Do Democrats Fail at Advertising?
I think, as a demographic we are harder to advertise too. When we advertise we advertise to ourselves and we ourselves are not who we need to advertise to.
We all have knee jerk responses, when you see an ad used over and over, it is because a large exploitable demographic is vulnerable to that approach. The problem that democrats have with advertising is simple. First we try to advertise to ourselves. We know that if a person lies over and over we will stop listening. We know that if a person says something that turns out not to be exactly right, we will stop listening.
Note that Fox News does not have that limit. But we are not their target. We can be targeted, but it takes a product that matches advertising for us to remain a customer. That makes us a less appealing customer. The Fox news customer is someone that can be lied to and will never check on the quality of their product. Until the product fails them personally, their target audience member will not question their message.
Single issue voters are low hanging fruit. Get them riled up and they will buy into all the rest. The problem is that we Democrats are not Fascists. Look it up. Fascism as a movement was and is a unification of nation and business. With that aside though, the concept was named to describe the method of uniting single issue citizens into a political union that could then do whatever they wanted. The Socialist Workers in the National Socialist German Workers' Party were never given the prizes promised to them. The word socialist was a lure and not a reality.
As long as Fox and the other right wing sources maintain the 35% that can be kept focused by fear, prejudice, anger, and hate, the Republican party only has to keep deals that please the 10% additional group who can be focused by greed and jealousy. To win however, they need to convince the swing voters. In general swing voters tend to be apathetic and biased towards the conservative side. In other words fear, anger, hate, greed and jealousy will work but it has to be related to a hot topic to get the swing voters in.
Abortion is an overlap issue that a lot of the core "sold" conservatives would drop in a moment if it was convenient to. But it catches a few more demographics and solidifies product loyalty to good number of conservatives. Conservative Religion is another overlap that solidifies support.
As far as the base Democrat goes we don't have to advertise. We just have to have a product that does not suck. Getting the base Democrat to get up and vote is where we have to advertise. If our product sucks then we stop voting.
The place where we have been advertised to with a lot of success is the pundit ads. I am pretty sure the pundit class is paid advertising. They keep telling Democratic leaders to be conservative light. Every single time the Republicans win by cheating, the pundits warn Democratic leaders to turn their backs on making this country a better place to live. Nixon committed treason to get into office and the pundits said, Democrats be more like Republicans. Reagan and his VP Bush made a deal for hostages to not be released to get into office. Pundits warned Democrats to be middle of the road. Bush the second was made president by the Supreme Court saying it would harm Bush for him not to be president. Ignoring the harm it might do for the other side, the Supreme Court that itself needs to be visited with impeachment for that issue alone, stole the presidency. Pundits said, "Be more like Republicans if you want to win."
What we need is an education system that teaches logic and civics so more folk will be able to resist the lies. Oh, yes, that is another area where persistant right wing advertising has managed to eliminate education. I remeber seeing teachers asked to leave the school district because they were foolish enough to say they didn't like GWB.
