Pritzker

Karpf: I think of all the Democratic governors, Pritzker is the one who understands the assignment best. And that’s because he’s both telling stories that are true about what’s happening in Chicago, but also painting a picture of what Chicagoans are facing and making clear that this is an attack from Trump’s forces.

Sargent: Yeah. And I think Pritzker makes another interesting move here that I really want people to listen to. Check this out.

Governor JB Pritzker (voiceover): The Department of Homeland Security claims their highest priority is to protect children. So today I have to ask them. Please, live up to those ideals. I’ve sent a letter to Kristi Noem and to the Department of Homeland Security leadership asking them to pause all of their federal agent operations for the entirety of the Halloween weekend. I’m asking for basic human decency. I think their response will be revealing.

[…]

Karpf: Right. What he’s making clear there—I think he’s doing a really crafty job of raising the stakes by making a request that just seems so reasonable. One of the main classes that I teach is strategic political communication. And the trick that I always try to teach people about framing, when you are engaged in a framing battle, is you want to position yourself as being deeply reasonable and your opponent or the status quo as utterly absurd.

Elections are determined by four broad factors: (1) your message, (2) the messenger, (3) the media environment, and (4) the moment. The only thing that political campaigns have complete control over is the message. We control the words that come out of our own mouths. And so there is a long-standing bad habit among the pundit class of treating those words as though they are the only thing that matters.

The other three factors have increasingly large effects on who wins elections, but also are increasingly hard to influence. The party has some impact on candidate selection (messengers). They don’t get to design the perfect candidate in a hermetically sealed lab, but they can provide resources and support to candidates who seem more likely to win. And sometimes voters choose a candidate that the party leadership doesn’t like.

[…]

If the Democratic Party wants to build power and win elections in the long term, it has to keep all four of those factors in mind—not just the knobs that are easiest to turn. That’s the kind of tunnel-vision thinking—focusing only on those factors that you can most immediately control—that has put the party at an increasing disadvantage over the past few decades.

The report has no answer to the media ownership problem. It doesn’t even raise it as a question. It includes pages upon pages bemoaning the Democratic Party’s messaging woes, without ever considering that the problem might be that its opponents have access to much larger megaphones.

“Deciding to Win” also displays little awareness of what winning elections is for. There is an obvious reason why the Democratic Party ought not abandon its commitment to preventing the climate crisis: a hotter future with more extreme weather events is a future where the moment will often be stacked against incumbents and their broadly democratic values. Climate emergencies and refugee crisis are fodder for authoritarian strongmen, who can seize power by comfortably lying to the electorate while objective reality becomes increasingly unpalatable. You govern well when you are in power, and you hope that your governance decisions led to a more favorable electoral environment over time. (That’s kind of the whole point of democratic elections, actually.)