Democrats Can No Longer Tell the Difference between the Press and the Voters

I’m starting to suspect that Democrats have finally and irrevocably lost the capacity to tell the difference between what the political press will print and what the voters will actually believe. Sure, it’s important and useful to be able to “win the news cycle” or get your version of a story to trend on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean ordinary voters will believe it. They’re just skipping the essential final step, like Soviet commissars who are happy to meet their production quotas by mass-producing left shoes without regard to whether people buying shoes want one for both feet.

This mental error yields an approach in which the most important things are to (1) produce a party line that says what you want, (2) convince everybody inside the party to stick with it, (3) sell it to sympathetic reporters to run with it, and (4) bully the rest of the political press into going along. The problem is that none of this actually matters if the voters won’t walk around wearing only the left shoe.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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I’m starting to suspect that Democrats have finally and irrevocably lost the capacity to tell the difference between what the political press will print and what the voters will actually believe. Sure, it’s important and useful to be able to “win the news cycle” or get your version of a story to trend on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean ordinary voters will believe it. They’re just skipping the essential final step, like Soviet commissars who are happy to meet their production quotas by mass-producing left shoes without regard to whether people buying shoes want one for both feet.

This mental error yields an approach in which the most important things are to (1) produce a party line that says what you want, (2) convince everybody inside the party to stick with it, (3) sell it to sympathetic reporters to run with it, and (4) bully the rest of the political press into going along. The problem is that none of this actually matters if the voters won’t walk around wearing only the left shoe.