Part of the thing they need to remember is that they have to win over the voters, not win the interview. Treating the question as if it’s in a debate and there’s a judge who will declare the winner is a losing strategy. The politician needs to realize that the voters are the judge. Whether or not the candidate uses a certain debate strategy to “win” the question isn’t necessarily important to the voters. What is important is how the voters feel about how the candidate answered the question. Using techniques to dodge or redirect questions may be useful within the construct of an interview or debate, but that’s not when the election is decided. It’s decided when the voters cast their vote. If they like how the candidate answered the question, then they’ll vote for that candidate. Any debate strategy should be focused on convincing voters to vote for them.
But what do you do if it’s not getting put up by a demagogue? I’d guess the moderator at the 2028 presidential debate is going to ask each candidate what their position happens to be on transgender athletes; should the Democrat reply, you know, I see right through you, you’re doing this because you don’t have any answers, and isn’t that just how fearmongers like you operate?
Presumably, the response shouldn’t be to attack the moderator, but to say “you are only asking this question because MY OPPONENT is doing this, I see right through him, etc”.
Whether this is an effective strategy for reaching the 70% of your own supporters who agree with your opponent is what I dispute.
Moderating:
Emphasis mine.
You can ask your questions and make your points without becoming personal and engaging in attacks. Dial it back.
I’ll be more direct – but I promise that there’s A LOT of nuance missing in treating this topic simply.
OK:
Babale: I’m asking what you tell them .
Bordelond: You can potentially tell them many things, but you don’t have to make promises.
Regrettably, I cannot be exacting here. What you tell voters depend on many, many factors. Additionally, it’s likely that Democrats will have to attempt something akin to exchanging 2 extremist voters for 3 centrist voters. No Democrat will be able to appeal to everyone. If there are voters that MUST hear concrete promises about their top issue – trangender-related or otherwise – those voters might not be gettable.
Note that “not promising” is not the same as “rejecting” or “turning away from”. That’s the art of politics – you really are “closely aligned” with half of a voting bloc, but you skillfully and convincingly present yourself as being “aligned enough” with 3/4 of that same voting bloc.
On the contrary, at least for Babale and I – we’re actually not talking about transgender-related political issues at all. We are, indeed, talking about the tactics of messaging.
Actual answer: acknowledge voters’ concerns by saying that it’s an issue with two sides: inclusion for the transgender athletes, fairness for the cis female ones, and while you can’t make everyone happy, your preferred policy is X because of Y reasons. (I bet this will be how Newsom handles it if he is the candidate.)
IMO the impression of being out of touch with, and looking down on, voters is a bigger problem here than the actual policies adopted. This framing avoids that.
I’d actually guess otherwise. Your post makes me curious, though, how potential Bogeyman issues were handled by moderators in Presidential debates from 2016 forward.
My assumption is that a moderator may well have brought up same-sex marriage in the 2008 and/or 2012 Presidential debates. There’s no doubt that the media brough it up to Obama during one or both of those campaigns. He went on the record about it and took some criticism, though not a campaign-ruining amount.
Thinking on this some: Are these 70% your supporters or are they not? That is, are they single-issue voters who will pull their support of you’re not in line with them one this one issue (regardless of the issue)?
Obviously, some portion will be single-issue voters and will be lost at election time. How big is “some portion”? Again, that’s where politicking comes in. My assumption is that Obama convincingly won the 2008 and 2012 LGBT vote despite comments on the record against same-sex marriage. And that was even as “some portion” of single-issue (same-sex marriage) votes third party or stayed home.
This is a reasonable approach. Necessarily, it won’t please everyone and you will likely have to aim for exchanging two progressives for three centrists. But that’s about the best one can do.
Exactly - you can’t keep people on-message or avoid being asked questions you would prefer not to answer even within the confines of a single thread on the Straight Dope Message Board. So, how is this supposed to work in the context of a six-month national political campaign involving thousands of candidates pitching to millions of people? A perfect demonstration of why “we’ll just declare what The Message is and everyone will magically fall in line!” doesn’t even rise to the level of naive.
Reviving this thread for another example of how corporate media is inherently untrustworthy. Democrats absolutely need to keep this in mind; CBS and other networks are really no better than Fox in terms of unbiased reporting.
The producer of CBS resigned because of the corporation’s yielding to Trump’s pressure over the Harris interview, and the FCC’s new scrutiny.
This is a terrible state of affairs, but I’m not following the point about “really no better than Fox”.
My point is that Democrats should treat them as hostile, just like Fox. They should still do media, but they should go in with the assumption that corporate media has an agenda that is not in line with Democratic politics and priorities.
Is it your view that policies just don’t matter all that much in elections and what does is the messaging, or that voters are ill-informed about Democratic aims and policies and this could be corrected by better messaging?
Likely not aimed at me, but I’ll give my 2c:
Policies matter but right now the bigger issue is indeed messaging. ISTM that the trump vote was almost entirely based on disinformation, with just a small proportion of votes based on idolisation of trump.
Disinformation about minorities (including dei), trans, the economy and what the democratic party stood for.
It’s that bad that to this day no one can say the Biden economy was better than trump’s first term, you’d get laughed at.
Even though, by just about every metric (employment, salaries including inflation, stock market growth, energy production etc etc) it was indeed significantly better. And that’s even if we give trump a pass for his final year (and why would we do that)?
And this is true on every issue eg Why are people so in favour of deportations? Because they believe there has been a “migrant crime wave” and that migrants are a net drain on the economy.
If I believed the same facts then I might too have voted trump. So it’s more about what are the objective facts than ideology.
I was asking @iiandyiiii, since he started the thread, but other answers are welcome.
In my view the biggest issue is that the Democrats have become dominated and defined by the largest part of their base: college educated liberals, and the beliefs and priorities of this group don’t match up well with those of working class voters, who the Democrats also need to win. I was hoping I could find some evidence of what voters believe about each party’s policies, so we would have some idea if disinformation was a significant factor, but so far the only survey questions I found were extremely broad-brush.
External factors were against the Democrats this time in the form of inflation, but I don’t think it’s true the economy was better in general than under Trump 1. The Economist makes it seem pretty much like a draw, but inflation was particularly salient to voters and made it feel worse than it was:
Alternatively, this is why they said they were in favour of deportations, but the real reason is they just don’t like large numbers of strangers turning up, especially without invitation.
I’m sceptical of the disinformation explanation, because the Dems were in power, and people could see for themselves how they were governing. In my view Biden campaigned as a fairly centrist Dem, but his administration was much further to the left, and this is one reason if didn’t matter much what Kamala said: everyone assumed she would govern similarly to Biden.
In what ways do you think Biden’s policies as President were much further to the left than his campaign implied?
Re last post, my opinion is that it was a matter of positioning in 2020, and only concerned policy later.
In 2020, Joe Biden’s strongest primary opponent was Bernie Sanders, and the second strongest (although far behind) was Elizabeth Warren. This positioning allowed a lot of swing voters to categorize Biden as almost uniquely moderate within his party – without Biden having to take strikingly centrist positions.
In 2024, Biden-Harris had no leftist primary opponent that could play the same helpful role. So they would have had to show their moderation some other way, such as a Sister Souljah moment. I thought the best opportunity there was, back in 2023, to endorse the Supreme Court decision rejecting reverse discrimination in college admissions. Now, Biden and Harris both genuinely support preferential policies. Sticking with that was their profile in courage where Biden and Harris did what they believed in despite the electoral risk.
I think there’s a lot of truth that Biden was perceived as a moderate in 2020 because he was running against Bernie Sanders. And it’s true that he was a moderate relative to the Democratic Party, but the party as a whole has shifted left over the years, so those who expected him to be Obama or Clinton might have been disappointed. But I’m hard pressed to think of anything he did in office that should have come as a big surprise to anyone actually paying attention to his campaign.
As to 2024, I think Biden/Harris’ essentially unconditional support for Israeli actions in Gaza should certainly have satisfied those voters who worried they were too aligned with the progressive wing of the Party.