Wordcruncher

We Must Build A Better Message Machine Mousetrap

If there’s a good thing coming from this, it is that we are forced to examine ourselves as a party. It certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed among left thinkers that the exit polls revealed the issue that drove the election was not the economy, as we’d hoped, nor terrorism, as the media expected. It was “moral values” – which is what the Republicans had hoped.

It is instructive that the presentation of the very issue that seemed the most determinate in the election perfectly illustrates the very reason we lost. We’ve long known and conceded that the Republicans are far more experienced – and better – at framing issues.

Here’s the perfect example: We all know exactly what is meant by “moral values.” It means primarily gay marriage. Mr. Bush’s strategy was to put anti-gay marriage initiatives on as many swing state polls as possible to motivate primarily evangelical Protestants to vote. It was obviously a successful – if divisive – strategy.

Yet the exit polls as published defined the issue as “moral values.” This is a subjective label, not an objective term. It would be the same if Democrats had successfully labeled the issue as “homophobia.”

We may have the American electorate on our side when it comes to actual policy differences (I’m not going to check this because the point of this post is not to examine the results of the exit polls), but it is obvious that we lose the framing and communication war. Republicans are very good at honing their message down to meaningless and deceptive sound-bite terminology. Think “liberal media” and “culture of life.”

Whatever happens with the Democratic party as it traverses the wasteland of the 2004 election results, we must simplify our message and distribute it effectively. There needs to be a unity of message from the Democratic leadership down to the local politician level.

At times during the campaign, we effectively demonstrated that we could. I am confident that we will; the message distribution infrastructure is growing, and besides, we have no choice.