits within.
If I was reviewing this like a resume, I would kick it back for failing to show any kinds of real results or accomplishments. Simply showing up to a vote is not enough!
GET OUT OF DC is the absolute bottom line. All of these Beltway Bozos with their Eastern private school backgrounds have no clue how to talk to everyday people, and how everyday people consume media.
I've said for a while that the DNC should move their headquarters to Chicago.
Let’s pick two. Strength and safety. Trump isn’t making the country safer or stronger-he’s weakening it and making people less safe.
Now national security, measles, immigration, doge data security, federal cuts can all be framed under those two themes.
Tell a story.
You vote them out. We have one member, for example, from Hawaii who takes more corporate money from some of the scummiest orgs like defense contractors. And he doesn’t even need it. These folks just wanna be stooges.
Have you seen the daily ones they’ve been putting out all month? In response to an outcry from Dem constituents that we need action, not words,they started listing 6 concrete things Dems did, every day. But you want them to pick two words a day?
Here’s what we did:
1. Fought against the growing fascism from the MAGA/Russian criminals.
2. Fought for Americans to pursue life, liberty, and happiness without some billionaire fucking you over.
This past election one scene really stood out. Kamala using limited interview time to pump some $5k small business thingy compared to Trump just going “immigrants did it!”
Dems need to learn what an elevator pitch is. And bottle up the nerd stuff until after you win the election.
This is so bad. This party is absolutely clueless when it comes to messaging. They are thinned skinned and reactive. This whole thing reeks of being overly defensive to the legitimate criticism of their weak response out of the gate.
I think they think this is going to calm the noise around them not doing jack, but it comes off as weirdly defensive. They really need crisis PR brought in ASAP.
All im reading is resume lvl point list of things they did but written like they succeeded at. Like Dems voted against X person, yet X person was still elected. Thats like saying on a CV was head of a 1 billion dollar city planning project that was later found out to be scrapped from bad management.
They are so bad at this. Politics isn’t about showing that you did your homework, it about offering a compelling vision and giving people the courage to act (whether that action is a vote or a protest or a revolution).
Marketing Teacher here @democrats-veterans.house.gov. Please revise and resubmit with something people will actually can absorb. Maybe a video? Pathetic.
So need to put AOC in charge of messaging. Like a year ago.
"Wait, AOC does this in video. Why not poorly formatted text instead? I don't think there are enough widows*. Could we add more to make it even harder to read?"
This is not effective. We need people going on social media and telling us what’s happening. We have no chance if we can’t simplify the message. Get the message out to the people who need to see/hear it. Tiny words on a bullet pointed document is just lazy.
We need comms folks that understand that half of Americans can't read at an 8th grade level. I know it's difficult to do coming from "we're the party that actually thinks things through" but we have to find a way
The top bullet point shared by the Democrats is a flat out lie. Representative Grijalva, who ran unopposed in the primary and regularly misses votes, did not vote against it. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202550
I'm not going to read any more after that. Are they kidding? Nobody involved is competent enough to bother writing "no Democrats voted with Republicans"?
They do versions of this list with 3-5 bullet points all the time. When they do that nobody cares. When they do this nobody cares (or they get dunked on).
People just pathologically despise “Democrats” as a brand and have no interest in listening to them while whining constantly they don’t say more
WHAT DEMOCRATS DID IN FEBRUARY
- Secured a Ride on the bus
- Rode the bus to CVS pharamacy
- Secured personal lubricant
- Secured a Ride back to Congress
- Removed personal lubricant from packaging
- Removed trousers
- Lubricated thumb
- Lowered posterior onto erected thumb
You appear to possess at least avg. intelligence so I have to assume you’re pretending to not get this or purposefully not getting it. The whole point is to say “look at all the stuff we did in February! It’s such a long list we had to use really tiny font!”
Ok maybe an analogy will be helpful. Imagine this was an ad that said “All the safety features on the 2025 Subaru Blah Blah:” The point isn’t to read every single thing on the big long list, it’s for someone to glance at it, say “huh that’s a lot of safety features” and then move on
“Mark Warner forced Trump to back off a hiring freeze” while they’re firing tens of thousands (at least) of workers in the ugliest possible ways has got me so riled up.
It didn't help, including a bunch of things that are meaningless. Like introducing bills that will never pass with Republicans and a Dictator in the WH.
why? its just a variation on the same crap again and again
a democrat sent a stern letter
a democrat passed a bill for show to campaign on that will never be law
a democrat wagged a shame finger to shame republicans
all democrats finally realized they cant get away w voting for trump picks
You aren't supposed to read it, guys. It's supposed to be "look at this big list with small font, we're doing something we swear." I'm not defending that message necessarily, but it's not a legitimate attempt to get you to read the whole thing
Ok, but if you did some good things, you want to put them in big bold print, then, fine, squish another 20 things in small print, if you must. But most ppl would be happy to d see 3-6 MEANINGFUL THINGS
It’s not just that this is a wall of text. It’s that it’s horribly designed. It’s actually hard to read because of the hanging sentences (I think that’s the word in graphic design). Anyways it’s bad, my ED would be horrified if she asked me to come up with something to encourage donors & this was it
they could remove the bullet points that didn't do a fucking thing to help anyone and were really just meaningless posturing, but then I guess there wouldn't be anything left to tweet about. bit of a catch 22, really.
We need some comic book artists to put together visual panels of this info like was done to tell people about Project 2025's evil plans - but circulate it better on social media!
Even if they had done great (they didn't) and their response was sufficient (it wasn't), this wall of text is absolute shit. I've always resisted the "they are trying to lose" conclusion, but damn
Or who don't read, full stop! Maybe they can't read. Trump speaks at a third grade level. And his most ardent supporters reading comprehension peaks there.
Stop working so hard to ‘get back to normal’ or defend the way things were. They are breaking the system, no going back. We need vision for a way forward. Assume DEI is gone, how do you lead into our values for a new day instead of wasting time on old fights?
Not only that, if you need a jeweler’s loupe to figure out what in the heck the Democrats did based on this graphic, you’re doing a very poor job of communicating at a critical time like this
Well, Trump is planning to do an ethnic cleansing in Palestine (hello, he wants to forcibly move the entire population to camps, and make Gaza a holiday resort like Dubai is) so I really wouldn't go "both sides" here.
Every state Democratic party-hell, maybe even every municipal- should have 2-4 Gen Z posters on staff. 19-22 an hr, 25 hrs a week for each. We need an army of the terminally online if we’re going to win the war of attention
Lets say you have 4 posters, at 22 an hour, working 25 hrs a week each- and lets say thats for all 50 state parties. Not going into whether they’d have to pay benefits or any other administrative/ancillary costs, but thats around 114k for each state a year, 5.7 mil total- DNC could easily afford it
Do-nothing dems dont care if you read it, it's all about optics, it may be the same sentence over &over for all anyone knows. Liberalism is dead. #donewithdems #rankedchoicevoting #bluemaga #norednoblue
You joke, but if they had anyone under 50 working for them, they could have used that as a way to communicate this material in a way that would generate buzz and press coverage. You just did the internet better than them without trying.
Not to mention using the enemy's communication rig to put this pouty-faced sad-sack list of mediocrities out there.
Staggeringly embarrassing. The Democratic establishment are so removed from society it's no wonder they have no cultural clout and no ability to define themselves.
Good; but on the other hand are these the kind of things that will be effective against the sheer corruption and criminality that's happening? Sincere question. Most of it reads pretty "business as usual"...
What this list tells me (besides that they have zero skills communicating with the electorate) is that they completely fail to grasp that we're in a national emergency that needs laser focus.
Comments
Not a criticism btw, I was surprised when I looked it up! I didn't know approval was so low in '17
Figure it out, lib. You're more of a problem than Bernie was.
We should be able to disagree without insults.
Democratic Leadership: “Let me tell you why this position is incorrect. Firstly…”
They can have all the other things but they are things to achieve not communicate. Ffs look how much stuff was in project 2025 and did we hear about that?
But ffs they need and leader who is a communicator.
All of you pieces of shit are getting primaried. And far worse.
You cunts sold us out. Get out of the way. Some MAGA scum need to be un-alived now…
This ain’t it.
I didn't read the list.
But I'm willing to bet that no Democrat lawmakers got arrested for civil disobedience when they were denied access to any federal agencies they tried to enter.
Why?
Would John Lewis be afraid of an arrest after "Bloody Sunday", Selma Alabama?
Won’t leverage YT, socials, pods, all algorithms really.
Inexplicable given the threats.
They can’t get out of their own way.
Dems: call pros from outside of DC. We can help you.
Example: boil down laundry list to 1-3 overarching themes. Everything fits within.
I've said for a while that the DNC should move their headquarters to Chicago.
https://bsky.app/profile/kevinleecaster.bsky.social/post/3ljdyduut6227
Now national security, measles, immigration, doge data security, federal cuts can all be framed under those two themes.
Tell a story.
I can count on my hand how many democrats actually care about regular people
1. Fought against the growing fascism from the MAGA/Russian criminals.
2. Fought for Americans to pursue life, liberty, and happiness without some billionaire fucking you over.
That should be about it.
Dems need to learn what an elevator pitch is. And bottle up the nerd stuff until after you win the election.
Ds give a loaded list of actions taken
Rs sit idly by while our country is being isolated & transforming into an autocracy
But the complaint is “who’s going to read all that?”
We as citizens have a duty to have conversations about what is going on.
Pick 3 bullet points & talk.
NY AG Letitia led a multi-state coalition to take legal action against 🍊 and Musk's efforts to shut down the CFPB
Dem AGs successfully blocked Elon Musk's DOGE from accessing sensitive data from Treasury systems
Cool - you “did” all that.
What did you *achieve*?
"Wait, AOC does this in video. Why not poorly formatted text instead? I don't think there are enough widows*. Could we add more to make it even harder to read?"
*a word by itself on a line due to line breaks
This laundry list is not an effective way to communicate.
That small ass font isn’t even scannable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrNDwyj4u1w
DRILL BABY DRILL.
LOCK HER UP.
we need help.
Dems: UWSANTLGBTQ+&AISPж!?…
I wonder what the best way would be to communicate that visually?
People just pathologically despise “Democrats” as a brand and have no interest in listening to them while whining constantly they don’t say more
- Secured a Ride on the bus
- Rode the bus to CVS pharamacy
- Secured personal lubricant
- Secured a Ride back to Congress
- Removed personal lubricant from packaging
- Removed trousers
- Lubricated thumb
- Lowered posterior onto erected thumb
*don’t look
who find this equally ridiculous and certainly won't read it
Get some younger folks that know how to use social media effectively to spread messaging FFS
a democrat sent a stern letter
a democrat passed a bill for show to campaign on that will never be law
a democrat wagged a shame finger to shame republicans
all democrats finally realized they cant get away w voting for trump picks
Save democracy by putting trump in jail.
Some idiot has decided it’s just a powerpoint template for Communicate Your Actions and then stuffed an entire month into the same format.
DESIGN IS A CAREER FOR A REASON.
I mean, they don’t even have to add line 2, which would be “we probably f*cked you over too, but you’re too indoctrinated to notice.”
"coach, i can't do the job, sub me out for someone else"
CAN YALL LEARN HOW TO MARKET YOURSELVES CORRECTLY
I AM interested and I'm not gonna read all that
👓🔎👓
Seriously my kids would have known by middle school this is not ok
Because bombing Brown babies is always more important to them than stopping Trump.
https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism.bsky.social/post/3liziwy6zbc2v
Books, by contrast, come in paragraphs & are well-organized. Books engage you from the get-go so you want to keep reading.
Staggeringly embarrassing. The Democratic establishment are so removed from society it's no wonder they have no cultural clout and no ability to define themselves.
I read a lot. And this is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen them do. I can’t even see it.
Awful at marketing, awful at messaging, awful at getting rid of Fascists. That should be their tagline.
Make the litmus test : do you think Vance is a couchfucker. If you say no, then out you go.
And yup holy fuck this is so so stupid. And useless