A major area where the GOP has been hitting us hard is messaging - sound bites, slogans, chants, and catchphrases that stick. We definitely need something that makes the goal clear and inclusive, to counter the GOP narrative and policies of punching down.
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Perhaps a ‘Unite the Left’ rally? Ok, I’m not gonna go there.
But at the risk of turning this into another copy of the other thread, I agree that the Democrats have serious messaging and audience problems. But also option problems.
Who do we rely on?
- disillusioned core Democrats, who didn’t get a say in the primaries last time and feel that the party pushed another “it’s her turn” candidate - 2 in the past 3 elections?
- disillusioned leftists, who didn’t like the last pick because she was known as a prosecutor who charged people in the War on Drugs?
- union workers, who, (although I thought Kamala and Walz did a great job of speaking to the union crowd), make up less than 10% of the workforce nowadays (let alone the population), many of whom are right-leaning? That strategy is unfortunately 50-60 years out of date. (similar to Clinton advertising on AOL to appeal to the youth voters)
- immigrants, who often come from more conservative societies who simply wouldn’t vote for a black woman to lead them, and also often favor a strong anti-immigration stance because they don’t want the people they moved here to get away from to end up moving in next door?
- sellout centrists, who don’t really want to go hard-right, but would rather fall in line rather than going left?
- with external conflicts like Israel/Palestine and Ukraine/Russia, many people feel strongly one way or the other, and don’t want to be associated with those who feel the opposite, so which do we choose?
It may be a ‘big tent party’, but if nobody wants to be in that tent, especially not all in there together with each other, then that’s not much of a party, it’s just a big empty tent.
And to come back to your point, yes, frankly our messaging mostly sucks.
Much like the Occupy Wall Street protests. Ask 10 people what they were protesting for, and you’d get 15 different answers.
But contrast that to the Market Basket protests - ask anyone there and they’d say “Bring back Artie T.!” One single clear coherent demand.
Do we need a populist who people can rally behind? Maybe. Likely. The world seems to be turning towards that. It’s always dangerous, of course. (Though Roosevelt sure did ok.)
But lacking one of those, we really do need one single clear cohesive message that people can rally behind. Diverse people from many different backgrounds. Disillusioned people. People who’ve given up. People who disagree on some other things. Make it a chant or slogan or whatever. Just some one thing they can all get behind.
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All lives matter?
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In short order, that simple message is once again going to be “it’s the economy, stupid”, because everything old is new again. 
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FDT, and his little doge too!
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I’ve not been part of this thread before the split , so sorry if someone has already covered it, but France is not a good example of how to beat back the far right at all. LePen (and before that, LePen), has steadily been growing in popularity since the 1990s, and now controls a big block of Deputies in the Assembly. And they reach the presidential round regularly now.
“Rally behind the centrists” , doesn’t work when the outcome is that they spend their term in office doing barely enough to maintain the status quo, and then inevitably put more emphasis on shutting out the Left than compromising with them in parliament. We actually need politicians who are prepared to fix the underlying issues that are causing the atmosphere in which the far right thrives, but centrists and Liberals will never consider this because the underlying reason is capitalism itself.
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This does not get nearly enough attention in regard to the Dem leadership. The effort after AOC was elected to shut out primary challengers to incumbents was incredibly misguided and (IMHO) backfired dramatically. That said, I still subscribe heavily to Beau’s bus ride analogy. If I am travelling from Pittsburgh to Seattle, and someone else is travelling to Cleveland, at least for the time we are going in the same direction, and I am willing to help get them where they need to be. If they are headed for Philly, that is a different story altogether. IMHO, this is where we need to draw a line. There are folks who take an all-or-nothing approach and that will get us all killed. It is also not how a democracy works. In the USA of 2025, we have only 2 options, one of which is less-than-perfect, and at times utterly frustrating. The other are literal fascist pigs. I know which choice I am making. While I am sufficiently privileged to likely be fine under either party, I have family and loved ones who literally are being told they have no right to exist under the fascists. If you know anything about WVians, it is that you do not fuck with our families. It’s not clear to me how this will play out at this time, but the idea of allowing fascists to maintain power is just not acceptable. In my view, we can both keep the long view that capitalism is a death cult and needs to be replaced, while seeing that fascism is a very immediate threat to our very existence. If we lose this go-around, that long term view will not matter. We will need to partner with folks who may only be headed for Squirrel Hill, but for the now, that is sufficient.
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