What JD Vance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk are doing—spreading vile, racist and debunked conspiracy theories regarding migrants in Springfield, Ohio—is so deeply disturbing. So sick. So dangerous.
But….it’s important to see that what they are doing follows a strategy.
It’s the exact same pattern we’ve witnessed in recent cycles. And it ties directly into Donald Trump’s killing of the immigration bill in the Senate earlier this year.
Fully aware that most of what they stand for is deeply unpopular (think abortion bans, Project 2025, and most everything Trump and Vance talk about), what’s happening around Springfield and Haitian migrants is now their playbook come election time.
And as we saw in many place in 2018 (beyond the Congressional elections), it can work if we don’t see that strategy clearly, and respond the right way.
I wrote about this exact strategy in my book “Saving Democracy,” along with the best ways to respond.
Here are excerpts that put it all in context….
Their Strategy, and the Dilemma of Asymmetric Messaging
“Messaging strategist Rachel Bitecofer summed up the conundrum to me: “a fully radicalized party still holds 50 percent or more of our country’s political apparatus.” From a messaging standpoint, when their radicalism represents a decisive minority on most issues, how do they pull this off?
First, that “radicalized party” keenly understands where the American people stand on most issues—and on their issues. They know that if elections become straight-up-or-down referenda on their views and plans, their fate on election day will be that of the 2022 abortion referenda in Michigan, Kansas, and Kentucky: they will lose. . . everywhere.
Still, as Drew Westen, another messaging expert, explained to me, “they stick to their commitments. . . they are unafraid of taking positions that are minority positions if: 1) they firmly believe them; or 2) they are being well-paid to promulgate them.”
So, committed to a set of ideas that are largely unpopular, how do they effectively communicate their agenda?
It’s actually a simple strategy: they don’t even try.
The fall of 2022 provided a perfect example. After the Dobbs decision risked becoming the centerpiece of the 2022 election, they—the smart ones, at least—understood its unpopularity. So much so that Mitch McConnell told Lindsey Graham not to talk about abortion, and candidates across the country scrubbed their websites of references to abortion bans they’d spent careers fighting for. From ducking tough questions to frantically changing the subject, they did all they could not to talk about it.
In some states, the strategy worked. In others, things didn’t quiet down enough to succeed. Either way, their instinct for silence on their agenda tells us a lot: they want to avoid a direct confrontation on positions they know are political losers.
So if they fall silent on the unpopular issues they care most about, what do they talk about?
Democrats. Democrats. Democrats.
Their gameplan is attacking pro-democracy and Democratic candidates all the time. Ruthlessly. Relentlessly.
Bitecofer calls it an all-out “brand assault” against Democrats. Importantly, they choose messaging attacks that accomplish two goals at the same time: 1) to motivate their coalition (both their core voters and voters who lean their way) to show up at the polls on election day, and 2) to “pollute” the impression of Democratic and pro-democracy candidates among true swing voters.
Or, as messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio says, they pick issues and attack lines that “keep their base engaged and enraged.”
Take a step back, and you’ll see that this messaging strategy serves the same goal as the tactics and strategies described in prior chapters, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. “The name of the game is driving and shaping the electorate in your favor and driving turnout in your party’s favor,” Bitecofer told me. Because that’s the only way you win when you represent a minority viewpoint.
I saw this up close in the 2018 elections, with the late frenzy over a “caravan of immigrants” heading to America’s Southern border. It was a daily fear-mongering attack on Democrats with a simple goal: to spike Republican turnout in vast red areas of states like Ohio where voters were originally unmotivated.
And it worked.
That late surge wasn’t enough to stop a blue wave in suburbs that cost the GOP the House (again, it wasn’t meant to be persuasive), but that unexpected spike in rural turnout helped secure decisive statewide wins in states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri, and Indiana—where Republican candidates dramatically overperformed the final polls. (In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine trailed in the final weeks amid a sleepy campaign, and Democratic turnout in cities was the highest in decades; but that red, rural surge propelled DeWine to a 3.7-point win.)
To use Bitecofer’s language, that “caravan turnout” in red Ohio and elsewhere shaped the electorate in ways the polling hadn’t captured. To use Shenker-Osorio’s language, it “engaged and enraged” as intended.
And how do the Democratic and pro-democracy candidates respond to this type of onslaught? They generally try to motivate their own coalition (again, core supporters and those who lean their way) and swing voters by laying out policies they are confident are popular with the electorate.
Author and activist Steve Phillips calls it “popularism.” Bitecofer calls it the “make shit popular” strategy, hoping to force the other side to act on issues that citizens widely support. And a common tactic accompanying this approach is to “make things as universally popular as possible by not branding them as partisan—we bleach all hint of partisanship out.”
And here’s the problem with that approach, and the overall back-and-forth:
First, while the far right is furiously ginning up its turnout, a watered-down issue message from the left fails to motivate core Democratic supporters—“voters of color, who are the most reliable Democratic voters and the fastest growing segment of the population.” This is especially harmful with less engaged voters who need to be persuaded to turn out.
Second, as Bitecofer told me, “if they’re talking about us, and we’re talking about us, no one is messaging against them.” As in so many other areas, while those attacking democracy are on messaging offense, those who support democracy are not.
And this explains why the left has not gained much political benefit even when it succeeds in making its core ideas popular. For example, this asymmetry helps explain why states that strongly support a woman’s right to choose are voting in candidates who’ve spent a lifetime backing abortion bans. Or why states whose voters strongly support lifting the minimum wage vote into office those who oppose it. Or common-sense gun reforms. Or health issues like Medicaid expansion.
“They are voting to legalize pot and then voting for Republicans,” Bitecofer sums up perfectly.
So the side representing the minority is desperately avoiding a straight up-or-down vote on its unpopular core issues. It relentlessly defines the other side in ways that motivate its coalition to show up, while tearing down that side’s standing with true swing voters.
How should the pro-democracy, majority side respond beyond popularism, and “making shit popular”?
Here are some key tips on how to go on offense…”
Tips to Go On Messaging Offense
My chapter on messaging in Saving Democracy explains numerous strategies to respond to these tactics. I’ll provide a few excerpts that feel most helpful right now:
Responding to the Dog Whistles
“It’s a tactic that goes back to our nation’s Founding.
To advance an agenda that most of the population disagrees with—to “shape” the electorate in your favor—you need to divide that otherwise united majority over something else.
And the candidate for “something else” too often turns out to be race. So time and again, the far right’s attack on democracy comes wrapped in an unvarnished appeal to racial prejudices, stereotypes, fear, and outright racism. Dividing people who otherwise have all sorts of commonalities (like wanting better- funded schools or smooth roads or safe rails) against one another.
For years, we referred to these appeals as “dog whistles.” Lately, the tactics have grown so egregious, they’re just plain whistles— loud enough that everyone hears them. And too often, they still work. And one reason they work is an ineffective response.
For too long, the response to those dog whistles has been silence. Ignore it, and “get back” to the issues. That is a failed strategy.
Why?
Anat Shenker-Osorio explains: “Politics isn’t solitaire. . . . The right-right-wing is going to be race-baiting all day, every day. . . . [T]his idea that somehow we can be silent about race and the race conversation just disappears is a pure fallacy.”
If we are silent, she explains, “all our voters hear is the racially coded invectives from the opposition.”
The best response is to actually call the tactic out head-on, then get back to values
“[C]all out the opposition for what they are doing and how they are intentionally dividing by race and by place in order to aid and abet their plutocracy. . . [A]scribe motivation. . . explain why they are doing it,” and why “that [division] is going to screw you over.”
For a full explanation of this approach, watch Anat Shenker-Osorio explain it here (start watching around the 30 minute mark):
One other excerpt:
“Mobi-suasion”: Persuading Voters to Show Up…
“Above, I explained that the far right uses messaging to shape the electorate. To get its coalition “engaged and enraged” so it shows up and numerically overwhelms the other side, which in many places is larger.
Too often, Democrats and those fighting for democracy take a different, less effective tack: they push more sanitized messages to persuade voters in the middle, then frantically knock on doors and make calls late in a campaign to remind their own coalition to show up. They separate message from mobilization.
This approach is based on an assumption that those coalition members are primed to vote—already persuaded of voting’s importance—and if they just hear enough reminders about election day and who the candidates are, they’ll show up.
But for too many of those voters, this assumption doesn’t hold. Unfortunately, many live challenging lives—and are disengaged precisely because they don’t believe voting will change much in their lives for the good. (Lived experience has likely taught them that lesson.) Or because the issues they see bandied about in politics won’t make much difference for them. So voting— especially in states that have added obstacles or legal uncertainty to the process—just doesn’t feel worth the time, money, and effort. And those milquetoast messages and frantic door knocks do nothing to change that.
“You have to treat them as persuasion voters,” Stacy Abrams explained to Politico after Georgia turned blue in 2020. “Only your message is not trying to persuade them to share Democratic values. Your message is to persuade them that voting can actually yield change.” Change generally, and change in their own lives.
Almost the entire explanation of the outcomes in 2018, 2020, and 2022 comes down to fluctuations in turnout. So core messages must reflect that need to persuade folks to turn out—both at the macro-level, and the micro-level (doors and phones). Some call this need “mobili-suasion” (Tech for Campaigns’ CEO Gina Pak) or “mobi-suasion.” (Shenker-Osorio). Whatever you call it, do it!
And this need also places an enormous premium on. . .
. . . . Repetition
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
There is no greater power in messaging than repetition.
And it’s not just because people hear the message more often, or are more likely to hear it at all.
Done right, repetition changes how people hear the message. And from whom they hear it.
Shenker-Osorio explains: “[t]he number one most persuasive tool in our arsenal. . . is something that we call social proof. . . .[P]eople do the thing they think people like them do. . . . Whatever [people hear] repeated most frequently becomes ‘common sense. . . .’”
Which means “there’s nothing that we can say that is as persuasive as what people see other people doing.” And saying. If you keep hearing it around town, “this must be what people like me think”.
This dynamic explains how strong opinions on issues can arise overnight, or shift quickly, as they did on marriage equality. Or that caravan cooked up by Donald Trump and Fox News:
If everyone in my town is talking about that caravan—in restaurants, at the store, at the barber shop, at work—then it must be real and it must be something I should care about.
The importance of repetition puts a premium on creating and using messages that spread: “[a] message is like a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person,” Shenker-Osorio says. “[I]f your words don’t spread, they don’t work. . . And if your base is unwilling to carry a message. . . [and] no one in your base is going to say it, then the middle’s not gonna hear it.”
Back to Tip 9, this same repetition/social proof dynamic also plays a key role in persuading folks to turn out and vote: “Voters need to feel like voting is a thing that ‘my kind of a person’ does. It’s an habituated behavior.” So it’s key to “create the environment that this is a thing that everyone is paying attention to—this is a thing that everyone is thinking about.”
Formal studies confirm her observation: “There is a great deal of literature relating the habits of voters to other potential voters in their familial and social circles. . . . Connectedness matters. . . . The main finding in this line of research indicates that voting can be contagious; the more people in your network who vote, the more likely you are to vote.”
Which leads to two needs:
Once again, to create the most effective message—one likely to spread widely—it’s not good enough to win over the moderate middle with a milquetoast message. It may be appealing when heard in a vacuum, but it doesn’t spread. You need a message that your core coalition finds so compelling, it repeats it endlessly. The magnetism of the message is what gets that baton passed around. Sadly, that 2018 fake news about a caravan possessed that exact feature. On the other hand, messages that signal that “you’re a B-version of your opponent do not,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Second, to ensure a message spreads, “[w]e have to actually do the work of organizing,” Shenker-Osorio says. “[O]rganizing is the only route to messaging. . . . [T]he unsexy work of going door to door to door, phone to phone to phone, text to text to text, talking to people.”
Sure, media outlets and TV ads and podcasts and streaming videos can help. But, consistent with the rest of this book, the most important part of spreading the word so that’s it’s heard from a variety of people is that every American who cares about democracy must use her footprint to communicate. And organizations must empower every member or constituent to do the same.”
Bottom line: we are down to 50 days to go. Do whatever you can to be part of the organizing that will help us win this election. And if you are asked about the racist conspiracy theories being propagated by Vance and Trump, call them out for what they are: a desperate and intentional effort to divide us by race and place so we 1) don’t see their far right agenda that will trounce our freedoms and hold us back economically, or 2) unite to stop it.
Then be sure people know exactly what’s in that agenda—the very attacks on freedom Trump and Vance do not want us talking about.
JDVance is our Senator. Ohio.
Not only has he done nothing for OH, he’s put Springfield residents&legal immigrants in danger.
Also, return our wonderful Senator Sherrod Brown to the Senate.
Rs saying in their ad Bernie Moreno is good for workers is offensive.
Vote for people who have fealty to their state&country, not to Donald Trump.
ROE RAGE will deliver millions of voters for Harris. Dobbs guarantees defeat for the GOP in general and Trump in paticular. 🗽🌊🥥🌴