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

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.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


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 b******t.


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


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