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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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 it was those of us who had been working in the field of trying to bring more resources to movement building, progressive movement building, multiracial coalition building. Especially. We had Tory Gavito, who was one of our co-founders, who's now the CEO of Way to Win. She came from Texas. She's in Texas and was part of trying to, over time, flip Texas blue and had learned some really important lessons in the past few years. And we just felt like we needed to nationalize this idea of taking the fight to different places.

So we got so stuck in a battleground state world, which was really focused in the Midwest, and yet so much of the population growth is actually happening in the South and Southwest. And we saw the importance of states like Georgia and Arizona coming into power, but not enough resources actually going there. So that was one of the things, is, like, we need to re-imagine the map and actually expand the places where we could go to build power and to take power from Republicans. So we were some of the first coming on the scene to say we need to put major resources into Georgia, just as Stacey Abrams initial campaign was going, but it wasn't on the map of most national political organizations.

They still weren't talking about Georgia or even Arizona. So we were part of that. And we were saying we have to push into places like Texas as well as North Carolina, Florida, places across the South and Southwest that are growing and changing. So that was one thing. The second thing was funding politics in a way that actually leaves something behind. So when you only fund candidate campaigns, as you know, there's nothing left at the end of the day, the candidate wins or loses. There's no infrastructure to keep going, so you have to start over. So we wanted to create a way for donors to fund electoral victories in the short term, but that would also build toward the long term.

David Roberts

I think they call that losing well.

Yeah, exactly. And knowing that if we're going to build in a place like Texas, we're going to lose statewide a few times, but we're winning in local areas, we're flipping counties, we're flipping congressional districts, we're showing how you can build over time. But then funding organizers, leaders, and groups that are going to be there the day after the election to continue to keep fighting. So that was two. And then the third thing was having essentially a three-part strategy, but a comprehensive strategy that would ensure not only we have, like I was saying, base expansion, community builder, power builders working in cities in states and actually growing and building a base over time also that the purpose of winning power is to pass policy.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

It's not just about electing a democrat. We want to make sure that we're arming the communities in that place with the tools and the ability to actually push for policy, whether it's democracy, climate education, et cetera. And then the third part, which I know you're interested in, given your intro, is that we have narratives that shape the multiracial diverse coalition that we have. We need to be going toward inclusion. So we want to make sure that we're winning, but not in a way that is more divisive or causing different groups to fall out of our coalition.

We need to continue to grow and forge this multiracial coalition that we have, our winning coalition. And we do that with a narrative strategy that is all about building across those differences.

David Roberts

Right. So it is this latter part I want to focus on this sort of research you've done, on what messages Dems are using and how they're hitting. But before I get into that, I want to address my main hobby horse in this area, which I come back to again and again, which is I come up in the climate area. So I'm most familiar with the sort of agonizing, over climate messaging that has been going on and on and on and on as long as I've been following this area, and mostly has manifested in endless research and resources put into these kind of focus groups where you get a group of college students in a room and you read them various paragraphs and then you see which ones they react well to, and then you wildly over interpret that as some sort of messaging strategy. In other words, this sort of obsessive focus on what words are we using, what are the words and phrases, is it national security, is it home and hearth? Like what's the right themes? And I have come to think over the years that this a little bit misses the forest for the trees in that the reason the right wing seems to dominate this kind of messaging sphere and that they're always on the attack and the left is always on the defense is not their cleverness, they're not particularly smart.

A lot of their messages are quite stupid. They just are repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in your face, everywhere you look. So in other words, it's not the cleverness of the message, it's ownership of the means of distributing messages. And that's Fox News, that's OAN, that's all the local newspapers they're buying up. All the local news stations they're buying up. Basically, right wingers are running Facebook now. Basically right wingers running Twitter now. I mean, they're just on a march through media, dominating media. And if you spend the money and exercise the power to dominate media, you can get your messages in the heads of the public, even if the messages are super dumb.

So I guess what I want to ask you is, is this a fair dichotomy, this dichotomy between the sort of messaging focus versus capacity to get the messages out? Do you think that's a fair dichotomy? And how do you sort of view the balance between those, or, like, how should resources be divided up between those?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, it's a great question. The way I see it is not that it's not a dichotomy, because it really, I think, has to be both. And how I would think about dividing it is a good question, but I would say how we think about it is we absolutely need to be building different modes of ownership of media. Like, it should be a huge part of our strategy. We haven't focused on it enough. The right is certainly beating us, so I'd say we're behind there. I think we have to put significant resources there, but it really can't be the only thing, partially because that takes time to grow and build and we have low hanging fruit on the table.

Now, that I think that's what I've really been focused on is how do we actually build a process that can understand where voters are through research, then make content that tries to reach them in an emotional way, and we can test that content. There's lots of tools that can help us see what does this actually move people the way we want to move them. So there's a lot we can do. Now, I think that's not about necessarily being clever or finding the right words. It's like, can you deeply listen to the community you're trying to move?

Can you hear from them? Where are they actually? And not just trying to test in a poll with some words and see if they like what they hear. It's more like understanding how they think. It's like deeply listening is what we call it. And we use a lot of research tools that actually are much deeper than you would get from a focus group or for sure a poll. We use a lot of online panels where people actually you can kind of get underneath how they think. So that's what we're sort of about, like, how do we actually figure out what's underneath what people really, truly want, and then how we can speak to it in a message and then test that to see does it work or not?

So for me, it's not about necessarily finding the right words, but it is about finding the right kind of frames and the right overarching argument that we're trying to make. And then it absolutely is about repetition, repetition, repetition. So I think we can do it at the same time we can get better and smarter about how we actually do our message work. A lot of Way to Win and a lot of our partners that we work with do. But it's not the norm of the Democratic establishment or major campaigns right now that's what we're trying to do is influence and push in that arena, because I think there's just low hanging fruit that we could actually reach do better.

And I think that the midterms is a good example of where we actually did that. And so that just gives me hope. And we can talk about that if you like, but that experience just gives me hope that there is a way for us to get more aligned overall across the ecosystem, whether it's candidates, the president, groups on the ground, activists, et cetera. If we're all kind of rowing in the same direction on our message, it doesn't have to be all exactly the same words, but we're kind of saying the same thing in a big picture argument way that can actually break through.

David Roberts

Herding cats. Famously difficult to do on the left.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

It is. But like I said, we did it in the midterms. I mean, we should talk about it as an example of what we did, because it was really interesting.

David Roberts

Let's get into that. I want to come back to the capacity question later, but let's get into that because I think the thrust of your report was that the midterms were a success story in terms of Democratic messaging, which you don't hear. Success story and Democratic messaging don't go together a lot.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Success and warning signs.

David Roberts

I want to ask a semi specific question. So going into the Midterms, I think there was a piece of conventional wisdom among Democratic elites which went something like this the sort of positions of power in the Democratic coalition, the staffers, the people who are actually out there doing the work. That class has been kind of taken over by a young, very diverse, highly educated, highly liberal set of young Democrats who just talk to one another and convince one another that everybody's as liberal as they are. And they've sort of taken over the messaging, they've taken over the party's posture.

And what they don't realize is that whatever Joe average voter, Joe average mid-state voter, those concerns and things that they value don't resonate with him. So there's one story that goes the Democratic establishment has been taken over by lefties and they're alienating everyone else. And I sort of want to know a couple of things. Like a was there a lot of lefty messaging in the Democratic advertising going into the midterms? Like, were people actually out there saying defund the police and make immigration legal and all these kind of things. A was that the face the Democrats were showing the public?

And B is that the way the public actually does view the Democrats as sort of captured by their left flank, too far left? In other words, sort of like is the kind of rising left flank a vulnerability for Dems in terms of kind of messaging and posture?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

I really don't think so. I mean, my position is a couple of things. I think that those of us on the left and myself included, I consider myself progressive. Way to Win certainly has been funding a lot of progressive groups over time. So we're situated in that. We're progressives. We consider ourselves part of the left and the folks that we talk to in our coalitions really don't see things that way. I think we're very clear who our coalition is. Right? And it's ideologically diverse and it's racially diverse and it's diverse in terms of age too. And a lot of those things overlap, of course, but it's fundamentally a different task than the Republicans have.

When you're looking at we have 42%, 43% of our overall people who voted for Biden are not white. And then on the Republican side, it's 92% white. Right. So they're essentially trying to consolidate one group while fracturing off as much as they can from the other. We actually have to hold a really big coalition together, white voters and all kinds of different voters of color. So it's just a fundamentally different thing. And there's a lot of ideological diversity in that. So I think we understand that that right now it's an anti-MAGA coalition, really. It's like against this kind of MAGA Republican.

And that was partially the success of the midterms was making that clear. So I will say, number one, I think we're very clear what our job is. And we don't see the idea of a median voter. We see it in this diverse coalition way and needing to hold it together. Meaning you don't want to have messaging targeted to one part of the coalition that completely turns off and demobilizes the other. Right. You have to actually figure out how to get both to be persuaded and mobilized to vote for Democrats.

David Roberts

Yeah, well, you have both factions basically accusing the other faction of using messages like that. Like your messaging excludes me. No, your messaging excludes me. Is there some magic message that doesn't exclude either of them?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yes. I think we found it in the midterms when we talked about we need to protect our freedoms. We have these MAGA, extreme Republicans who are trying to take our freedoms away and it's our job to actually come together. We did it before, we rejected Trump, we can do it again. That actual overall message really worked for both sides. But back to your original question absolutely ridiculous. Because when we looked at the midterm, like you said, it's called TV Congress's report that we did, which looked at the paid broadcast advertising, which unfortunately is still a huge amount of money, it was like about around $600 million that we studied on both the Senate and just the Senate and the House on both sides.

And so when you look at that spending, even on the Democratic side, just looking at Senate, it's $296 million. And looking at those ads, who's controlling that? It is not young, quote unquote, woke lefty liberals, okay? It is old school. A lot of consultants who've been around for a really long time, media firms, they are the ones who are driving this message. It is also not liberal. I mean, what's so fascinating to me about this debate within our party is it's like it misses the actual bad guy, which shocker, is the Republicans, okay? It's the Republicans who are lifting up defund the police, who are lifting up bad immigration narratives, who are talking a lot about crime and all of these racially coded things and attacks.

It's the Republicans who are painting us that way. So if there's a perception among our voters, which frankly there is, unfortunately, we still see it even today, there's a perception that Democrats are too liberal or Democrats don't care about you. It's not because of what Democrats are actually doing. It's because of how lockstep Republicans are in their messaging. I mean, it's absolutely mind boggling when you just see the amount of money that they spent trashing Biden, Biden, and Pelosi in their midterm advertising. It was over $200 million just attacking Biden.

David Roberts

Yes. Even though Biden was notably not up for election.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, because they care about brand. They are trying to trash our brand, and they did it pretty effectively. And I think that plays into Biden's approval ratings being so low.

David Roberts

But what would you say, though, they do use defund the police. I think it's fair to say that people on the right probably said the phrase "Defund the police" ten times more often than any liberal ever said it anywhere. Yes, but a few liberals did say it. You know what I mean? So they did get that ammunition from liberals. And so the argument ends up coming down to sort of like, on the one side, people saying liberals should stop saying stuff that's so obviously out of step with the mainstream, and then other side saying, well, you can't prevent all liberals everywhere.

You just don't have that. Kind of like if a single liberal somewhere saying something goofy results in like a ten week Fox News campaign about it, there's only so much you could do. You can't control every liberal everywhere. So how do you think about that?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Well, it's a different job. It's the job of movements to push the boundaries on what's possible. It's the job of movements to fight for their own lives, to fight for the things that they need and want. That's a fundamentally different job than winning elections. So those of us who are focused on winning elections. We actually have to just work with it. And that is what I think is our philosophy is like I was saying, we have a diverse coalition. We have to move them. So how can we actually figure out what they need and want? How can we talk to them in a way that they can hear?

Because we can actually make the case on things like community safety, for example, which is where that defund piece comes from. Ultimately, when you actually talk to voters, they don't like that kids are being shot by cops unarmed. They don't like it. It's not popular. Like voters actually don't like that. In our own coalition that we're trying to move, they care about it. They care about violence. They want something to be done. And what the problem is I think that we've really been saying in which we said in our report, is like, we actually need to embrace it a little bit more.

We need to figure out how to make comprehensive arguments on all of these things, whether it's crime or immigration or gender and LGBT issues, because what we've too often done is just ignore it. Like, think it's going to go away, dismiss it, try to focus on something else. Oh, it's just got to be about kitchen table issues. We can't actually address those things. We're not actually going to talk about crime, even though that's what the other guys are talking about. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes that I haven't seen us solve yet, and that is the focus of 24.

David Roberts

One of the other big themes in messaging debates these days is you have, I think, I guess they're called popularists. I don't know if any of them still want that label or if that label means anything, but there's a group of people that say basically like Dems have a core set of issues on which they are extremely popular and they tend to be "kitchen table" issues. We're going to protect Social Security, we're going to give you better health care. We're going to put you to work. Economics and health, basically kitchen table issues. And by this way of looking at things, anytime Dems sort of focus campaigns on other stuff, typically culture warish issues, they suffer.

And so what Dems should do is stick to their strengths, stick to talking about issues where they know they are popular. And insofar as they get drawn into these other debates, they're going to lose. I have so many questions about this narrative, including like, what the hell counts as a kitchen table issue? If I'm a young woman, abortion is an extremely economic issue for me. It's something about which I worry at the kitchen table, as a matter of fact.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Exactly, yeah. What kids are reading in school and how their teachers are treating them and what books they're banning are also kitchen table issues these days.

David Roberts

Right, but the conventional wisdom is sort of like these core economic and health issues or where Democrats should stick.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Right, it's wrong.

David Roberts

A) you think that's wrong but first I'd like to hear sort of like did Dems do that in the midterms? Did they stick to those issues or what did they do instead and why is it wrong?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Right? This is what I would say. It's another false dichotomy, honestly, to say it's got to be kitchen table versus culture, because it's all swimming together right now and we're not going to be able to have a conversation about one thing when the other side, which you noted has a very large set of megaphones and channels, is going to talk about the other thing. You can't ignore it. Politics isn't solitaire like our friend Anat Shenker-Osorio likes to say. So you have to know what the other side is saying and you can't expect to have a totally different conversation.

What we looked at in the lead up to the midterms, because we knew this was going to happen, was figuring out how to actually tell a story that does merge these two ideas together in terms of an economic, focused narrative and that also addresses the contrast of what the other side is trying to do. So it was a structure that involved sort of three parts. One is really just saying what you're for leaning into what we believe in this case, the things Biden has done created all these millions of jobs. Democrats came together and passed this amazing Inflation Reduction Act.

Like there were a lot of things we could point to of like this is what we tried to do, we actually did. We created millions of jobs with better pay and better benefits. These were think concrete things we did. Number two, you pointing out that the Republicans have completely gone off the deep end and this is what they're focused on. They're trying to ban your books, they attacked the Capitol with violence, all these things. You can actually point to the contrast and then at the end of the day just again remind people the third part that we are a diverse coalition and we came together before to say no to this kind of extremism and we can do it again.

And that three part strategy for the message actually really worked in our research to show that it moved folks over toward Democrats whether they were liberal or moderate or even somewhat conservative. And it also worked across black, white, Latino, Asian American voters as well because it's a unifying message that doesn't try to separate these two big topics, whether it's economic, kitchen table and kind of culture war and our freedoms that the Republicans are trying to take away. There really is a way to talk about them together.

David Roberts

Yeah, I mean one thing that should be noted is that Republicans talk about them together, like, Republicans, when you hear them address economic and kitchen table issues, it's always through a culture like everything's culture war. Now it's all woke, right? Like, they don't neatly distinguish between those two areas.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

No, because they wrap their anti woke culture fear. We call it status threat. That's a term from academia. But status threat, it's like anything around race, gender, to try to make people feel threatened, to try to make people who are economically insecure in particular feel like there's someone else that they can blame for that. It's a way of deflecting blame for people rather than putting it where it should go, which is the actual Republican policy that has led to this kind of economy, which is for the elites, which is for rich people getting all the tax cuts, et cetera, et cetera.

But they literally wrap their anti woke status threat messages around a core message about money and taxes and how you're going to get more if you vote Republican. So you're right that they completely merge the two. So that's why I never understand why Democrats think we can't or we can somehow separate them and only talk about one and not the other.

David Roberts

Well, I just think there's a fundamental and I think this runs deeper than argument. I just think there's a real and this is like, maybe it even dates back to, like, the 90s, when a lot of the Democratic establishment was sort of coming to political age. It's just the very deep sense that the general public doesn't share, like, that Democrats are that their positions on these culture war issues are sort of intrinsically unpopular and they're sort of quasi embarrassed by them. And so there's all this, like, let's just don't talk about that stuff. And that seems to me, as you say, a strategy that is not sustainable over the long term.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

It's super outdated. It's an outdated way of thinking. I don't think in the age of Trump, when we can see what our coalition is I mean, Trump ignited a huge group of people that were not that engaged in politics before. And we've seen in the data they're still engaged, actually. I mean, the young people who came out in 2022 were the very same young people who came out in 2018 and even grew from there. So there actually is a different playbook that needs to be applied because our task is different, our coalition is different. We're not in the 90s anymore.

It's a completely different world. And so you're absolutely right that that way of thinking is super outdated because abortion rights are popular, book bans are unpopular when you talk about it.

David Roberts

I can't believe they're banning books, and we can't make hay out of this.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Exactly.

David Roberts

Makes me bang my head against the wall.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

We should we shouldn't be able to. And like, gun violence prevention reform is popular. All of these things are actually popular with the people we're trying to move. So some of it just comes down to are we actually clear about who the audience is that we need to move. And it includes the swing voters who you may have always thought about, who are a little bit older, but it also includes what we call the surge voters, who are much younger, much more diverse, and there's a lot of them, there's a lot more of them, actually, than the more traditional swing voters.

So we got to figure out how to talk to them, but again, not at an expense of the other. So we did find that in the midterms, when we made an argument, look, the midterms were supposed to be a disaster. Everybody said we were going to get clobbered. There was a lot of hand-wringing about whether we should talk —

David Roberts

Really classic Democratic stuff, just classic Democratic hand-wringing, self-loathing doom saying, it was in full bloom.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

It really was. But we could see in the data that there was some salient, like abortion was super salient. We saw that even before Dobbs happened that people were really mobilized when you talked about even what the Supreme Court did around the Texas law. So we knew that. And then the democracy issues, partially because of the January 6 hearings, and getting more salience in the minds of voters, the President really making it a priority in what he talked about. We could see in the data that we were looking at a real power in linking those two in a story and using the frame of freedom and freedoms.

Because freedom is an American value. I mean, most Americans will say it's their top value, but the left has never actually tried to own it in the same way that the right has that's contested territory. I mean, we can't let them have freedom. And in fact, when you look back at our own history of progress, whether it's a civil rights movement or the LGBT marriage equality movement, freedom has been a powerful frame. So kind of reclaiming the idea of freedom because it's a frame that can actually tie a lot of different issues together. And we paired that with this idea in persuasion that's called loss aversion, which is like when people have something and they think it's going to get taken away, it's very motivating for them to take action.

And so we combined those two tactics in the message that said, this election is about these MAGA Republicans who are trying to take away our freedoms, block everything we need, and we as voters can protect our futures and our freedoms by joining together and saying no to them. And that made a huge difference.

David Roberts

For all Barack Obama gets sort of beat up in retrospect these days, I thought one thing he was absolutely great at is this loss aversion question. I did a whole pod on what's called "system justification," which is a slightly fancier term, I think, for roughly the same thing. Like, people tend to approve of the larger systems in which they are embedded even if they're sort of on the ass end of it and prospering from it. People are just sort of inclined to be averse to big — like we're going to change the system, we're going to burn it down, et cetera.

So what Obama did is frame like the ongoing struggle for greater and greater freedoms and greater and greater equality and greater and greater prosperity spread more widely is the system. That is America. That's what America means. And so when we're doing that we are affirming the system. We're not trying to burn it down. I thought he played that twist really well and I always thought should run with that.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah.

David Roberts

In terms of this dichotomy, I'm a little curious where does climate change fit into all that? I mean I think the conventional wisdom on climate change and messaging is just that it's a very very low priority for voters.

They don't really care. They don't really want to hear about it. Did you find anything to the contrary? How do you sort of view that issue amidst these others?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah well I mean it's becoming more and more important just because of the rise of especially the Gen Z voting generation because they do really care about it very as you know, passionately and it's not something that they're willing to let go of and not care about. So what we found really is like a) it is important b) in the messaging study that we released there was very little TV advertising talking about the climate provision that Biden had passed, again, despite how popular they were with voters. So that was like a challenge and a miss that I think that we saw in our own research. It was like we didn't sort of quote unquote, try to figure out how to talk about climate but actually more when we listened to voters about what they cared about.

Climate did always rise to the top. And again we talked to "gettable" voters across the board in several swing states, we call them gettable because they believed that Biden won the election. So we took out anybody who didn't believe that.

David Roberts

Low bar there.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

But they weren't all Democrats. They were a mix. They were a lot of independents and people were there, white working class, Latino, working class, black, AAPI, across different class demographics. So it was a very diverse group of voters. It was about 300 people in qual studies that we ultimately talked to. And it's true that they saw the climate as a part of the future that they wanted.

They would see a healthy climate as a part of it. There's also a definite pain that voters are feeling around the climate disasters that are happening and all the changes that are happening. So people are feeling it. I think it's how do you wrap it into the overall narrative, which is the chance that we have right now with all of the legislation that's been passed is actually framing it in terms of the kind of way that Democrats are working for you. Democrats are part of this world we're in right now is, like, we're trying to help people with lower costs.

We're creating these clean energy jobs, lowering energy costs. Kind of like how do you grow the middle class? How do you have people feel like things are getting better for them? There's an economic narrative in that that I think climate really fits well into that narrative in terms of it's part of this different future we're creating. I think that's what we saw the most.

David Roberts

I would also say maybe this is like, getting a little ahead of things and maybe this message will work a few more years out. But in terms of the broader freedom narrative, I've always thought that we put up with a lot of horrible crap from fossil fuels because there's no alternative. They're the only way to get the prosperity we needed and have been for years. But now we have an alternative so we can be free of fossil fuels finally. And that, to me, is a great freedom message. Like, imagine being free of the fumes and all the geopolitical nonsense you have to put up with and just the worst people in the world being empowered, just like all the freedom from all of that.

I think that's so fertile, a fertile message.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

I totally agree. And that was always part of our thinking with the freedoms message, that it does apply not just to abortion and democracy. It can apply to all these things, the freedom to earn a fair wage and to have a good life, to retire with dignity, to breathe clean air, to thrive. What does it look like for us to actually get to a freedom to thrive? Having freedom from fossil fuel companies, as you say, is a key part of that. So that's how I see it. The most success we've seen is fitting it into a larger story because your point is correct, that it's hard to focus on one issue like that with our voters.

David Roberts

You say in the report, sort of the old, again, going back to sort of old conventional wisdom, and I think this is probably still the conventional wisdom among the aforementioned consultant class. But the idea is, like, you pick your issues, your message, your spin, and you just stick to it and repeat it over and over again and ignore everything else that's going on. And you say that no longer works. You say, we need offense across multiple issues and channels. So what does that mean? What is that mental shift and sort of operational shift that you're referring to there?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we talked about in our report was the compare and contrast of two different Senate races. One was Tim Ryan in Ohio and the other was John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. And it's kind of a perfect case of what you're talking about because when you look at what Tim Ryan wanted to talk about, it was China.

David Roberts

A lot of China.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

A lot of China, like, outsourcing. He hadn't made up his mind about what it was that he wanted to say, and it didn't really mesh with what Vance was saying. So you have Vance talking about, I mean, really, some of the most extreme, horrific, racist —

David Roberts

Good Lord.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

— sexist messaging. And you have Ryan being like "But I am bipartisan, and I want to work with the other side."

David Roberts

Yeah, lots of, like, "I'm not like the other Dems" talk, which people in purple states just believe in their bones for some reason is going to work and never seems to.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

He even spent a million dollars trashing Obama. Okay? So that is one thing. And when you look at some of the charts in our report, you can see it's like, here's what Ryan talked about, issue, issue, and here's what Vance talked about, issue, issue. They don't match. Like, there's nothing related to each other. Whereas when you look at Fetterman versus Oz, a different state for sure, but not completely different in terms of Pennsylvania versus Ohio. But you saw actually, the issues that are salient for voters, whether it was economy and jobs, crime, well, really, those two were the kind of the top inflation, crime, economy.

Those are the issues that people in the state cared about. Oz talked about them, and Fetterman talked about them. So it was a way that he went on offense. So that was kind of what we were talking about before, where you could imagine, okay, Oz is going to attack Fetterman on crime, which was one of the biggest attacks that happened, and Fetterman could have just tried to deflect it or ignore it or try to focus it on something else. Well, I just want to talk about working-class blue-collar jobs. You could imagine that scenario, and that's essentially what happened in somewhat in Ohio.

But instead, the Fetterman campaign, they took it on. They took it on head-on. They had a real argument about their vision for community safety and their take on what it would actually take to make people more safe and to reduce crime. And it involved gun violence reform. It involved things that were really popular for voters. So that's what I mean, is that we actually can go on offense. We have to be aware of what the other side is doing and what they're saying, and we shouldn't be afraid to address those things. Whether it's Vance's xenophobia racist sexist attacks, or any Republican who's coming at us around inflation or crime narratives.

David Roberts

Or even just Oz making a fool of out of himself.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

I mean, that helped.

David Roberts

In addition to the sort of big picture you're talking about between Fetterman and Oz, just on a day-to-day level, the Fetterman campaign just seemed sort of like alive and awake and engaged, like they never let anything go by, even if it was just an opportunity to sort of mock Oz for being from out of state, like they were engaged. And I've always thought and I don't know how you would make, like, a quantitative case for this, but I've always thought one of the big things that Republicans have over Democrats is just that they seem to really believe what they're saying. And they say it no matter what, and they repeat it no matter what, and they just have the strength of their convictions. And that's what you got from Fetterman, is this sense that, oh, you want to talk about crime?

Let's talk about crime. Let's do this. I believe in my own crime position, so I'm not going to go running away from you when you bring it up. And just that confidence. I think in addition to Fetterman's sort of general aura of big burly manliness, he just was confident in himself and his own beliefs and that's like, you can't really put a number on that. But so many Democrats just come off as like "What do you want me to say? What do you want me to say? I don't want to offend you." And it's just, like, you can't help but have a little sliver of contempt for people like that.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And that's the brand shift that I think we're trying to say we need, right? We need to shift to actually making the case for what we already believe and what we already think in our own ideas.

David Roberts

What a thought.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Coke doesn't run ads talking about how great Pepsi is, right? So we can stop running ads that make us sound like Republicans or that don't actually lean into the conviction of our own ideas. I really think that's a fundamental flaw. It does come from the triangulation, as you noted, and it's dead. Triangulation is dead. It doesn't work anymore. Our political messaging apparatus just hasn't caught up to that reality. There's many of us doing that kind of work, and we're doing great things and we're trying to push an influence, but I think that's fundamentally what it is.

At the end of the day, we haven't caught up to the new reality that we're not in the 90s anymore.

David Roberts

You cannot repeat often enough how unfortunate it is that an aging cadre elite is running all the levers of power in the Democratic Party is just like more and more glaring kind of how far behind they are from reality. But you are segueing perfectly into my next and one of my main questions and the one I've most interested in and sort of continually frustrated about, which is go back 50, 60 years, really, but certainly to the beginning of your Limbaughs and your sort of dedicated right-wing media. The main, absolute core of their message from the beginning was Democrats are bad. That is their number one thing.

Everything else hangs off that that is the theme they return to over and over again. Every news story is used to illustrate that. Like, everything every Democrat says is used to illustrate that. Everything is around that point. Way more than you ever hear "Republicans are good on those things." Like, they often are grumpy about Republicans because they want them to be more farther right. But the one thing that entire side is unified on is Democrats are evil grooming, pedophile, Satan, whatever. You can't go overboard in saying horrible things about Democrats. In other words, they've defined their opponents as bad, which you might think, yeah, seems basic, but if you look at Democratic messaging and you look at Democratic advertising, they hardly ever say that.

They kind of put their toe in the water this last cycle, and of course, all these high horses came out like "Oh, we don't want to be like them, and we don't want to be divisive. And voters don't want partisanship. They don't want this us or them stuff. They like us working with the opponents. They like bipartisanship and all this." Basically the way I've reduced this to a single word is branding. Like, Republicans brand Democrats. And Democrats, by and large, do not attempt to brand Republicans despite Republicans giving them so much material. I mean, as we said, they're literally banning friggin books. Now to make a 32 second ad, they literally are banning books for you. You couldn't ask for a better way to sort of say, like, this is who these people are. But we don't. So. Why, Jenifer? Why?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Well, it's interesting. I really believe and I'll give credit to Dan Ancona, who you also know, my husband, who says that the party brand is an open source process. The party brand is open source. We should all have a say, right? So if you think about it in that way, you can see where some of the challenges are. It's like you've got these different factions of our side, right, and people tend to divide up around issues. As you know. People tend to divide up. We saw the spending in 2021. It was just completely divided by issue.

So when all you talk about is one issue, you're not hitting into a larger brand about what this is about, right. You're not actually connecting it into a larger story. So the division by issue is a problem. There's a problem in the way that the Democratic Party establishment is focused or organized in that you've got people mostly working for candidates. So they're trying to provide a candidate brand. They're trying to elect one candidate. They haven't historically, I think that it's a big missed opportunity who is actually trying to brand the Democratic Party writ large because you've got the movement on the outside.

They don't necessarily see that as their job. They don't see it as their job to brand the Democratic Party.

David Roberts

Kind of the opposite. I mean, kind of their job is to hassle the Democrats and call the Democrats, sellouts and push the Democrats left, right.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

But the party itself, it hasn't historically been organized outside of a presidential campaign. You'll see the DNC now starting to come in behind Biden, and there is kind of more larger branding messaging because they're getting ready for the presidential. But in between those cycles, it's the DCCC focused on House, it's the DSCC focused on Senate. It's like, never the twain shall meet. They don't actually talk about, well, what is the larger Democratic brand that we should be advancing here? And so that has been actually the role that we have tried to play a little bit in this outside movement where I sit. But with Way to Win it's much more about, like, we see it as part of our job to help push a larger, across the party inclusive and effective message and brand, especially when there's no presidential cycle because there's really nothing to knit it together right now in the current structure.

David Roberts

Yeah, I mean, if you just go ask normal voters, like, why are Democrats good? Why would you vote for a Democrat? It's amazing how little standard narrative and mythology and just sort of phraseology and just that messaging is not out there. I don't think people could tell you what you end up with is like, Republicans want to be crazy, and voters will go along with them up to a certain level of crazy, and then they'll overdo it, and they'll be like, all right, well, what's the other one? Let's let the other one in for a while.

But there's no positive reason for the other one because the other one isn't telling you and also not doing a very good job branding the other side. And this, to me, is crazy. Like —

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Crazy.

David Roberts

I went through, sorry, a rant here. I told you I had a few rants about this, but I went through the George W. Bush years. I remember thinking, like, after this, the Republican Party brand is going to be destroyed for a generation. Like, they will not soon recover from this. This whole series of fiascos, disasters, lies, scandals. Like, it's just comically over determined at this point that the Republicans are doomed. Ha ha. On me, it took all of two years until the 2010 midterms for them to just be back unashamed. Like, hey, we're back criticizing spending.

I'm like, wait, but it was just a few years ago that you ran the deficit through the roof to pay for a war. What about — but what I realized over time is events do not tell their own story, right? The news does not tell its own story. If you want people in general to come to believe that about the Republican Party, that they're bad because of all the things they've done, you have to go out and say it, and no one's going out and saying it.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Well, it's true. I mean, we saw it in the early lead up to the midterms in 2021 when we were seeing in our data and research like, wow, the Republican brand is really pretty toxic right now in the minds of our gettable voters. When we ask them, what images come to your mind when you think about the Republican Party brand? They literally put up so many images of the actual devil and like, things on fire. So it's true that that brand has tarnished and become more toxic in the minds of people just because of Trump. I think the rise of Trump and January 6 played a huge role in that.

But at the same time, we found even in 2021, a resistance to actually calling them out for the January 6 attack. For example, for calling them as extreme as they were. We were saying, look, we're seeing this in the data, people are open to this argument, like we should really be branding them this way.

David Roberts

You mean resistance from the message makers, the advertisers?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, from kind of people in some of the establishment, which is just like, well, we can't really do that. It doesn't really work. We've tried it before. That kind of, sort of we don't want it's going to backlash. There is definitely a timidness and kind of an overall fear, like you had said before, of just leaning into not only what we care about, but having a lot of conviction to call them out for who they are as well. But I will say so we saw in the 2020 Report that we did, the TV Congress Report, it was really wild to us because we saw very clearly the right was calling us crazy.

They were calling us extreme, they were calling us radical. That was the most money —

David Roberts

After four years of Trump, is amazing.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Guess what? We didn't say anything about that. There was one campaign, Lucy Macbeth in Georgia, who talked about their extreme position on abortion. And by the way, she was one of the few that won in the toss up in that district, but in other places they didn't do it. But we did see in our data in 2022 a complete turnaround. So we saw not only they use those words a little bit less, but we use those words much more. I mean, we definitely won that one in 2022.

David Roberts

Do you have an explanation for that? What was the shift in opinion that caused that? I mean, I know Biden coming out and saying it was somewhat significant, but I don't want to over ascribe too much to him.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

No, it's like what I'm saying, this is how we can win is when you have people on the inside and people on the outside and people in lots of different campaigns saying the same thing, ultimately we got to it, right? So I was saying there was some initial resistance, but there are a lot of people who pushed we were pushing Anat Shenker-Osorio and her teams were pushing the research collaborative. You had people at the Center for American Progress really pushing the idea of a MAGA Republican and the extreme Republican. There were enough people in different parts from inside the beltway to outside in the movement saying it at the same time.

And I think that that made a difference. Ultimately, it's that what I like to call Dems in array.

David Roberts

But did here's another thing about Dems. They accidentally did a good thing and accidentally won. Will they learn that lesson and carry it forward? Are they aware that's why they won?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

I think so. I've definitely heard in a lot of the post mortems that I've been to since 22 a recognition that actually being in alignment around what we were saying about the Republicans was important. I mean, we're not totally there yet because like I said with Tim Ryan, we still saw people talking about bipartisanship too much, not actually branding them, but overall, especially in the House, which is honestly what we were supposed to lose, 30, 40 seats. We lost only five. I think people could see we made these surprise gains, and you could look at that kind of message where it was really clear.

The branding against them was really clear. I think people are seeing that and saying, okay, so that did work, and that's something that we can do more of. But the warning sign piece is that we have to keep doing that around branding them. And it's not enough just to only attack them. We also have to have a brand for what it is that we're doing, how we want to run the economy, how we're going to make people's lives better. That's the meta narrative about the past few years that we just don't have yet. And that's why we see in the data, 80% of voters can't name one thing Biden has done to make their lives better.

Or our Latino focus groups that we just came out of in Arizona, Nevada, saying, like "Nada", nothing they saw, nothing that Biden has done to help them. So that's our challenge going forward. Keep leaning into this branding of them that is really effective around how extreme they are, around MAGA, taking away freedoms, being out of touch, all of that. It's really good. It works. It's a narrative that we have to keep pushing together for 24.

David Roberts

Branding them and branding ourselves. I think we should all celebrate and lift up the woman from Nebraska. This would be a better story if I could remember her name, but she's in the Nebraska legislature filibustering their trans bill. You listen to an interview with her, and she's just like, "I don't want anything to do with these people. These are horrible, hateful people. They're trying to hurt my kids." None of this like, "Oh, we just disagree about the right vision, and we're all there's no red or blue America." None of that bullshit.

She's like, they're trying to hurt my kids. And she's just reacting to them the way you would react to someone trying to hurt your kids. Right? Which is like, screw these people, they're horrible. And it's just so refreshingly human. It just sounds human and not —

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

It does.

David Roberts

— focus grouped to a fare-thee-well.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

We saw that with Mallory McMorrow, too, right, in Michigan when she went on that rant. So yes, I completely agree.

David Roberts

Yes, speak like humans. Okay, well, we're almost out of time. I just have a final question, which I wanted to return to after bringing it up at the very beginning, which is back to capacity. So you've talked a lot about the kind of meta narrative we need about Democrats and about Republicans and the way to sort of weave together Democratic issues and the way to talk about them. But let's return briefly to capacity. The right has spent many decades very systematically trying to take over as much media as possible and now basically have their propaganda in everyone's face all the time, everywhere.

It's going to clearly take a while to reverse or even make a dent in that situation. But what can people on the left do? Because I raise this all the time, and then people ask me, well, like, what do you mean? Should we buy a TV station? Should we start a blog? And I'm like "Oh, I don't really know. My job is just to complain about this. You have to figure out the solutions." But what can the left do to build media capacity that works in the 2020s? Not just sort of like an obsession with cable news.

I know this cable news is still big, but like a more broader 360 degree view of the media landscape. Where does the left need to be trying to build capacity and how?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, well, it's got to be comprehensive, and I think it's a combination of things. I think it probably is a ten year strategy that we need to start now, right? Like, it is going to take time, but we have to do a lot now. We can't wait. We need to buy media properties that includes TV stations, includes radio. There's a really interesting project that's being done in Wisconsin right now where they've bought up kind of all the rural radio stations.

David Roberts

Oh, yeah, I heard about that.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a model we could look out for other places. It's not about creating a lefty channel. It's about creating a more neutral channel, actually. It's progressive, but it's not about left versus right. It's actually about building a more of a coalition, like I was saying, across ideology. So that's interesting. There's the Latino Media Network, right? Like, building up in different particular audiences our own channels, which includes a lot of online YouTube, recruiting talent. Like, who are the Shapiros on our side? God invest in now, right? Because there are a lot of talented people out there, and there are people building audiences right now. So how do we support them in doing that? There's the world of micro influencers and people who are building on TikTok and Instagram. I think we need to do a lot more "always on" sort of — it's a funding stream. We have to create, actually, like people are artists and we need to pay them for their work. So we want them to talk about our message. Let's actually bring them in, make them fellows.

David Roberts

Yeah. Are our billionaires — their billionaires clearly get that. They provided a lot of money, steady operational money for years. Do our billionaires get that?

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

More and more, I think you'll see more and more. It's just becoming really clear, and there's a lot of people out there talking about it on our side. I'm seeing a shift in terms of people actually paying real attention and putting real money and resources in. So I think we'll get there. There's a lot of great people doing work in this area. There's Accelerate Change, a group that has been buying up different online properties that either focus on audience or focus on things like news. There's a whole group that's looking at more sort of state-based news, which is a little bit different.

Yeah, like state newsrooms, like creating a place where you could actually get real information around state news. That's happening. I think it's called State Newsrooms. That's really interesting. There's a lot of stuff happening, but it is these three things which are: We got to buy up things that exist, we have to build our own things, and we have to try to influence the properties that do exist now, too.

David Roberts

Yeah. Working the refs.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Yeah. So it's a long-term plan, but I mean, that's supporting things like Crooked Media, which is one of our great owned media properties. They have a whole new thing people can do and become a friend of the Pod and support them. That's good. There are things that individuals can do as well as accountability on things like Fox, which we're in a moment now around. MoveOn has a really great campaign on that right now. So there are things individuals can do. Even if you're not a billionaire who can buy up a radio station.

David Roberts

You could subscribe to a Substack. Throwing ideas out there.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Exactly. I love that idea. You should give them some links they can subscribe to.

David Roberts

Well, Jenifer, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to my rants about this, which I've been carrying around with me for years and for actually knowing something and doing real research and pushing on this. So I really appreciate your work. Thanks for coming on.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona

Thank you so much. It's been great.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

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Everyone agrees Democrats suck at messaging. How can they do it better?

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