Summary
Democrats must reclaim their identity as the party of the working class to regain electoral strength.
Despite pro-labor policies under Biden, working-class voters feel disconnected, seeing Democrats as defenders of a failing system.
The party’s decline traces back to NAFTA and neoliberal economic policies that favored corporations over workers.
A generational effort to prioritize labor rights, fair wages, and economic security while addressing working-class frustrations are needed.
Without serious reform, Democrats will continue losing ground to populist alternatives.
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And guess what the innovation in advertising this last cycle was? Cheap, to voters, text messages asking for funding. Sounds like a great time to dump the dead-weight corpos and win some elections
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A motivated voter seriously engaging with their social network is worth a lot more than an ad buy. The whole ad world is trying to smuggle their advertising as the genuine thoughts of a real person and politics is acting like it’s still the age of Must See TV.
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Do they? We’ve outspent Trump in three elections now and still lost two of them. Is there any actual measure of the value of an ad for political purposes? It’s not like business where you could note an increase in sales after you run an ad campaign, there’s one single opportunity to “buy” and it’s a secret. Anything you learn in that one campaign you just have to hope still applies years later in a different environment with a different candidate.
I’m sure they have some benefit, but the only time I’ve ever seen someone talk about political advertising was either when they were sick of seeing them or when an ad was going viral because regular people were using their social networks to share it.
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Things change over time. What works on one generation may not work on the next whose minds were conditioned differently in their formative years.
I think propaganda still works as a concept, but Democrats are trying to brainwash people like it’s the 1960s and Republicans are on the cutting edge of lying.
I’d compare it to, say, the Lutheran Church vs a modern megachurch. Same core absurd claim about heaven and whatnot, but the megachurch knows how to package it for the modem gull.
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You seem to have read the first sentence and decided you’d gotten all you need for a reply.
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The whole point wasn’t that advertising itself is a failure, it was that political advertising doesn’t operate in the same system and doesn’t have good measures of success. If you hear a stupid jingle every fucking day (in a time people when people watched broadcast TV reliably), when you go to buy toilet paper, something you have to do, you might subconsciously choose the one that feels well established. The advertisers can test their campaign in different markets and validate the results.
But voting isn’t a purchase and isn’t something you have to do but don’t really think about because the options are mostly interchangeable. If an ad annoys you, you can just not vote. You also can’t just test a series of campaigns to see what works because it’s not an ongoing choice. You’re not going to find easily comparable races and if you do you’re not going to abandon one to test a null case, and even if you could the sentiments and candidates are going to change by the time you can implement your findings.
Saying “advertising sells stuff, so it must be good at getting votes” doesn’t make sense. It’s not the same thing.
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They do get the word out. The problem is that we don’t believe them.