For Democrats, Maybe it’s Not the Economy, Stupid. You Idiot. You Worm.
New round of Democratic handwringing about economic messaging just dropped. But what if I told you the best way to improve voters’ opinions about your job on the economy wasn’t by talking about the economy at all?
Lots of people seem to think Trump got so much credit for the economy from voters during his presidency because he was constantly bragging about it. In reality, the connection between messaging and perception may not be as direct as you would assume.
Think back to November of 2016. As of the beginning of the month, just 16% of Republican voters in Gallup’s tracking poll thought the economy was heading in the right direction. A mere week later, that figure shot up to 49%.
No, America did not win the lottery or inherit money from a long-lost uncle that week. But that was right when Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election. He hadn’t even taken office yet, let alone started bragging about what he’d done in office. Yet there he was, already getting credit.
Uncovering what’s going on with examples like this reveals a key lesson for the Democrats who are constantly worried about how to talk about the economy, from James Carville to Bernie Sanders to Nancy Pelosi to that latest example from just last week.
This is really counterintuitive, so let me just say it again before we get into the details: Democrats don’t actually need a better economic message in order to make people think they’re good on the economy. They might just need to get comfortable with exerting some dominance. And I have evidence to back it up.
The clever reader will have figured out by now that those 2016 Republican voters actually only improved their assessment of the economy because their guy won. But this goes deeper than partisanship or Joe Biden would be getting more credit on the economy already. The real secret is how you build affinity.
Trump had built a massive reservoir of credibility and affinity with his supporters by November of 2016. Notwithstanding his ill-deserved reputation as a savvy businessman, it’s no exaggeration to say Trump bullied and dominated his way to forging that connection.
“Little Marco” Rubio. Ted Cruz’s ugly wife. Running circles around Jeb Bush before he could even respond. The hits in the runup to Trump’s victory seemed superficial at times, but the more they discombobulated his opponents, the more they conveyed a critical subtext: he was the dominator.
And those hits were funny. We all want to think we choose which politicians to vote for based on their policy and issue positions. But we’re mostly wrong, just like how we all think advertising only works on other people. It’s not cool to admit it, but entertainment value counts, especially with less engaged voters. In my years of studying undecided voters , I’ve come to see that they often actively resist absorbing political information. But entertainment is something a political information resister will still tune into.
It’s more than the transactional value of a laugh, though. No one wants to get mocked or dominated, so when they see someone successfully mocking or dominating, they’re likely to choose that person’s side, even if only subconsciously. It’s a version of the bandwagon effect that was the original non-policy driver of affiliation in US politics. People want to be on the winning team.
Democrats don’t want to adopt Trump’s hyper-aggression, lying, or other hallmarks of authoritarianism, nor should they. Even if they did want to, it would seem as phony as John Kerry going hunting and riding a Harley coming from them. But I would argue that John Fetterman’s mockery of Mehmet Oz was a key component of his victory in Pennsylvania last year. There are ways to make it work for Dems.
Reports that Trump’s growing fandom in 2015–2016 was made up of voters driven by “economic anxiety” became a running joke because of the way that frame papered over his constant racism. But it ultimately wasn’t just White voters gravitating to Trump. By 2020, his vote share had grown dramatically with Hispanic and Black voters as well.
Although rosier views of the economy correlated to some degree with support for Trump among these voters of color, it’s not necessarily the case that those policy views drove Trump support rather than the other way around. That is, it’s possible and even likely that preexisting support for Trump among those audiences drove up his issue and policy ratings. Indeed, the numbers below are almost certainly inflated by a lot of post-facto rationalization. Much like how I recently had to buy myself a PlayStation 5 so I could get my kids playing spelling games, and not at all because I wanted it anyway and had to find a justification to tell my wife.
Men especially seem to respond to the combination of confidence, aggression, and domination that Trump represents, no matter their ethnicity. In psychology, it’s called social dominance orientation, and outside of Fetterman’s relentless mocking of Mehmet Oz last year, Democrats usually do almost nothing to appeal to people who exhibit this personality trait.
Social dominance can mean mocking, but it can mean a lot of other things, too.
If Democrats had wanted to keep non-college voters from defecting to Republicans between 2008 and 2016, they could hardly have done worse than failing to put anybody of consequence in jail for lying the nation into the Iraq War or wrecking the world economy.
And so far, the party has largely repeated the same mistakes in the post-presidential portion of the Trump Era. Democrats cut short a promising impeachment trial over the January 6 insurrection so they could make it home for Valentine’s Day, then went out of their way to try to get the perpetrators of the crime to join the House committee investigating it.
Heck, when you think about it, you probably won’t even be able to pull up many examples of a Democrat naming a villain of any kind in their stories or talking about punishing anyone for anything. They may propose things that amount to punishment or they may denigrate broad unnamed swaths of people (e.g. billionaires), but they don’t quite name names, and the punishment/dominance language isn’t there.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the Biden Administration couldn’t manage to indict Trump for crimes we all saw take place on live TV until it appointed a special prosecutor who didn’t take orders from them. This timidity has not worked out well for the party’s political brand, to put it mildly.
If showing dominance is so powerful, somebody should test it. Oh, hey, I tested it!
I came up with two versions of a message about the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s signature legislative accomplishment on the economy. One ran down the material benefits: investments in renewable energy, strengthening supply chains, etc. The other showcased a more punitive message, talking about how the law had dominated corporations and lobbyists. Then I ran the videos through the Swayable rapid testing tool to compare results.
If Democrats think the voters who have moved away from them in the Trump Era need to hear about the economy in order to move back, they might want to think again. Look at these results with key groups:
- Rural voters moved 5.3 points toward Democrats on the generic ballot when they saw the punitive message
- White voters moved 3.3 points
- Non-college voters moved 3.2 points
- Voters with incomes under $80,000/yr moved 3.1 points
- Moderates moved 2.8 points
- None of these groups moved in a statistically significant way when they saw the material benefits video
Further testing is clearly warranted to better understand what’s happening here. But I will say from my years of professional message testing that it’s unusual to see a message on a popular economic policy exhibit this magnitude of movement on these key audiences. Imagine how the electoral college map would change if rural voters moved 5 points in Democrats’ direction.
We can stop pretending that Republicans get high marks on the economy because their issue policies are more appealing. Huge chunks of their own voters don’t even know what the Party stands for on economic issues.
Indeed, the paper trail of support for the proposition that people simply adopt the positions of their preferred candidates, rather than picking candidates who align with their preexisting issue preferences, is getting very long at this point.
Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she’s fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.
“We need someone who is just going to look at what’s best for us,” she says.
I mention that Trump’s plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt’s idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn’t like that idea then.
Why not?
“I didn’t like him,” she says.
Trump, though, she likes. And so do a lot of people.
What these voters do know is that Trump went out and dominated people. He gave them something not just to vote for, but something to root for. And on a deep psychological level, that social dominance orientation is what many of them crave in leadership.
For Democrats to get the economic approval that they crave, they need to meet voters where they are. They need to stop dwelling on policy once in a while and show they can throw a punch. The specific way they approach it can be more Fetterman than Trump.
But if they don’t do something different, well, when it comes to voter perceptions of the economy, Democrats will just keep getting dominated.
