I don’t understand why I get frustrated when people don’t seem to understand communications when I wouldn’t have a job if everyone understood communications. Like, my entire career has been in helping people say what they want to say on often complex, challenging topics, and helping them figure out who they want to say these things to, and helping them also figure out whether the things they’re saying are landing with the people they’re trying to reach….I could go on, of course, but I hope you get the point.
If helping people get better at communicating has been the focus of my entire career, then I don’t understand why I find it frustrating when people can’t figure this shit out. It reminds me a little bit about how there are many content creators and websites who do nothing but criticize celebrity fashion, and their rationale is that celebrities can buy or borrow the nicest, most luxurious fashion and professional stylists and yet they STILL manage to look terrible and wear something fundamentally unsuited to them. The same might be true in communications – there ARE people who can afford all the help in the world when it comes to communications – dedicated teams, speechwriters, messaging/narrative/campaign specialists, etc. – and yet, they still can’t communicate. (The opposite is also true: there are people who come along and are able to communicate brilliantly with very little help and in those situations, they become your absolute favorite person to work with as a communications professional, because they get what they – and you – need to do.)
Worse yet, some people even refuse to admit that they need communications support at all – point me to any communications professional in my field, and you can find a story of how they worked directly with someone who INSISTED that their 219-slide deck, all of them unreadably dense with words and charts, could ABSOLUTELY be presented in 15 minutes or less with PLENTY of time for a lively, interactive discussion with the audience afterwards. Whilst managing a website renovation once (which always seems to bring out people’s fighting selves, and I don’t know why), I had a program lead who insisted that each and every component part of the program strategy needed its own separate landing page and sub-landing pages, which would’ve resulted in the most insane navigation/search challenges ever, and she told me outright that she would fight me “all the way to the top” to get her way, and all I could think was: why? Why do you care so much about this? Also, why is my communications experience and expertise so undervalued in comparison with how I value your program/issue area expertise?
But I think my frustration gets worse when the stakes for not communicating well are super, super high – like, the future of the country, people getting killed or harmed, and their individual rights abolished, type of high. And I can’t think of any messaging/communications breakdown with higher stakes than the unproductive squabbling that’s going on within the Democratic Party, and between the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialist Party (DSA) of America. Instead of figuring out all of the ways their interests and messaging can align, they are instead spending all of their energy pointing fingers at each other. A recent example: the postmortem analysis after Mamdani’s endorsed Congressional candidates all won their primaries has been SO unhelpful and disheartening. And me, and millions of other Americans, are gnashing our teeth yet again (I will have no teeth left by the time the midterms come around) because what we want to see is, more than anything, is a coalescing of POWER when it comes to anyone who thinks positively and hopefully about what we can do to improve our existence and thinks not at all like the MAGA/Republican party.
I already wrote a post about how Democrats were failing to grasp the communications lessons from Mamdani’s mayoral campaign – both the candidate and his campaign were remarkable for its message consistency and its digital content creation. Instead of applying those lessons – the most obvious ones being, talk to people about the concrete things they most care about, campaign with joy and hope and promise, and don’t fall into the rhetorical identity traps people keep on setting for you – Democrats keep on pointing their fingers and shouting in the wrong direction. As just one example: Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and former Senate candidate in South Carolina, issued a statement on Threads that basically said, “If you hate the Democratic party and its platform and voters, then don’t use our resources or infrastructure to campaign and win elections.” (Harrison tried to backpedal and say he was talking about people like Fetterman and Manchin and Sinema but the fact that he made this statement right after the DSA candidates won in the New York primaries is highly suss, to say the least.) Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) gently responded to Harrison and said, “I dunno, what IS the Democratic Party if not its voters – and if they’re voting for DSA candidates over Democratic candidates, doesn’t that tell us something?” (Yes – yes it does, Chris!!!)
I am not suggesting that building alliances and power is easy. It is not. Building alliances and power means doing the painstaking work of finding areas of overlap and the shared North Star, rather than letting ourselves be divided and defined by our differences. It means staying in conversations and the work of building a future together when lots of people will say stuff that you find alienating, offensive, or misguided. It is also tough to do this when the discourse around most issues – like climate, democracy, education, healthcare – can already feel so fractured and polarizing (although really, there is a lot more agreement on issues people believe are super controversial than most people know, like most people support abortion or at least the autonomy of women’s right to make their own reproductive choices). And it is also tough to forge alliances when the current Administration, with the help of some really soul-less, desperate-for-cultural-relevance billionaires, has taken ownership of our once-vaunted and protected media infrastructure and flooded our airwaves with falsehoods and ass-kissing and just plain shit.
But I know it is possible to communicate in ways that bring people together, because communicators do this work all the time – through messaging and narratives and audience engagement, we build bridges that engage disparate audiences around causes and movements. Communications is not the only thing needed to bind these groups together, and keep them engaged in forward momentum – but it’s still one of the most powerful levers to pull towards a shared goal.
Putting back on the hat of communications advisor (which, let’s face it, I never really take off, I just let frustration get the better of me sometimes), here are the main points of advice I would give to the Democratic leaders when it comes to communications:
- Build alliance publicly, hammer out differences privately. It was documented by The Atlantic that Brad Lander, who defeated incumbent Dan Goldman in the primary election for New York’s 10th Congressional District, got too far out over his skis in expecting and assuming he would get a top leadership position in Mamdani’s administration. Mamdani said hell no to the position but he ended up endorsing him for the Congressional race and expended his political power and contacts on behalf of that endorsement. As many people commented after Lander won, it was as much a strategic move on Mamdani’s part – to endorse the Congressional candidates who could win and not touch the ones who couldn’t – as it was a victory by Lander.
- Make sure your own messaging not only represents what YOU truly believe and stand for, but also doesn’t force people to immediately decide if they are with you or against you on a particular issue. Did we not learn anything from the years of learning about what inclusion really looks like and feels like? As just one example: the dialogue around Israel and Gaza has boxed candidates and voters so tightly into untenable choices. I feel this very deeply – it simply feels so wrong that I am forced to choose between supporting Israel or Gaza and be labeled as pro-genocide if the former and anti-Semitic if the latter. From both a values-based and a rhetorical stance, this is simply not a choice – and if you do try to choose one over the other, then you are going to be forced into the most unsavory positions (like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand endorsing Andrew Cuomo, a known sexual predator, over Mamdani after running Al Franken out of the Senate for inappropriate and somewhat gross photos). When Mamdani was asked about the refusal of a café to serve Dan Goldman because of his stance on Israel, he said simply, “I disagreed with many of his stances and votes on Israel, but I think [the café’s] behavior went too far.” Similarly, the dialogue on abortion changed significantly when the discourse around abortion expanded to include not just women terminating their unwanted pregnancies, but also women needing healthcare after their wanted pregnancies. Once the messaging expanded, people could get out of the “you’re killing babies” corner they had been painted into to fight for women’s right to make these decisions privately, with her healthcare professional if needed, so that a whole spectrum of reproductive decisions could be addressed.
There are lots of people other than me who are commenting on this same set of frustrations, although it gets expressed in different ways. “I wish the infighting among Democrats would stop.” “I wish the Democratic Party would stop self-sabotaging.” “I wish Democrats would fight back harder against the Trump Administration.” “I wish that we could return to an era of feeling inspired and hopeful about our future.” “I wish that we had politicians who cared more about ordinary Americans than their rich donors.” “I wish we could get corporate money out of elections.” “I can’t believe so many Americans still support Trump.”
These are all valid feelings. I feel them too. I am just saying that as a communications professional who occasionally wants to bang my head against a wall because of people who simply want to fight with me about the right communications path forward, rather than work with me on a path forward, the fighting never gets you anywhere – unless you’re fighting together.
Minna Jung Consulting 