It’s post-election autopsy time again.
But the big piece that’s missing in all the post-2024 discussions about rebuilding the Democratic Party and adjusting message is a conversation about trust. Simply put: the party has trashed it and we need to discuss what we can do to rebuild it.
In the Trump era, it would be easy to think trust isn’t a necessary part of a successful political brand. But I would argue that by making strategic blunders that eroded the trust our voters have in Democrats, we’ve diminished the effectiveness of any contrast argument against our opponents.
We’ve done that in a few key ways. The first is over-promising in campaigns and under-delivering in governing. The ambition of our rhetoric has often been met with minimalism in governing.
This is in some ways the classic campaigning in poetry and governing in prose problem, but it goes a little deeper than that. We have been remarkably unambitious in our approach to both federal and state policy objectives since the first two years of the Obama administration (now half a generation ago).
While I know that often matches the political reality on the ground, we’re asking a lot of people to accept that the things we campaign on aren’t actually achievable unless we completely politically realign the country.
The second is committing outright fraud and just hoping that people accept it on the basis of “well it works.” Try to imagine for a second that when you get your tires changed next time the tire shop asks if you want a reminder for the next time you should need a tire change. Sounds great right? So you say yes.
Well, then imagine that tire shop texts you every single week telling you that you need to change your tires NOW or your car will blow up. You would block their number and never bring your business there again right? We do that with all of our key supporters — year round and many times over.
We lie to people to encourage donations and put our heads in the sand about how it influences our brand. No consumer brand would survive long using those tactics – and leaning on being the default political option for half the country doesn’t justify our willingness to utilize them.
The final one, which just doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the “why we lost” discourse, is President Biden.
I don’t know what is true there and I have absolutely no inside information. But a lot of people felt lied to about his fitness for the job. I honestly don’t know how much merit that has — only the people around him do — but you can’t deny the perception.
And acting like that didn’t play any sort of role in the election outcome seems kind of nuts to me.
So this fight over whether the party needs to move right or left just seems to miss the point entirely. Policy positions only matter if people trust you to lead and execute them.
Our brand sucks in large part because we made decisions to harm it. You can say that Republicans lie to voters all the time and don’t seem to pay a price for it and you would be right. But if we’re going to make contrasting arguments based on values and character and then don’t demonstrate that in our own behavior, it’s not much of an argument.
Andy Barr is a managing director at Uplift Campaigns, a Democratic media, ad buying and technology firm.
