Okay, we’ve heard a lot about how Harris lost because the Republicans had all sorts of ways to get their message out–Fox, OANN, Sinclair, Musk, and so on and so on–and Democrats didn’t.
Which is true. But Democrats also don’t use the tools they have.
For example: I donated a decent amount this cycle; the punishment for that was no end of texts and emails.
Texts and emails that all seemed to have one message, and one message only: Send more money.
There was very little about why to send money, or why to vote for that matter.
This isn’t just my impression. I went back through all 75 (!) political texts I got from September 16th to election day (36 from PACs, 39 from candidates) to see if they mentioned any reason to support them. (Texts made a more objective dataset than emails because I had deleted a lot of political emails, and others were caught by my spam filter.) I set a very low bar: any mention of a real, specific reason—the candidate supports policy X, the opponent is an insurrectionist, the Republicans are the party of hate, whatever—counted. Horserace stuff like “the polls are close” or “we’re being OUTSPENT” didn’t count.
45 of the 75 texts (60%) failed that easy test. Worse, of the 30 that did give some kind of reason, only 3 went into any detail. That was true even though many of the texts were quite long; they went on and on about the URGENCY of donating, without giving much, or any, reason why it was important.
Here’s a graph:
This was, I’m sorry, a massive failure of the Democratic messaging machine. Yes, I’m a safe Democratic voter. But safe voters talk to others and try to convince them; why not give us more and better talking points?
And, of course, it turned out that many safe Democratic voters, well, weren’t. Maybe the Democrats could have retained more votes if they’d spent less time hysterically demanding money and more reminding us why we became Democratic voters in the first place.
For instance: all of the texts linked to a donation page (except two that linked to a “poll”—“But despite asking multiple times this month, we at the DGA are still not sure who you’re supporting for president!”—that then linked to a donation page). And yeah, duh, you should have a donation link in your email. But how many texts linked to anything else? There was plenty of room for more than one link—again, the texts often went on and on.
Here’s a graph:
Why not, at least occasionally, link to something we can share around, put on social media, and so on? Like this video, which laid out what Project 2025 has in store for us? (The video was made by Samuel Spitale, who’s just some guy working on his own initiative. I’d say that an official video would be even better, except that Democratic consultants are famously bad at crafting such things. But still, whatever they made would have been better than nothing. Probably.)
Also, what about the how of it? How to check your polling place, how to vote by mail in your state, where to volunteer? Any information people could use?
Well, here’s a graph:
Point being, the Democrats had a whole channel of communication they could have been using to spread their message and keep voters engaged. Instead, they endlessly, drearily hit us up for money with text that seemed like they were written by the same couple of consultants, probably because they were.
Presumably a lot of the money they did raise went to ads. I don’t get TV or radio ads, but the digital ad I kept being fed started with Harris talking about, yes, donating. I never let it run longer than the first few seconds, and I doubt many others did either.
Also: in 2020, the Democrats had blacklisted firms that worked with primary challengers (not ones that work with Republicans, or work for oil companies, or anything like that); these were the firms that were best at digital outreach. I don’t know if that explains how bad digital outreach was in 2024.
I expect it doesn’t, though, because unfortunately this is all part of a bigger problem: The Democratic Party is a machine designed, not so much to win elections, as to take donor money, give consultants a big chunk for keeps, and set the rest of the money on fire.
That’ll be a whole different post, though.
I guess my point is, while progressives have been trying, and failing, to turn the Democratic Party into something other than an election-losing machine for more than two decades, the misuse of texts and emails seems like something that could be fixed short of sending James Carville and his ilk to the glue factory, however much that also needs to be done.
Anyway.
Speaking of the misuse of texts, I noticed big differences between texts from PACs and from candidates:
- In the use of ALL CAPS:
- In the use of exclamation points:
- In the offers to DOUBLE, TRIPLE, or QUADRUPLE MATCH the donation (if someone’s ready to give you 4X my donation, why don’t they just, you know, give it? Why do you even need me?):
- And in how they respected my requests to stop:
So PACs were responsible for a disproportionate share of the really annoying texts, the shitty formulaic ones that beg for parody:
PACs were also, with a couple of exceptions, opaque about how the money would be spent.
So, reining in the sleazy PACs would be a good idea.
Although candidates can be sleazeballs too—I’d like to end this with a shout-out to my congressman, Dan Goldman of New York, for being a particular piece of shit: He sent an (actually inspiring) text that talked a great game about contributing to downballot Dems in tight races. Which seemed quite good of him. But it was a bait-and-switch—the link went to his *own* donation page.
This is a great piece