Playbook reports today:
Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?Apart from the painfulness of Ken Martin's attempt to sound tough, notice what he's trying to do here: he's trying to shoehorn multiple messages into a couple of sentences (law and order, plus congressional Republicans' subservience to Trump on Epstein).
There is a certain allure animating Democrats’ Epstein trolling, even as it forces them to momentarily set aside their better-bet polling issues — like, say, focusing on Medicaid or the cost of living.
Of course, they can make a larger argument rolling the Epstein issue into what they characterize as Trump’s “billionaire protection racket” — and are doing just that.
How Dems are spinning it: “Republicans are literally shutting down the House floor and getting ready to go on vacation early just to weasel out of releasing the Epstein files,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement last night.... “While the American people elected leaders to fight for law and order and do their damn jobs, Republicans are bending the knee to Donald Trump and protecting an infamous sex trafficker.”
Another party spoksman weighs in:
Added DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton, in a statement to Playbook: “The midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on who is going to lower costs and help improve the lives of everyday Americans, not the wealthy and well-connected.”Do you remember what Al Franken used to say about the complexity of Democratic messages? “Our bumper stickers always end with ‘continued on next bumper sticker.’” It's as if Martin, Franken's fellow Minnesotan, has taken that criticism to heart and said, "I can get it all on one bumper sticker if we squeeze a lot of words onto the sticker by using really compressed type." Shelton is saying, "I can be even more concise by alluding to Epstein in a way that makes you unsure whether I'm alluding to Epstein or not. And I'm getting us back to the only issue Democrats believe that voters care about: the economy."
This Playbook passage begins, "Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?" The reference to "a message" is clearly a reflection of how Democrats see the task before them. But that isn't how messaging works in 2025 -- in fact, it's the exact opposite of how messaging works in 2025.
Democrats think they need to boil everything down to one concise message focused on one narrow set of issues. But Donald Trump throws everything at the wall -- arresting Barack Obama, challenging the Washington Commanders to change their name back to Redskins -- and while Democrats and independents aren't responding well in this Epstein moment, it's keeping Republicans faithful to him and pushing new subjects into the news cycle. That's because he and his people understand contemporary attention spans better than Democrats do.
The main messaging medium in contemporary politics isn't the bumper sticker or the concise thirty-second TV ad. It's the podcast or the video social media site -- TikTok, Instagram. I'm 66 years old. To me, the most zeitgeisty podcasts seem endless. They go on for hours and hours. But they matter politically much more than TV or cable. Who's the one Democrat who actually went viral yesterday? Hunter Biden.
He tossed out so many different messages on so many different subjects:
Hunter Biden goes on a profanity laced rant about illegals being deported:
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 21, 2025
"People are really upset about illegal immigration? Fuck you. How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned? How do you think you have food on your fucking table? Who do you think washes your dishes?" pic.twitter.com/OETugq51H7
He did this on a podcast that was three hours long. This is how you communicate in the modern era. You don't try to boil your message down to one concise bumper sticker or one multi-subject aphorism that's a sentence or two in length. You just put yourself out there and have strong opinions about a lot of things, and wait for the gods of virality to sort through the best nuggets. This is also how TikTok works: people watch a thousand little videos and some of them break through, on a range of subjects. But they don't want one central message. They want a lot of little messages.
This is how Trump operates. He thinks he has something brilliant to say on many different subjects and he throws it all at you whenever it suits him. Right now, I'll acknowledge that he's desperately trying to change the subject -- but he's succeeding with his base, at least, because he came to this moment already knowing how to leap from subject to subject in a way that usually seems confident even if, to informed people, he sounds like an idiot.
Most Democrats don't know how to leap from subject to subject confidently, and the party as a whole certainly doesn't, and doesn't want to. So when Trump tries to change the subject, Democratic leaders scream "Distraction!" and ignore what he's saying or doing -- which leaves him as the only person talking about whatever subject he's discussing now.
Democrats should attack everything Trump says, and they should do some leaping from subject to subject themselves, trying to make news any way they can. When they don't do this, they seem to be conceding Trump's point every time they fail to challenge him. And when they try to squeeze the bizarreness of the world into one little bumper sticker the way Ken Martin does, they sound phony and boring. They should just hold forth. Hunter Biden understands that.
