Writing teacher advice for Democratic strategists: Your audience is NEVER everyone, and acting as though it is will lead to generalities that appeal on average but not in specific. You find your audience through specificities. Relying heavily on polls and consultants leads to tepid messaging.
Been on the stage since i was 5. First impression is half of it. And as long as it’s unexpected, shocking, completely honest or funny, never seen one person leave. I’ve had people tell me on numerous occasions they came to several shows day after day for that 30 seconds solo pirouette. The catch.
IN other words, kitchen table issues because those issues depend on where the kitchen table is. Medicaid is pretty much everyone, ICE is also a kitchen table issue in places where workers and neighbors are being disappeared, affordable housing is more urban and exurban, etc.
Yes!! And their words do not ring with authenticity. Voters see right thru it.
It's really no surprise that mainstream Democrats have embraced AI slop machines
Knowing who your target audience is was a big part of the health communication classes I took. We had to produce materials and test them for one group project. We were targeting male students in our school, and absolutely none came by our table outside the sandwich shop when we were there at lunch.
You have to give guys something to do. Making the sandwiches and making a game out of it. Or making pizza. Open mic. Or, did you see how popular Mamdani’s treasure hunt was?
You needed to offer them free sandwiches.
😉😄
We had homemade cookies! They were delicious! We were between the sandwiches and the elevator and truly, zero men came by in the time we were there. Total fail of a materials test, but did highlight how hard it was to reach that population!
I would've thought food was a sure bet! Amazing.
Me too! They were chocolate chip, all the women who got to eat them raved.
In Tucson, Harris ads ran on our Soul-Old School sta. that sounded crafted for Black & Latino listeners in a major city? Only the culture here is low key & outrage was never going to play. Many in target group too are Pentecostals etc. Liberal town so Harris won, but ads were one size fits none.
Writing and rhetoric teachers know! I wrote about this in 2016:
If the Democratic Party intends to win this fight, it must stop functioning solely as a party & instead step into its moment in history: to lead a pro-democracy movement capable of confronting this authoritarian threat. www.lincolnsquare.media/p/stand-up-a...
The DNC debuted its new fight song at last week’s meeting, so they must think their audience is…Girl Scouts and cheerleaders? Dorks. ~~~ D-E-M-S, we rise! Stronger together — blue skies! Lift your voice, we’re bold and true, Onward, Democrats — We shine blue!
So spot on! As a marketer I’ve also thought this before.
In addition to thinking about pedagogy, this is probably influenced by the marketing book I was reading recently.
If a consultant has to tell you what to say you're not a leader.
Riding popularism all the way to fascism.
Retired English prof here—I agree wholeheartedly!
This I think is Trump's secret sauce: he identifies specific groups with influence and tells them (and gives them) what they want. Evangelicals on abortion. Latino conservatives on trans rights. Tech bros with crypto. Etc etc
And he's entertaining and offers unfiltered versions of the things he offers. If you like those things, then you get all you want.
I'll give an example of someone who tries to be a story-talker but is instead a dictatorial boor that demands you to accept their story, it was someone who used to be a governor and rhymes with "oh no." I've noticed younger people, I'll call that people 50 and younger, aren't thrilling with that.
I agree. An observation I have made over the years is that many smart and effective politicians are story-talkers as I call them. Instead of the bland fact speaking politicians marching down their laundry list, they weave their points through stories and pose questions that has each listener
give the correct answer themselves. We are all story-talkers, that's how we communicate our life experiences to others. We tell them the facts of it through stories. A simple example: They take a policy point casually discuss it through real life examples and then ask, how does it affect you?
Listeners always give the correct answer. They experience that correct answer in your presence, it builds something. "They talk/think like I do." We like story-talkers, good ones. Humans have never gotten away from the need to gather and listen. Trump's rallies were those and he told stories.
I think of B. Clinton, B. Obama, Kate Bailey Hutchinson, and Maya Angelou did it poetically so but wasn't a politician, as examples who come to mind of such people. I think that's an important skill that has been underutilized by the party. Stern letters worked in an era when no one shredded them.
Follow the republicans playbook. Make a promise and have 💯 compliance by every blue state.
And this is why social media is dumb. Makes no sense.
Check with Dominic Cummings for details.
People would rather vote for a person who has actual beliefs even if the don’t agree with all those beliefs than for a person who doesn’t appear to have any beliefs. It’s like that old TS Eliot line about readers not having to believe everything you write they just have to believe you believe it.
Yep.
Honestly, this is just me venting a frustration as I finalize some stuff for my classes. So a (hopefully) mini thread about why this kind of messaging sucks.
I'm going to use the college essay as a metaphor. Let's say you are writing an essay about how recent technological changes have affected students. Your opening sentence should grab your audience, and it doesn't have to be gimmicky.
You want to grab the biggest possible audience you can, so you pick a deliberately broad opening that you assume will apply to everyone. Something like "In recent years, technological changes have affected everyone."
In theory, this should grab people. After all, it's true! And it applies to all of your readers, no matter who they are. But the rest of your essay, if done well, is specific. You're not talking about *all* technological changes.
You're talking about changes that have affected students, and you've picked three specific examples, from most recent to least: ChatGPT, the iPhone, and the ThinkPad. Your essay is not about technology generally but about the ways new tech affects student behavior.
Your real audience is not everybody, but a large subset: students, instructors, and people interested in education. Someone who has been affected by tech changes in domestic life may not be your audience.
Moreover, humans connect to strong emotion and/or specificity. You can say that the killer stabbed fifteen people, and that's not going to move your audience as much as starting with the story of one person and expanding to include the other 14. We don't connect to numbers. "Everyone" is a number.
So, back to the tech essay and then to Democratic strategy. Specificity finds your real audience. You could go for an actual hook using anecdote, but for your actual audience, because they already care about the topic, just telling them specific should be enough.
Plenty of published and much-cited academic essays start with something like "This is a paper about students and how the last thirty-five years of ed-tech has changed their behavior." No hook, just a clear description of what you're going to talk about.
It's more engaging to a broader audience to start with anecdote, and personally, that's what I'd do, but if people are interested in ed-tech and student behavior, they're probably interested in the paper even without a flashy opening.
With a general message you essentially speak to no one.
and sound inhuman and untrustworthy doing so
But what about the Baileys?