Q&A: How Democrats Should Think About Language on the Trail

As Democrats look to chart a path forward after the 2024 election, one group is urging them to rethink the very language they use on the campaign trail. 

Third Way, a center-left think tank, circulated a memo late last month listing 45 words and phrases that they believe are harming Democrats’ ability to connect with voters. Ranging from so-called “organizer jargon” like the phrase “small ‘d’ democracy” to terms like “cisgender” and “deadnaming,” the memo argues that some of the language that Democrats use serves to isolate persuadable voters in exchange for appeasing the party’s activist class.

Campaigns & Elections spoke with Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s Senior Vice President of Social Policy, Education and Politics, about the group’s memo and how candidates should think about language. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

C&E: Can you tell us a little bit about what spurred Third Way to put out this memo? How did this issue come to your attention?

Erickson: We’ve been really doing a lot of soul-searching since the 2024 election and that includes a lot of public opinion research to try to understand why we lost. In particular, we did a post-election poll that showed that voters thought Democrats were more extreme than Republicans, and given that we’re now talking about this MAGA version of Republicans, that’s a pretty strong statement. So we had to ask ourselves: Why is that and how do we change that so that voters feel that we are part of the mainstream and that they can be – and want to be – part of our team? The only way that we can wrench power back from this MAGA movement is by bringing a larger group of voters along with us. 

One of the things that we’ve heard over and over again in focus groups over the past few months is that the language that Democrats use really alienates people. At best, it confuses them. At its worst, it turns them off and sends a message that they’re not welcome in our club. So we wanted to call that out and make sure that folks were thinking about the fact that the words they might use to signal that they’re part of the club in the elite circles of progressive advocacy are the very things that might be signaling to voters that they’re not welcome.

C&E: What has the feedback to this memo been like? Have you gotten any criticism or any support? What has the response been?

Erickson: You better believe it. It is one of the most clicked on products in Third Way history, and I’ve been inundated with incoming over the past couple of weeks. It definitely got a lot of notice, but what struck me was that we got massive amounts of people writing us private notes of thanks – from candidates to campaign managers to consultants, anybody who has to win a majority coalition. We got a wave of people saying: “thank you, you’re right, this is smart, this is part of the problem.” 

But of course, we got the opposite too. There were a lot of folks who were just being critical generally of Third Way, who don’t align with our approach to the world. But I think for folks that were more serious in their criticism, their argument was that no one really uses these words. That was a big point of contention for folks right after it came out. It was like: “This is fake news. No one really uses these words. This isn’t a real problem. You’re just trying to pick a fight.” But three days after that, when the [Democratic National Committee] held their meeting and used a lot of these words, I think that kind of fell by the wayside because that meeting was the perfect example of everything that we were begging folks not to do. 

So really, in fact, there were people that actually took back their criticism after that. They said, “well, I didn’t really think this was the problem that we needed to address, but now it seems like it’s a lot more rampant than I thought.” 

The other line of criticism was that folks were concerned that the message we were sending was that we should leave marginalized communities by the wayside, and that clearly was not the intention of the memo. We were very careful to say that the way that we can actually protect these communities is by bringing along a broader group of people to our tent and persuading them with language that actually resonates. Whether we’re talking about transgender Americans or undocumented immigrants or people of color or homeless people or people who are in jail – all of these are communities that absolutely need us to beat [President Donald] Trump in order to protect them. And we think that the most effective way to do that is to sound like normal human beings.

C&E: To an extent, every candidate, every political party has language that they use when they speak to their base. With Republicans, you might be able to point to something like their use of the word “woke.” What’s the difference for Democrats here?

Erickson: The fundamental difference is the asymmetry of our electorate. When you look at how the different parties build winning coalitions, Republicans can win elections in lots and lots of places with basically just their base. Eighty percent of people who vote for Republicans are self-described conservatives. Their ideological base is bigger than ours. Less than half of people who vote for Democrats call themselves liberals or progressive, and another batch calls themselves moderate. So we just have a harder job. We have a bigger tent that we have to build numerically in order to win elections. 

We can’t just rile up our base to win anywhere in the country, except for a very small handful of places. That’s certainly a piece of it. But the other piece that Democratic primary voters care a lot about winning, especially now when the consequences are so huge. In the way that Republicans have to worry a lot about their base and being primaried, Democrats don’t actually usually need to worry about that, especially in most of these battleground places that determine the majority because those primary voters want somebody who’s electable. They want somebody who can appeal to swing voters.

C&E: Looking at Third Way’s memo, a lot of the language mentioned is broken down into categories – things like “Therapy-Speak” and “Organizer Jargon.” Can you elaborate on that a little bit? How did you all settle on these categories and what exactly do they mean?

Erickson: We didn’t have a specific poll or data set on each one of these words. But we reflected ourselves on it. What are words that we hear in our own circles or that we even sometimes say ourselves that we never ever hear a voter say in a focus group, except to make fun of Democrats. 

So we started with that list. And honestly, there are some of words on that list that I use a heck of a lot. Like, I use “existential threat” on a daily basis, but I also recognize that I don’t use that when I’m talking to my mom or when I’m talking to friends back home. That’s not the language I use. So it started with some self-reflection on our own and then looking at words that the Democrats use in our political platform or in press releases or on BlueSky that we think voters just simply do not understand or feel are really foreign. 

I talked to a good friend of mine who does a lot of public opinion research after the memo came out and he said, “you know, this is really interesting because the thing that you’re talking about is in-group and out-group psychology, which is so important to humans. The reason that we sometimes use some of these words is to signal to elites or advocacy folks or progressive folks that we are a part of the group – that we get it and want to be included in that group. But by doing that and caring a lot about sending that message to the progressive sphere, we’re actually sending voters a message that they’re not part of our group. We need to think a heck of a lot more about creating an in-group, so those voters feel like they’re on our team.

C&E: Does this language reflect ideology or is it shaped by ideology? What’s that relationship like? 

Erickson: There are good communicators across the ideological spectrum of Democrats and they’re bad communicators across the spectrum. But the way that this links to ideology is that the same people who enforce progressive norms also enforce that this is the only acceptable language. The policing of this language happens often times on the far left. 

A specific example is we were told that if we didn’t use the term LatinX when describing Latino voters that we were being homophobic. Well, it turns out most Latino voters don’t use LatinX. We should call people what they call themselves. Not a made up word that the advocacy community decided we need to use. There’s always someone coming to say that if you use the “wrong word” that you are being disrespectful in someway. I think the enforcers of the language are the same enforcers of the pledges and the questionnaires and all of these things that our candidates end up getting into are later weaponized against them in a general election.

I think part of the problem is an education gap, not just an ideological gap. A lot of candidates already know this because they have to win these races. A lot of times, it’s their staffers who are using this language. Almost all of the staff from these campaigns and on the official side have college degrees. Many of them are coming from elite universities, and this is the language that they used – and still use – and so it finds its way into press releases and statements and vote recommendations, even for members that maybe don’t use this language themselves. 

We wanted to make sure that while a super smart candidate in a purple district may already know not to use these words, their staff is also on alert to make sure that they’re not slipping things in that make the candidate sound elite and unavailable.