HOW DO DEMOCRATS SUCK AT MESSAGING? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

Hi. I know I'm supposed to be thankful today, but it's raining and my household been dealing with minor but annoying health issues and the bad people are still winning in the world of politics, while the good people are barely showing up to compete.

Here's a widely quoted interview in The New York Times in which Senator John Fetterman suggests that Democrats should respond to Donald Trump's Cabinet picks by saying nothing right now:

Trump is assembling a cabinet of people many Democrats find deeply objectionable. How do you think Democrats should respond?

I’m just saying, buckle up and pack a lunch, because it’s going to be four years of this. And if you have a choice to freak out, you know, on the hour, then that’s your right. But I will not. I’m not that dude, and I’m not that Democrat. I’m going to pick my fights. If you freak out on everything, you lose any kind of relevance.

... Do you think Democrats have done too much freaking out when it comes to Trump?

It’s symbiotic. One feeds off the other. The Democrats can’t resist a freakout, and that must be the wind under the wings for Trump.

The Democrats can’t resist a freakout? Really? It seems to me that Democrats are extremely quiet at this moment, particularly about Trump's worst appointees.

Democrats don't have to "freak out on everything" -- they can let Trump have Marco Rubio at State and Elise Stefanik at the UN, because they'll be bad but they won't be catastrophically bad. But maybe Democrats should say something about Robert Kennedy Jr., who doesn't even think polio vaccines are safe and effective, and who "likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church," as NBC News reports.

In a recent Emerson College poll, Kennedy has near-majority support -- 47% of poll respondents back him. He has a higher level of support than Rubio (45%). Republicans who despise Matt Gaetz didn't hesitate to express their opposition to him, and Republicans support Trump otherwise. Why would it be so terrible for Democrats to say right now that the Kennedy nomination is a five-alarm fire for American health? Sure, don't "freak out on everything" -- but freak out on him.

Regrettably, Democrats don't message very well between elections. That allows critics, right-wing and otherwise, to define who Democrats are, until Democrats desperately play catch-up during election season. So the result of a survey conducted by Stephen Hawkins and Daniel Yudkin is not surprising: Democratic voters' priority issue is "cost of living/inflation," but Republicans and others, including fellow Democrats, think Democrats' priority issues are abortion and LGBT issues.

... every single demographic group thought Democrats’ top priority was abortion, overestimating the importance of this issue by an average of 20 percentage points. (This included Democrats themselves, suggesting that they are somewhat out of touch even with what their fellow partisans care about.) ...

By far the most notable way that Democrats are misperceived relates to what our survey referred to as “LGBT/transgender policy.” Although this was not a major priority for Democratic voters in reality—it ranked 14th—our survey respondents listed it as Democrats’ second-highest priority. This effect was especially dramatic among Republicans—56 percent listed the issue among Democrats’ top three priorities, compared with just 8 percent who listed inflation—but nearly every major demographic group made a version of the same mistake.

Hawkins and Yudkin blame progressive groups for talking so much about these issues that voters think they're Democrats' top priorities. But while abortion may have seemed like Democrats' #1 issue because Kamala Harris made protecting abortion rights a major part of her campaign message, she rarely if ever talked about LGBT/transgender policy. Republicans attacked her incessantly in ads highlighting her pro-trans stance in the 2020 primaries -- but Fox and the rest of the right-wing media were obsessed with this issue long before the 2024 campaign began, and even the "liberal" media has been anti-trans, particularly The New York Times.

Democrats needed a message on this issue, and the Harris campaign decided it was impossible to craft one on the fly during the campaign. Democrats also needed to do some proactive messaging on the economy -- selling what was working while acknowledging the pain of those still struggling to pay off high grocery bills. Joe Biden is a terrible public communicator in his old age, but no Democrat picked up the slack because Democrats don't message between elections -- they just do stuff and hope voters will like it.

And now we have a whole new sphere in which Republicans are winning the messaging war while Democrats don't even seem to want to deploy troops:

While many on the left have spent the last few weeks debating whether Ms. Harris should have granted an interview to Joe Rogan, the right-leaning host of the world’s most popular podcast, some progressive influencers are now more interested in building up a Rogan of their own.

They are banding together to create their own networks to make content year-round and not just in the final months before elections. Their goal is to eventually forge self-sustaining advocacy groups and networks, a left-wing answer to the nonprofit Turning Point USA or the media company The Daily Wire on the right. But first they need buy-in — and cash — from the Democratic Party’s donors and institutions to compete in the new attention economy, where people’s time is the currency....

“Conservative influencers have year-round support, and those of us on the left have been left to fend for ourselves and it’s not working,” said Leigh McGowan, who goes by iampoliticsgirl and has more than two million followers across various platforms.

It's bad.

David Pakman, who has a progressive YouTube channel with 2.7 million subscribers ... has looked enviously upon the Turning Point network. “We just don’t have anything like it at all on the left,” he said.

He was among a small group of influencers invited to meet with Ms. Harris for an off-record meet-and-greet linked to the State of the Union address last March. But he had to pay his own way there and for his lodging.

“I think I got a tea bag and some hotel water,” he recalled. Now he worries that Ms. Harris’s loss has sapped enthusiasm on the left and that there’s no plan from the party to keep supporters engaged.

As Collin Rugg noted on X:

David Packman called out his own party for giving up when things get hard.

“It terrifies me because our instinct is the opposite of what the right does.” ...

“When the right loses, they get organized, they fund and they create insanely effective organizations like Turning Point USA, investing in the Daily Wire and building out this huge network of right wing idea ideas and influencers.”

“We are in an algorithmic de subscription spiral right now, because when people start unsubscribing on YouTube, YouTube thinks oh, we probably shouldn't recommend this content...”

But as Oliver Willis has noted, Democrats stand down after Election Day even when they win, and they did this long before the podcast/influencer era:

... Democrats have an annoying habit of powering down after these electoral successes in a way that allows the right to make gains in public sentiment and raw political power that ... allow them to advance just at a time when they should be in retreat. The right understands that the battle over political power in the United States is a long slog, and that even when they lose in spectacular fashion they still retain the power to set the stakes and parameters of the wider conflict. Much to their favor.

After John McCain lost to Obama in 2008, the biggest thumping at the presidential level since 1996, the right spent the political equivalent of about two weeks wondering how they lost. Then they got over it and began a concerted campaign to undermine Obama. The right was practically handing out tri-corner hats and yammering about tea bagging people before Obama had even gotten comfortable behind the Resolute desk.

At the same time, Obama essentially began winding down the campaign machine he had steered to victory and wasted his time cajoling Republicans to support the stimulus and health care reform. They responded to his olive branch by calling him a socialist, a foreigner, and a tyrant. Then we got 2010 and a Democratic disaster.

Republicans succeeded at forcing Obama to spend most of his time in office on defense rather than offense, because Republicans never stop fighting.

Democrats should attack Kennedy (and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth). They should cultivate that influencer army. And they should stop letting Republicans create the perception of who Democrats and Republicans are. They should do all this, starting immediately, even if John Fetterman disapproves.