I watched the CPAC speech from conservative donor and philanthropist Foster Friess. Friess said we have to learn from the left:
They speak to the heart and the emotion. We have a tendency to speak to the brain and the intellect.
I don’t think that is the problem. I think that conservatives do pretty well among people whose worldview was shaped by the 1970s and 1980s. If you associate the Democrats with the Iran hostage crisis and the Republicans with Grenada and the fall of the Soviet Union, then the Republicans have a narrative for you. I think that goes a long way toward explaining the limited public fallout from the Benghazi affair. If it had happened twenty years ago it would have played into a narrative of Democratic weakness and paralysis. But if you were born or came to the country after 1980, that isn’t your experience. You see the party that screwed up the Iraq War ankle biting the president who got Bin Laden. I’m not saying this view is right, just that context matters. It has worked the other way too. The Iran-Contra scandal didn’t do the Republicans more lasting damage because the median voter doubted that the Democrats (or the kinds of Democrats who got the party’s presidential nomination) would be tougher on America’s enemies than Reagan.
The same thing is true on economic policy. Many people (not all of whom understand themselves as conservatives), have a certain memory of the late seventies and early eighties. The late seventies were a period of runaway inflation, bracket creep forcing middle-class tax papers into paying higher tax rates, and high gas prices. The eighties were a period where tighter money, lower taxes, and deregulation of oil led to prosperity. That is exactly the story that Karl Rove and Crossroads tried to tell in the last election. Obama’s taxes and regulation were choking small business. Obama got the Federal Reserve to spark inflation through expansion of the money supply. Seems like old times. The problem is that an ever larger fraction of Americans don’t remember the old times. Most people hadn’t had their taxes directly increased by Obama. Inflation was fairly low. Unless you had the context of the late seventies and early eighties, those Crossroads ads didn’t speak to you.
The problem isn’t that we don’t speak to the heart. The problem is that we don’t speak intelligibly to any parts of the majority of younger and nonwhite voters. Republicans and Republican consultants are talking to experiences and policy priorities formed a generation ago. It is only normal that people who grew up under lower marginal tax rates and lower inflation interpret events differently. If we want people to support conservative policies and candidates, we have to talk to them in terms of the world they know.
So what combination of visuals, words, and policies would work best for Americans whose experiences are defined by the last twenty years? We don’t know. We might all have theories about what would work and what wouldn’t, but we don’t actually know. And we probably won’t figure it out just by talking to each other. What we know is that the Republican ad template form the 1980s doesn’t work anymore.
This is where conservative donors can be so helpful. We need good data on the policy priorities of younger people and different populations of nonwhites, how they respond to different policies and different explanations of those policies. We need to know about their experiences with the health care sector, with their understanding of rising premiums and the problem of the uninsured. We need to know how they respond to different explanations of what is wrong with Obamacare and how they react to the range of conservative alternative policies. We need to know how they respond to a range of conservative tax policies and how they respond to the obvious critiques of those policies.
This kind of research would be tricky for the Republican National Committee to pull off. It isn’t their job to pick among different conservative policies on taxes or health care. That would be stepping on the toes of Republican office holders. Conservative donors could fund survey research, in-depth interviews, message production, and trial and error experimentation with small groups of voters. This would produce valuable knowledge, and the sooner it begins the better. It increases the chance that donor money will be effectively spent, that the donations will inform and change minds. If we don’t improve our knowledge of public opinion and sensibilities, it will be just giving money to the same old Republican consultants to produce the same kinds of ads that worked in the 1990s.
March 16th, 2013 | 8:01 pm
[...] I don’t think that is the problem. I think that Go to the Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
March 16th, 2013 | 10:06 pm
It doesn’t help having spokeswomen like Sarah Palin who make fools of themselves, displaying their “witty” Big Gulps and accusing Washington of acting like Reality TV. (Pot, meet Kettle…)
March 16th, 2013 | 10:53 pm
1. What do Karl Rove or his Crossroads organization or the RNC have to do with conservatism? These are the old guard of the status quo club who brought us John McCain and Mitt Romney under the sham label of “electability.”
2. The primary other group organizing the kids are the Randian libertarians, who deny that anything beyond self interested”liberty” is unnecessary for a healthy society.
3. Unfortunately, Santayana’s maxim is proving true, and what is now necessary is for this generation to live in difficult times so that they will get a sense of cause and effect through their own suffering.
March 17th, 2013 | 4:02 am
The Conservatives are also losing women at an alarming rate. If I were your consultant, the first thing I would say is to lose that word “traditional.” I don’t know what you all hear, but what I hear is incompatible with being an educated, professional woman who is paid fairly for her work and supported in her career goals. If you want that vote, then the commenter above is right — stop offering us people like Sarah Palin and Calista Gingrich as ‘role models’. ELect some women, put them in senior roles (MItt had practically none in any positions on his staff). Stop promising to bring back 1950. It wasn’t so good for a lot of us then and we don’t want it back.
March 17th, 2013 | 10:13 am
There are other groups out there other than Crossroads that are working to shape narratives with key demographics.
Take this one for example http://youtu.be/yNHywGefNnQ
Here is an attempt to synthesize what Foster Friess is saying about the heart without giving up on principle.
March 17th, 2013 | 12:20 pm
Not June Cleaver – I get that people don’t like Sarah Palin. I don’t always like her either. But it makes no sense at all to complain about “traditional” in connection with Palin. She’s a high powered female political leader who chose not to stay at home. Isn’t that precisely the sort of model that you’re talking about?
I suspect for many that make this complaint about conservatives, it simply masks a general dislike of conservatism under a thinly veiled claim of sexism. Though that may not be true of you, I’ve certainly see many self-proclaimed moderate women go within two sentences from bashing the republicans for wanting to keep women in the home to bashing Palin. This doesn’t make much since.
Pete – I think you’re on to something important about the 80s. Too many of our ads – and speeches – assume a particular level of knowledge that just isn’t there in the general public.
The bigger difficulty is that I just don’t see a lot of prospects for big conservative donors that aren’t either of the Rovian or Randian type. One thing both of these groups have in common is the basic belief that things would just be better if we had a lot less government. I agree, but I also think something culturally needs to replace it. I think the sort of conservatives donors that want to make real cultural change are putting their money in different locations, which by default leaves the political ad arena to Rove and Rand.
March 17th, 2013 | 7:00 pm
Bill, my point was that Foster Friess and other priincipled conservative donors would be better off giving somewhat less money to Rove and spending that money differently.
Caleb, as usual I agree with you, but Friess strikes me a a legit social and economic conservative. My sense is that getting better data would get a lot more bang for the buck than writing checks to super-PACs that back Santorum. I think this is a case where one guy with some money could make a huge difference.
March 17th, 2013 | 7:33 pm
Pete, I don’t really know anything about Friess, but I entirely agree with your goal of getting some better data. Just as our primary system tends towards overwhelming fiscal support for one “big” republican it also tends towards overwhelming social support for either the most outspoken or best-spoken social conservative. I don’t see much point writing huge checks for that guy in any random election. Better to figure out how to target it.
March 18th, 2013 | 2:16 am
midweststatesmidweststatesmidweststates
that is all
March 18th, 2013 | 2:21 am
“These are the old guard of the status quo club who brought us John McCain and Mitt Romney under the sham label of “electability.””
Rehashing 2012 is pointless but I really can’t stand this argument. Sometimes I just wish Michele Bachmann won the nomination and lost horribly just to shut y’all up. There.were.no.other passable candidates, period. Blame Mitch Daniels, blame Chris Christie, blame God, blame whoever. but this “establishment” crap is tiresome, at least on this point.
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