It is a rule of thumb for political parties to emphasize popular positions while deemphasizing stances disfavored by the public. Politics ain’t beanbag, but it ain’t rocket science, either.
Democrats have been struggling with this lately.
Last week, the party and its legacy media allies were given ample opportunity to win a few news cycles, such as when President Donald Trump announced his desire to “take over” Gaza, offending both “America First” Republicans and pro-Palestinian progressives. Instead, they spent the week defending deeply unpopular ideas and emphasizing all the wrong news items.
The week began with Democrats blasting Trump’s executive order that banned biological males from competing in girls sports. The problem, of course, is that 79% of the public currently supports the measure, which is up 17 points since 2021. Even 67% of Democrats support the order. But prominent Democratic politicians and news outlets made it seem as if Trump had ordered a genocide.
An article on NPR titled “Trump’s anti-trans effort is an agenda cornerstone with echoes in history” compared the executive order to Germany in the 1930s.
“One of the first trans health clinics in the world was in pre-World War II Germany. It was the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin,” said Hanah Stiverson, the associate director of Democracy Protection at Human Rights First. “And it was one of the very first targets of the rising Nazi party. … What I see currently happening in the United States is the same strategy.”
“[Trump] wants us dead,” an MSNBC article quoted a young person named Lyra as saying in response to the executive order.
One thing can be said of “resistance”: What it lacks in imagination, it makes up for in perseverance.
The next item Democrats fixated on was defending Politico and other news organizations that benefited from heavy spending for their services by the federal government. In total, the government spent $8.1 million to secure 236 Politico Pro subscriptions last year.
The controversy followed a familiar Trump-era media pattern:
- Trump makes an inflammatory but somewhat valid social media post.
- Democrats and their media allies wildly overreact, calling Trump’s post a “conspiracy theory” while proceeding to tease apart secondary details.
- This attracts the attention of a distracted and overworked public who already knows Trump says outlandish things and doesn’t have time for secondary details.
- The only real impression left is whatever Trump posted about in the first place, which, in this case, was exorbitant waste in government.
Forget for a moment that Democrats spent the week defending a deeply unpopular institution: the media. Forget, even, that Trump has ridden the media around like a coin-operated pony for the past decade. What really must burn smart Democratic operatives about the Politico scandal is that it underscored what people detest about the establishment: the perception of corruption, decadence, and disregard for ordinary Americans.
Nothing screams “swamp” quite like a magazine subscription that costs more than the average mortgage. And thanks to Democratic messaging last week, millions more voters heard about it than would have otherwise.
By Friday, Democrats, apparently unsatisfied with the depth of the narrative hole they’d been digging, freaked out about Trump’s vow to reverse former President Joe Biden’s deeply unpopular initiative to phase out plastic straws. Not only was the original ban imbecilic — paper straws, themselves distributed in plastic wrapping, actually have more “forever chemicals” than plastic straws — but it was also deeply unpopular.
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Call it the cherry on top of a pitiful week managing the narrative.
If Democrats want even a chance at stopping the Trump train, they need to get back to basics on messaging. For a major political party, it shouldn’t be this hard.
