Democrats are beginning to understand the power and extent of the right wing media bubble. For the past three election cycles, many of us have asked, "How could so many people have voted for someone like Trump?" More and more, we're realizing that the answer is not any particular issue or line of reasoning, not anything "deplorable" about the people themselves, but: "Because right wing media was their sole source of the news."
There's a lot of post mortem talk these days about how the Democratic Party could improve its policies, messaging, and candidates to do better next time, and we should by all means continue evolving our vision for the country and how we communicate it. However, no change in the party is going to affect voters who will never hear about them.
Let that sink in for a moment.
There's an enormous segment of the electorate that will never even hear our pitch to the nation, however well we tune it. They won't be choosing between our policies and the GOP's; they'll be choosing between the distortions of those policies presented to them by the voices they trust, voices that are more free than ever to lie more egregiously than ever to their audience because of how well they've insulated it from any other news sources.
Where does that leave us?
It obviously depends on how big that segment is. Right now, the best organizations I know of for growing and turning out a Democratic electorate still seem to have fertile fields to work, room to maximize our advantage among voter cohorts that are still persuadable, but the 2024 presidential election, in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote for the first time in twenty years, raises the concern that this might not always be the case.
What will happen if/when the right wing media bubble grows to the point that no success we can have outside it will give us more than 50% of the vote? At that point, we'll have to find a way to penetrate the bubble, to inject our voices into that echo chamber, so we can pull at least some of its occupants back onto the common ground of a shared reality.
Democratic organizations, current or new–I suspect that brand new ones devoted to this specific mission will need to be founded and funded–must begin or accelerate the work of:
- Establishing the extent, makeup, and trajectory of the right wing echo chamber,
- Finding ways to reach that audience, and
- Developing effective messaging that can pull them out of the bubble.
Some notes:
- Creativity and scientific testing will be required at every stage. No idea should be too wild to try, but every idea should be carefully tested before being released for general use. Testing should involve all the usual best practices of controlled experimentation. It's essential that we find approaches that actually work, rather than blast messages that only satisfy our own need to vent. (See: The Lincoln Project.)
- Part of the scientific endeavor should be to consult what science we have about why people hold the politics they do and what makes them more amenable to persuasion, while also funding new research in that very young field. No scientific discovery should be the sole basis for putting some new method or message into wide practice–every attempt must be tested first on a small scale to see its actual effect in the real world–but known or soon-to-be-discovered science can help us devise the most promising hypotheses.
- It's likely that no "miracle cure" (a single tactic with a big effect) will be discovered. More likely, numerous approaches will be identified that will have small but significant effects if carefully targeted to the right cohorts.
- Or it may be that we'll discover no methods or messages that work under any circumstances, and if that's how it ends, that will have to be accepted. However, we're a long way from that point right now. We need to make a legitimate, systematic, scientific go of it before admitting any kind of defeat.
Finally, here are a few examples of tactics that might be developed. I'm NOT claiming there's any proof they'd work; I only present them as examples of how wide-ranging the attempts might be. In practice, guided by no principles beyond "whatever works", some of the actual ideas that are found to be effective could turn out to be much more surprising and out-of-the-box than mine.
- A fun online quiz measuring fluid intelligence targeted to conservative users. Those who score high are presented with a further message: "Congratulations! You scored in the top X% of all test takers. This puts you in an elite group that studies have shown is more open to having misinformation corrected. Would you like to take a further test to find out if you're holding any misinformation and how ready you are to correct it?"
- Some kind of campaign just to make conservatives more aware of the material differences between conservative and liberal brains. With the idea that mere self awareness might make a difference.
- Interest groups that chip away at Republican monolithic belief by celebrating the possibility of dissent and relative rationalism. (e.g. Republican Gun Owners for Common Sense Gun Laws, Republicans Against Corporate Welfare, Republicans For Diversity, Republican Cops Against Police Violence).
However we do it, we need to start thinking outside the box of conventional political targeting and messaging, because that box is getting smaller by the year.
This is one of my suggestions for bridging the Blue-Red divide.