In This Edition:
- Announcing three new online trainings!
- Democrats Should Be Flooding Social Media after Last Night’s Speech
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Three New Trainings (and One Tomorrow)
Howdy folks, I have three new trainings coming up! Plus, my Online Fundraising 101 session takes place tomorrow (Thursday) at 3 Eastern! Don’t miss the fundraising training or these three just announced:
- Ethical & Effective List-Building for Politics & Advocacy (3/13)
- Digital Advertising in Politics, Part I: Nonprofits, Advocates & Activists (3/26)
- Digital Advertising in Politics, Part II: Political Campaigns (4/3)
Drop me a line at cpd@epolitics.com with any questions. These sessions will all be recorded, and I’ll send a link to the YouTube video after the fact to folks who register. Please spread the word!
Democrats Should Be Flooding Social Media with Clips about Last Night’s Speech
Democrats, it’s time to crank the rapid-response machine into high gear. Donald Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress last night was packed full of blatant lies both domestic and foreign, which means it provided plenty of fodder for right-wing social media accounts. Democrats can’t leave them in possession of the field — we need to flood the communications zone with video and other content of our own.
Michael Steele made the point late yesterday evening in MSNBC’s after-speech coverage that Democrats should have already been cutting ads featuring clips from Trump’s attack on social media, and I agree. We should be pulling damning segments out of the speech, and we should also be highlighting Democratic reactions including the official (and excellent) response from Sen. Elissa Slotkin as well as those from Bernie Sanders, JB Pritzker and others.
Of course, we should treat this moment as the beginning of a long communications process, not as a one-off moment. If we don’t start seeing this as a nonstop campaign, we’ll have little chance of stopping the other side. And please, Democrats, don’t ask the grassroots for money too often — give them actions to take instead.
Taking lessons from Sen. Chris Murphy’s digital communications operation, Democrats should be:
- Producing short video clips for social media, featuring Trump or his Democratic opponents, refuting his lies, showing the stories of people affected by his policies, and reframing the argument on Democratic/Constitutional terms
- Creating memes and photo-posts that make similar points in a way that’s accessible at a glance — and were possible, also funny
- Distributing all this content via social media including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Bluesky, TikTok and YouTube
- Getting them into the hands of influencers who are sympathetic to our cause or skeptical of Trump’s
- Amplifying them through the social media accounts of Democratic organizations and office-holders
- Blasting them out to grassroots Democratic supporters and asking them to respond, post or share
- Feeding them to journalists and commentators to use as they assemble their own stories
- Lining up interviews and discussions on podcasts and live-streams with popular hosts or ones influential with a important voter niches
- Creating digital ads, streaming TV ads and targeted cable and broadcast ads and getting these messages in front of swing-district voters, if not a broader swath of the public
None of these tactics is revolutionary! They just take a lot of work and a dedication to meeting voters where they actually get their information these days, not where we wish they would get it. If we don’t talk with people where they are, we’ll cede today’s media environment to the nastiest voices on the right. Which we and the people who depend on little things like Social Security will definitely come to regret.
– cpd
This post was also published on Substack