If Democrats acted like a company trying to reach customers, Farrah says, they would do a true segmentation study of the voter base that goes deeper than demographic categories and gets at who people are and what they value. Instead, we get the “tyranny of crosstabs,” where categories like “white non-college men” harden into avatars and stereotypes that distort strategy from the start.
Rather than lead with values and a clear story, most Democratic consultants use message-testing results to “chase the customer” without offering an authentic point of view that might attract people. The obsession with “meeting people where they are”—and believing that polls and message tests can tell us where they are—results in reverse-engineering a brand from weak signals. Meanwhile, Republicans are playing the different and more effective long game of deciding what they want people to talk about and figuring out how to make that happen.
Once upon a time, filling in the “message box” below was where core strategy began; message testing was about figuring out how best to communicate the ideas in those boxes, not telling you how to fill them in. Too many Democrats undermine their own brand by defining Democrats the same way Republicans do—weak, woke, don’t care about real people—while refusing to tell the full ugly truth about who and what MAGA Republicans are.
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