How my best friend's wedding taught me what's wrong with Democratic messaging

Part 2 of the pre-autopsy of the 2022 midterms

Yesterday, as my best friend Bryan would say, was pretty great. That’s him below in the blue suit, holding Amy’s hands. And that’s me in the middle pronouncing them husband and wife by the power vested in me by Universal Life Ministries, the State of Texas, and the Internet.

That was Saturday. Amy asked me to officiate their wedding a few months ago, but it wasn’t until the Sunday prior that I had any clue what I was going to say, because that is when my friend Tom sent me Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic, “What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture.”

Thompson looks at what mathematical optimization has wrought not only in baseball but in other aspects of our culture as well, prioritizing symmetry over exuberance. In particular, this bit about “finite games” and “infinite games” jumped out at me.

The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that there are two kinds of games in life: finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference.

Marriage isn’t just an infinite game but the greatest of all infinite games. Perhaps you can’t win at marriage. If the point of an infinite game is to keep playing, can you ever declare victory? Or, because the point is to keep playing, do you win every day that you are married? Today is actually my 13th anniversary which S and I celebrated with a brunch of cava and caviar, so I’m inclined toward the latter. I’m calling our marriage a big win.

But that’s today. Yesterday it was my job to marry off my best friend to a lovely and brilliant woman, so I talked about how marriage was the ultimate infinite game because it can only be won if you don’t care who gets the credit for winning. I mentioned that you can certainly lose an infinite game by mistaking it for a finite game and trying to win an argument. And I closed by pointing out that the couple exemplified all the qualities needed in an infinite game, namely enthusiasm, commitment, self-awareness, consideration, love, and some other stuff, probably. And then I shut up because absolutely no one came to the wedding hoping they’d get to hear me talk.

All in all, it was a pretty great night. And in two days, we — by which I mean not just Democrats but all non-Trumpy Americans and really anyone with a rooting interest in our continuation as a functional democracy — are going to have a pretty bad night. Realistically speaking, the best case scenario is that we end up with a Speaker of the House whose manhood is stored in an unlocked closet at Mar-A-Lago. The worst case is that Hershel Walker becomes a United States by-god Senator, astronaut Mark Kelly loses in Arizona, and election-deniers win offices in charge of counting votes in swing states, even blue ones.

If on Wednesday morning we find ourselves sifting through electoral rubble, Republicans won’t get the credit as much as Democrats will get the blame, as if we are the adults in charge of making sure voters don’t go running off into traffic.

(To some extent, of course, this is true. No one is really expecting Republicans to solve our existential problems such as climate change. Hell, no one expect Republicans to do anything about the issues they’re campaigning on. When it comes to actual crises, voters turn to Democrats and then blame them when they do. See also: bailing out Wall Street to prevent a global economic apocalypse, or everything the Biden administration has done to dig us out of the hole that Donald Trump dug during the pandemic. But I digress.)

We can with near certainty predict where the blame will be placed because it’s already happening. Democrats are going to lose because they “suck at messaging,” as Obama White House veteran Dan Pfeiffer recently discussed in a Vanity Fair essay entitled, helpfully, “Why Do Democrats Suck at Messaging?” The title is a misdirection. He admits that Democratic messaging falls into the smartypants trap. (“It’s often too wonky and wordy, an Ezra Klein column distilled into a paragraph of focus-grouped verbal applesauce.”) But his main point is that Democrats don’t have a communications infrastructure on par with the GOP’s. Basically, he wants some billionaire to turn Pod Save America into a liberal version of Fox News, which isn’t quite the solution he might imagine.

“Democrats spend 99% of their time worrying about what they should say and only 1% figuring out how to get people to hear what they are saying,” he observes, not wrongly.

But it’s how Democrats spend time worrying about what they should say that should terrify you. He mentioned a weekly lunch meeting hosted by then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle in which senators and top aides tried to come up with their message for the 2004 elections.

Group projects never work, and they definitely never work when every participant has a veto and no participant has the ability to override that veto. The decision on messaging wasn’t resolved in one lunch or even two. After weeks of discussion, the senators eventually lined up behind the thrilling and incisive slogan “Better Together.” In the end, the only thing the party could agree on was something so inoffensive that it meant nothing, the political messaging equivalent of plain yogurt.

If the idea of a group of “mostly very old people constantly interrupt[ing] the presenters” strikes you as an especially bad way to come up with a campaign message, then you won’t be comforted with the knowledge of how common this is. God help me, this is how we act in the room where it happens. Find me a conference room full of reasonably educated liberals unconvinced that they are just one PowerPoint deck away from devising the perfect communications strategy, and I’ll shake your hand because you’ve discovered a unicorn.

That room is where the problem starts. From there, it goes to campaign committees tasked with winning and holding governing majorities. They determine who gets hired by campaigns, which means that only a few pollsters get hired by the most important campaigns across the country. And that means that voters get a limited number of issues and positions to weigh in on in opinion polls. This is all well-intentioned and meant to focus candidates on voters’ priorities, but Moneyball-for-Politics produces an endless stream of data-driven drivel and paint-by-the-bullet point numbered lists.

This system takes actual human beings and turns them into automatronic, yet sweaty try hards nearly replicating authentic speech. Candidates who buck the system don’t get funded. The voters keep saying they want authenticity, and yet the Democratic Party has created a system to deliver the opposite.

This systemic messaging problem is compounded by the need among Democratic partisans for Elvis. We want to feel excitement in our leaders, but it’s hard to be inspired by air-brushed Honor Society apple polishers endlessly promising to “fight for you.” We look endlessly for someone who looks at home onstage, someone who can command the spotlight. Everybody wants to scream in ecstasy, and so we look endlessly for Elvis.

This is why Democrats are so ready to fall in love not only with the real Elví but with the pretenders, the Amy McGraths, the Wes Clarks. These are resume candidates. We list their attributes as if trying to convince ourselves that a winning television commercial can create a winnable race. We pour millions into their accounts, hoping to replicate Obama by recreating the effects he caused. We hype these resume candidates like they are the next AOC because they share superficial characteristics, turning subpar candidates into political meme stocks.

Another Obama veteran, Jon Favreau, recently talked about the limitations of resume candidates on Pivot, the podcast hosted by Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher, except on this episode Kai Ryssdal was subbing for Galloway. Favreau argued, smartly, that campaigns (that is, actual voters) should decide things, not resumes, or hype.

We hype resume candidates, turning subpar candidates into political meme stocks.

“You gotta have a primary to test people out because there’s nothing that tests people like a presidential primary campaign, and people who look good on paper, once they start running are not good,” said Favreau. “I think the thing we do about just looking at peoples’ resumes, looking at people on paper, that doesn’t work.”

“It never did,” interjected Ryssdal.

“You actually have to test people out, see them out there on the campaign trail, hear them, and then see what happens when they get attacked,” concluded Favreau.

This is more possible in a presidential race because the media exposure afforded each major campaign requires a candidate to reveal something real about themselves. You can’t hide behind talking points on a presidential campaign like you can on a congressional one.

But what would the voters say if all candidates at all levels dared to be as real as an actual human being? You know, walk and talk like a regular person out there in public where people can see you. Maybe even have an idiosyncratic idea to show voters you’re driven by personal conviction and not opinion polls. Talk about getting rid of daylight savings time or not making us take our shoes off at the airport anymore, and maybe voters’ ears will prick up at the sound of exuberance and not soulless symmetry.

Midterm elections, like all elections, are a finite game that will deliver winners and losers. But communication and messaging, which so often is used as an inarticulate expression of a voter’s relationship with politics, is an infinite game. Who Democratic leaders are and what the Democratic Party stands for, is an infinite game that cannot be conjured anew every campaign season. Think of communication instead as a conversation in which political organizations have better means of listening to voters than hoping they pick up a phone and stay on the call for 15 minutes. If political communication is an infinite campaign, then it can only be lost if voters completely tune out politicians. Then the conversation stops.

Given an environment of fractured media audiences, disinformation from hostile actors (which I suppose applies as much to James Woods as it does to Russia), and a Republican Party which only sees the truth on alternate weekends and Wednesday evenings, Democrats can understandably feel that they are being unfairly held to a different standard and are not really responsible for the mess they’re in. But here’s the thing: It’s not the responsibility of the governed to improve communication from those who govern them. It’s their responsibility to vote, and on Tuesday, God help us, some of them will.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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