Anat Shenker-Osorio’s recent guest post at Weekend Reading, “Bringing a Survey to a Gun Fight,” has gotten a lot of positive attention because it captures what’s missing in the debate over Democratic messaging: questioning the basic methodology behind how messaging decisions get made in the first place.
That methodology, which Anat dubs “Pollingism,” wrongly presumes that issue-based polling and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of messages can tell us all we need to know about what voters want to hear and how to reach them. These are helpful tools that Anat also uses in her campaign work—but they’re not a replacement for real strategy or moral clarity (which is how too many Democratic strategists use them), and they can’t tell us what will make a message spread in the real world of constant scrolling and distractions. People’s “top issue” will almost always be the economy or jobs because we need money to live, but knowing this is the case doesn’t tell us what will get people talking to their friends and family about your candidate or cause.
There’s a better approach that Anat calls “Magnetism”—being attractive by driving the conversations that most benefit your side, and having a polarity that distinguishes you from the opposition, whose fans aren’t worth trying to please because they will never vote for you. This is the strategy that Republicans already use to great effect, but most Democrats have yet to embrace it even though it has also driven some marquee wins on the left.
In this week’s “Meeting the Moment” chat, we discussed recent examples of Magnetism like Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and Portland’s response to Trump’s invasion, addressed some questions and misconceptions about Anat’s argument, and more.
