If Your Voters Can’t Vote, Your Messaging Is Irrelevant

Would you just fight, for fuck’s sake?

The only messaging Democrats can ever agree on is that they can solve all their problems if they just tweak their messaging.

Former President Barack Obama added his voice to that eternal agreement in an interview last week with Stephen Colbert.

What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar? Can you talk in plain English to folks? And not have a bunch of gobbledygook around it. Just talk like normal people talk. ‘The rent is too high.’

The problem with Obama’s advice here is not that it is wrong. It’s not that’s it’s stale. It’s not even that Democrats talk about high prices all the time in quite straightforward language.

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No, the problem with Obama’s advice is simply that messaging advice is irrelevant when you are fighting a fascist opponent whose goal is to disenfranchise voters rather than convincing them of anything.

Let me repeat that.

MESSAGING ADVICE IS IRRELEVANT WHEN YOUR OPPONENTS ARE LASER FOCUSED ON DISENFRANCHISING YOUR VOTERS.

The Republicans are currently engaged in a successful effort to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South. They are wholesale disenfranchising Black voters. The explicit goal of that disenfranchisement is to render messaging irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter what Democrats say on television or on social media if maps are drawn such that their voters have no power and cannot elect anyone to any office ever. It doesn’t matter how unpopular Donald Trump is or how often you point out he has raised costs if only white racist voters are allowed to vote for only fascist government forever and ever, hallelujah.

The issue we are currently facing is not “which message is best.” The issue we are facing is, “will we have two parties, or just the one from now on?” In that context, lambasting other Democrats for not saying precisely the right thing in the right way isn’t a helpful contribution to strategy. It’s a massive distraction, and potentially a dangerous exercise in blaming the victim.

Democrats aren’t losing seats in Tennessee and Louisiana and Texas because they talk like college professors (a group which the fascist GOP is actively scapegoating, by the way.) Democrats are losing seats in the South because Republicans are disenfranchising non-white voters as part of a plot to impose a white supremacist 1000-year reich.

We do not really need more Democratic politicians chastising each other about the best way to massage slogans and flip maybe a handful of Trump voters. What we need, as messaging is absolutely unrelenting demands that Democratic elites use their power in office to crush fascism.

For the most part, Democratic messaging with voters has been going great since 2024. That’s why Democrats are getting massive special election swings. It’s why they cleaned up in New Jersey and Virginia in 2025. What is not going so well, though, is messaging to elites, who still keep acting as if their main job is to massage messaging rather than pull all the fucking fire alarms and roll the fucking tanks into Normandy.

As an example of the problem, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, in her race for state governor, is rushing to preempt talk of state redistricting and babbling about how she’ll work across the aisle with the fucking white supremacists who are (have I mentioned this?) CURRENTLY LITERALLY REINSTITUTING JIM CROW. Rather than fighting for existential Black rights, or even the existential rights of the Democratic party, Klobuchar natters on about how it would be wrong for her to do anything ever to try to ensure that Republicans don’t simply end our fucking democracy in front of her. This in a state where federal gestapo is (again literally) shooting people in the street.

We don’t have a communicating-with-voters problem. We have a fascism problem. And part of that fascism problem is elites who don’t want to admit we have a fascist problem, because they find fascism either congenial or inconvenient.

If commentators, analysts, pundits, and former presidents want to help Democrats win, ever again, they would do well to spend less time chastising the party for its messaging failures, and a lot more demanding it respond to fascism with some measure of urgency and resolve. Gerrymander the fuck out of every state you can. Put 50 judges on the Supreme Court. Hold tribunals. Toss traitors who supported the insurrection out of the House and Senate on day one. If one path is blocked, find another. And everyone start demanding all of this right now, while it might matter.

Bashing Democrats for being elitists seems reasonable and nonpartisan. Reaching across the aisle seems reasonable and nonpartisan. We don’t need reasonable and nonpartisan now. We need unreasonable partisan demands rammed through however we can.

The alternative is Trumpism now, Trumpism tomorrow, and Trumpism for decades, if not forever. I don’t know if that message will move voters. But if it doesn’t move elected officials, it’s not going to matter what voters think, because, in Jim Crow America, they will not be voters any more.