Moving Away From Poll Driven Messaging

In assuming that campaigns are best waged by assessing voters’ issue preferences and making them focal, Pollingism credits voters with knowing candidates’ positions on said issues and/or believing candidates’ claims about them. All of this rests upon the fiction that what people believe about a Democrat running is made out of what that Democrat, or their surrogates and Super PACs, say. Somehow, this fiction also holds that battleground Dems have to overcome the hurdles erected by what their too leftist co-partisans dare to utter, but voters in progressive places aren’t hindered by the Republican-lite messaging crafted for purple districts. And, further still, that America’s notoriously low information electorate can follow the specific ins and outs of the unique “heterodox” positions a down ballot candidate espouses.

So, for example, if your polls tell you the majority of voters want a crackdown on the border, you have your candidate say “I will get tough on the border” in an ad that moved in-survey vote choice. Once again, assuming the candidate doesn’t have their own set views and therefore feels comfortable parroting any survey-tested refrain. But your opponent puts out their own ads, blathers on podcasts, posts on social media and – critically – gets their choir to repeat that your candidate is ready to turn said border into a sieve and lure newcomers with fat checks on “real Americans’” dimes. A message your candidate puts out that gets drowned in rebuttal from the opposition will not seem credible. Meanwhile, you’ve accepted the opposition’s frame that “immigration” equals “border,” without attempting to reframe the electoral conversation on better terms, like attacking MAGA’s monstrous plans for abductions and disappearances, or elevating shared values about freedom and keeping families together.

More confounding still, during election season, Pollingism proponents advise spending hundreds of millions of dollars on end of cycle ads, as if voter eligible Americans make up their minds based on what politicians, or their aligned PACs, pay to say. Instead, what people believe about politicians comes from what is said about them by messengers who are far more trusted. The virtues a politician extols about themself or their political positions are suspect. Anyone other than die-hard partisans discount this as self-interested. Because it is.

On the other hand, the crap flung at politicians, even by other politicians and much more so by outside entities, is more likely to be credited, especially when repeated over and over again. This is because negativity bias is built into our wiring: negative images, as opposed to positive or neutral ones, produce stronger responses in the cerebral cortex. We are more likely to recall, learn from, and retain negative messages than affirmative ones. This extends to how we make judgments: negative stimuli are considered more critical than positive ones in people’s reasoning. Pile onto this how pre-conditioned voters are to believe that politicians are bad, and negative messages fit into an established cognitive groove.

There is a pattern to breakout moments by Democrats: they are unapologetic. Jasmine Crockett’s frequent MAGA takedowns, Zohran Mamdani’s populism, Andy Beshear’s refusal to take the anti-trans bait, Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador, and J.B. Pritzker’s repudiation of the regime, to name a few. There is a reason why some of these are among the only Democrats voters recall and admire: they are not saying what is poll-tested as “popular” but rather making popular what needs to be said.

So here we are, with many Democrats responding to each new horror unleashed with a social media post attempting to drive conversation back to what surveys say voters care most about. Instead of speaking about what’s actually occurring, these Democrats have wedged themselves into an impossible corner where what they say barely gets heard and what gets heard can barely be credited. You cannot occasionally tell Americans the truth that this regime is veering into dictatorship while also promising to meet and negotiate in good faith with it. You cannot convey the full extent of the threat before us, let alone marshall public will into needed resistance, when your actions (or lack thereof) routinely undermine your utterances.