Trying to shift further right won’t work. You can’t do “what the other party does” because they already do it and they do it better.

Find original messaging, take back the narrative. Then you get to tell the story you’re good at.

Trump does this exceptionally well. By spouting all kinds of shocking horseshit, the media doesn’t stop talking about him. This lets him dominate the narrative. You could see them panic when Kamala was nominated, because suddenly the DNC controlled the narrative for a bit, and polling showed Kamala taking the lead. That advantage evaporated as Trump seized control of the front pages again.

This doesn’t just happen in the US. Here in the Netherlands, the campaign was not initially but later on dominated by talk on migration from the PVV. Of course other parties tried to respond by talking about migration, which only helped to legitimise the PVVs talking points.

A good bit of literature has studied the problem and arrived to recommendations that overlap in parts & depart in others with this playbook.

A former parliamentarian of the Hungarian government studied its slide into illiberalism, and suggested remedies for the current, similar trend in the US. Resist in the courts & media, and build a powerful social base at the state & city level throughout the country. The latter means

the Democratic Party must reconnect with the working class to preserve liberal institutions

Doing that means

1. “creating new and strengthening existing local organizational structures, especially labor unions”. Do not focus “on issues important to the active base only” such as “media freedom or democracy”: this leads to “failures of mass mobilizations”. “[E]ngage with [ordinary people] outside elections, focusing on issues that matter to them”.
2. “[T]o push through popular reforms that elites oppose”, free “the party from elite capture” by shifting financing “from the corporate elite to small and micro-donations”.
3. “[C]ommit to left-populist economic policies”.
4. “[L]earn symbolic class politics”, “embrace the mundane and be down to earth”.

you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people

I’m seeing the playbook overlap a bit with points 1 & 4, diverge from point 2, and not treat point 3.

Another article reviews research observing a decades-long trend of class dealignment: workers abandoning the left-wing party & joining the right. As unions have weakened and Democrats abandoned them, the party has increasingly relied on & shifted appeal to urban middle class professionals & minorities. The review names 4 paths researched or discussed to reverse dealignment.

• inclusive populism: “appeal to working-class voters’ sense of resentment at economic elites and stress how elites use racial resentment to divide segments of the working class that share a common interest in economic justice”
• anti-woke social democ­racy: make “a clean break with factions of the party that embrace unpopular social and cultural messaging that alienates working-class voters”
• deliverism: “pass and implement large-scale economic reforms that benefit working Americans”
• institutionalism: reinvigorate a “labor movement capable of advancing working-class interest in politics and [re-embed] Democratic and progressive politics into the lived experiences of working-class communities”

It looks like the playbook is going with anti-woke social democ­racy & institutionalism, rejecting inclusive populism, not mentioning deliverism.

They seem to think the way to win the working class is to go more MAGA-like (anti-woke social democ­racy) instead of trying a competing strategy like inclusive populism. It also looks like they’re choosing not to break free of elite capture, which seems like a huge mistake.

The blue MAGA are here on Lemmy and I ran into couple of them. They keep shouting to the rooftops that the Democratic party did nothing wrong and berate Trump voters as stupid and ignorant. But they are tone deaf when you point out that the Democratic party is not willing to run on the platform on Medicare-for-all, build more social housing and increase federal minimum wage (and ditch Israel), which made the party unappealing and lose consistently. Basically, blue MAGA don’t want to go left, because even if they are socially progressive on issues, they benefit from wealth inequality because they themselves are affluent in spite of being socially progressive.

Edit: yep, the blue MAGA came out of the woodwork. They think Medicare for all, affordable housing, and increasing minimum wage are red fascism.