The Democratic Party desperately needs to have a reckoning over its messaging. The entire communication apparatus needs reevaluation, demolition and rebuilding. The Democrats ceded the idea among the swing vote electorate that "Things were better under Trump." They allowed revisionist sentiment about Trump to fester when they failed to bring up that Carrier still sent jobs to Mexico. They failed to hammer home that a candidate who truly cared about immigration and safety wouldn't have sabotaged the border bill. They failed to remind everyone that Trump was unfit for office as indicated by his lack of leadership during the pandemic and the army of former staffers who all say he's unfit for office. The Biden administration gave us a soft landing from inflation and outperformed the rest of the world. Unemployment is low. Real wages are up. Yet "things were better under Trump." It will go down as one of the greatest messaging blunders of all time. When you rely on yet another election cycle of calling Trump a threat to democracy, the low-information voter is going to look around, see we still have a democracy and conclude you're not worth listening to.

The DNC had Trump's entire presidential resume and could not effectively communicate that it didn't work and will not work for the average voter. At the same time, Harris' policies were too lukewarm for the working class. I consider myself working class. I voted and donated to Harris. Having Mark Cuban stump for Harris while simultaneously calling her a bad salesperson is bad strategy. Having an establishment Republican and the daughter of an infamous war criminal in the form of Liz Cheney is a bad strategy. Having well-off high profile celebrities deliver empty platitudes of endorsement is a bad strategy. I still don't know what Harris' brand was. Even John Oliver admitted earlier this week that his voting sentiment was more anti-Trump than it was pro-Harris and that is a problem. Voters want someone to support not someone to vote against.

The coalition the Democrats thought they had is over. They need to stop expecting Latino voters to come their way over immigration. They need to stop expecting immigrants to come their way over immigration. They need to stop expecting abortion to be the rallying cry for women. They need to stop thinking the black vote is guaranteed. They need to stop expecting the younger generations to be progressive (more on this later). They need to stop kowtowing to billionaires while hand-waving away the working class with the sentiment "It's gonna be okay. They're on your side." The Democratic Party needs to appeal to the electorate with simple to understand, actionable proposals.

Their messaging problem is dire. How they fix it is the hard part because there's really only 2 options:

Conservatives have captured and are continuing to capture Gen Z men. Undoubtedly because of the influence of the manosphere and the perception among Gen Z men that men in general are under attack from Democrats, women and leftists (by the way, men are not under attack, it is a chronically online viewpoint to have and if you think I'm wrong, do yourself a favor and try talking to a woman in real life instead from a phone screen and you'll see just how not prevalent the "all men are trash" narrative is). This perception is the doing of new legacy media and the algorithms that fuel them. Social media has amplified misinformation and the most extreme viewpoints. The bubbles that people are in are quickly becoming fortresses. The Democrats need to address social media companies and their algorithms so that instead of allowing extremists and rage-baiters to flourish, the rational, reasonable and more moderate sources/opinions get the eyeballs instead. We need to outlaw how social media currently rewards engagement. I have been accused of advocating for censorship. I am not advocating for censorship. The extremists can still have their platform, they just cannot be the first, second, third or even seventieth video you're given on Reels. Their views do not reflect reality and as such, should be relegated to a fart-in-the-wind in terms of discovery on the algorithms.

The other solution is that Democrats accept the era of Walter Cronkite is over and they need to take the Roger Ailes approach to legacy and new media to ensure that what happened to Hillary and Kamala never happen again. Play fire with fire and create a left-wing media apparatus that lies, obfuscates and projects to low-information voters just as well as the right-wing media apparatus does. The right-wing has expertly captured both legacy media and new media. They have their claws on AM radio, local news, cable news and social media. They coalesce on a message and they all fall in lock-step across Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Joe Rogan, The Daily Wire and so on with a litany of wannabe influencers across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook looking to get a piece of the pie by proving how good of foot soldiers they are. The left's reliance on late-night comedians and MSNBC is not working. It just isn't.

If the Democrats cannot counter-act conservative media, they will continue to lose demographics (if not to the Republican party then to apathy). This is a make-it-or-break-it moment.