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Pod Save America is actually one undeniably successful example of Democratic progressive messaging, but itlike most avowedly progressive mediais for self-identified politics junkies. Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting are for anyone with a TV. For much of their audiences, they are simply the news. In order to give voters the positive messages Democrats want them to receive, liberals would need to create a mass media of their own and stop outsourcing the job to the frequently hostile corporate media. The Democrats messaging problem is really a media problem.

Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads, and that higher doses of party-promoting ads could influence peoples voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior, the political scientists wrote. By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.

In the world of American political communications, ads promoting a party are a novelty. The researchers concluded that both parties could benefit from producing the kinds of ads we tested, and its true that neither party currently does this with conventional TV advertising. But while these political scientists framed their experiments as part of a novel ad strategy, what they were really doing was directly exposing people to particular political messages that had been designed to influence their political affinitiesand even their identities. There is already language to describe what that kind of messaging is. These political scientists independently invented party propaganda, exposed Americans to it, and discovered that it can be effective, especially with constant exposure. Conservatives dont need to learn to do this: Its how their movement sustains itself.

Amusingly, the top-shelf political ad professionals the political scientists hired to make the ads were flummoxed by the request, because no one had ever before asked them to create messaging designed to promote the Democratic Party or to convince people to associate themselves with it. Despite how familiar American liberals are with the power of propaganda when yielded by the right, it has seemingly never occurred to the most powerful of them to do any propagandizing on behalf of their own causes and party!

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Why Liberals Ought to Invest in Propaganda - The New Republic