Message Without Meaning
Political parties often focus on messaging.
They conduct endless polls to test which slogans will stick, which phrases will soothe, which words will win over the wavering voter.
Campaign staffers get paid well to fine-tune these messages down to the syllable. And every cycle, the theory is the same: if we can say it better, we can govern better.
But this theory is wrong. And the results are everywhere.
No matter how well a message polls, it will not solve a problem unless it is accurate about what is causing the problem in the first place.
A beautifully crafted sentence cannot fill a pothole, balance a budget, or make a prescription drug affordable. Yet, much of modern political practice treats messaging as the thing itself, rather than the wrapper around it. This is most evident in the Democratic Party today.
They aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They are struggling because they fail to solve problems.
It’s an inversion that has become almost pathological. Confronted with a crisis—whether it’s inflation, housing shortages, immigration backlogs, or public safety—many leaders first ask: How should we address this? Not: what should we do about this?
And when the doing falters, the impulse is to double down on the talking. Hire another consultant. Test another frame. Issue another round of optimistic tweets.
The public, of course, is not fooled. They can live with imperfect messaging if they sense that the work is getting done. But no amount of linguistic acrobatics will cover for a party that cannot make rent more affordable or public transit more reliable.
The irony is that the obsession with messaging often makes the messages worse. Voters detect when a politician is more concerned with saying the right thing than with doing the right thing. That gap between language and reality erodes trust, and once lost, trust is hard to regain.
This is not an argument for ignoring communication altogether. Of course, it matters how leaders explain their actions. But the actions must come first. There is no substitute for solving real problems, in fundamental ways, that improve real lives.
Until that lesson is absorbed, all the polling in the world won’t save them.