Why do most Democratic campaign professionals do things exactly like we did 30 years ago?
Every other aspect of American life is virtually unrecognizable from the 1990s, but in Democratic politics we’re still campaigning like it’s 1999.
I think the answer can be found in the study of scientific thought.
One of my best memories from graduate school — other than the constant clanging of the basement furnaces struggling to survive another Evanston winter — is being introduced to all of the great thinkers that I’d never heard of.
Going from a very average small-town high school to a state school best known at that time for sports marketing (Go Ducks!), I couldn’t tell Max Weber from a Weber grill but when my grad school professors opened the doors to all the stuff I didn’t know I needed to learn, it was one of the lightbulb periods of my life.
And the thinker that made the biggest impression on me was one whose insight was profound yet simple.
Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” quite literally blew my mind. Until that day in the basement of Harris Hall, I had no overarching theory why so many things were so clearly fucked up in the world but nobody seemed to do anything about it.
IMO, Thomas Kuhn had the answer. (Apologies in advance for anyone who’ll argue I’m misusing Kuhn’s insights. Start your own Substack.) Kuhn studied how science established knowledge and then changed that understanding and came up with an amazing insight: Once enough of the scientific community was invested in a certain way of thinking, it was damn near impossible to get that thinking to change until the dominant perspective was either dramatically overthrown or everybody who subscribed to it dropped dead.
Applying Kuhn’s ideas to Democratic politics is revelatory.
He claimed that scientists worked in communities with a shared set of beliefs. Check. Applied to Democratic politics, our shared beliefs include ideas like “unlikely voters” aren’t worth spending money on, TV ads are king, and don’t ever say or do anything to piss off anybody. Ever.
Kuhn also argued that much of the time science operated in a “normal” phase, where a certain paradigm rules most thought and action. In the case of Democratic politics, the normal phase is the current one, which has persisted for over thirty years and we don’t do anything until it “tests well” in a poll using stilted language, we don’t want nobody nobody sent, and we always “stay on message,” no matter how badly things are going.
Now, to be clear, the normal paradigm can last for a long time and be extremely successful. In the case of Democratic politics, we had two terms of Clinton and two of Obama.
But then, just as you’re thinking everything is all peachy, an “anomaly” occurs. To Kuhn, this is when the normal paradigm just doesn’t work anymore, doesn’t seem to explain the world. In the case of Democratic politics, this sounds a lot like all the certified smart people continually arguing for years that voters actually agree with our policies and there are enough of them to win while we keep getting our asses handed to us.
The problem with the way paradigms work is that humans aren’t fond of throwing out the stuff that got them tenure, a Nobel Prize, or a nifty podcast empire. Once a status quo is established and a lot of people’s income, prestige, and vacation homes are dependent on it to keep on humming, those folks aren’t really going to be too interested in trying something new.
While Kuhn was certainly not trying to explain politics, and I may be just the latest person to misuse his notion of the paradigm, ever since I was first exposed to his writing, it had the same impact on me as his own brush with Aristotle had on his thinking.
TLDR: Things don’t change because the people in charge have no motivation to change them.
Although Trump’s masked private army is going into one U.S. city after another, the Democratic Party is in disarray, and about 80 million people are literally begging for leadership, many folks pulling the levers are still doing quite well thank you very much.
Podcast hosts keep hosting, pollsters keep polling, there’s very little relationship between prior results and future revenues, and a small number of wealthy consultants keep making their 15% via an outdated broadcasting medium.
But the crucial assumptions that guide most Democratic campaigns are never challenged.
Such as…
Why don’t we give people anything to do between election cycles, letting all of their righteous energy dissipate into social media posts and scammy fundraising appeals?
Does the dominant mode of polling still provide the insights we need in a world of near-zero response rates and voters who hold an assortment of beliefs that don’t fit nicely into our traditional notion of an “ideology?”
What is the impact of avoiding offense to anyone who doesn’t share our beliefs? Is this expanding the tent or failing to energize the people we need to vote?
Where have all the think tanks gone and why are political consultants like me guiding the policy discussion anyway?
Should we keep hiring separate consultants to handle different forms of media — which guarantees a never-ending battle to divide up the budget pie — or would it make more sense to take a strategic and coordinated approach to all that advertising like they do in corporate America?
Should we figure out what we stand for and convince people to meet us there (like the other side does) or simply keep guessing where they are and try to meet them?
Why is there so little accountability for the hundreds of millions of dollars —if not billions — spent on campaigns every year, much of it coming from small donors all over America?
Why is our campaigning so episodic? Despite the fact that there’s an increasing call for “year-round campaigns,” the bulk of our visibility still occurs in the last 60 days before the election.
In the era of “testing,” why are almost no campaign spending decisions made on the basis of which firm does the most effective direct mail, TV, digital, etc.?
What accounts for the stunning coincidence that so many of those who award the contracts just happen to land with the contract grantee after the election cycle?
Why don’t we just talk like normal people and not anodyne amalgams of poll questions and clever evasions?
Why, at a time when the electorate is increasingly diverse do we oscillate between treating non-white voters as a monolith or ignoring them?
Aaaaaaaaaarrrgh!!!!!
OK. Sorry about that last one. Couldn’t help it.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving into each of these assumptions (and a few more) to share my experiences and observations and offer a few ideas for doing things differently.
Anyway, these are just a few elements of our paradigm that I think merit examination. What are yours?
And the bigger question remains: If the powers-that-be will never change, then who will initiate the change that the Democratic Party so desperately needs? Who will come up with the next “normal” paradigm that will lead us, and America, out of the wilderness?
Maybe you?
2,763 is designed to encourage candid discussions about how we let that dumbass win twice and how we can prevent similarly terrible things from happening in the future. I’d love to know what you think, if you disagree, and if there are other hard questions that you think should be on the table. Everything is fair game, because, well, it needs to be at this point.