Democratic strategists think the party has a messaging problem. Post-election autopsies overflowed with countless cross-tabs of how Democrats “underperformed” with demographic after demographic. There are endless debates about which words poll better (should Democrats stop using “microaggression”?) — as if anybody were even listening.
Third Way’s “Signal Project” exemplifies this paralysis. The center-left think tank launched an 18-month project to identify which Trump actions are “most relevant to key voters.” Their profound discovery? “Shuttering USAID, using government power to attack political opponents, firing indiscriminately, degrading the civil service, releasing J6ers, or blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion all are a combination of unwise, unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional,” according to Axios. “But none resonate much with key voters.” Who knew?
Should we say “working families” or “working people”? Frame ourselves as “Team Normal” versus “Team Extreme”? Who notices? House Democrats test “America is too expensive” versus “People Over Politics.” Say “poor,” or say “economically disadvantaged”? “Addiction” or “substance use disorder”? Who cares?
Yet, leading Democrats seem to think that if only they spend another $50 million to identify the right message for lost working-class voters, they can “win them back” (tellingly, the “them” in the “Win Them Back Fund” gives away the flawed premise of the project).
Certainly, polling and focus-group testing have their place. Polling, when done well, offers a snapshot of public opinion to see what is resonating (though even polling results are highly sensitive to question wording). Focus groups, when done well, can better capture the complex and often contradictory ways in which citizens think through politics, and can pick up on concerns that poll writers might miss or struggle to distill into simple questions (though moderators can very easily direct the results, often without realizing it).
But both are reactive to current news, almost by definition. They can never shape the dominant conflict. Only political leaders taking decisive actions can do that.
The Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a much bigger problem: They have accepted a losing political battle they never chose without even realizing it.
Messaging is how you talk about the fight once the battle has been chosen. It’s the tactics, slogans, and talking points deployed within an accepted frame. The conflict defines the possible frames. The frames — the greater story — shape the specific messages.
Democrats have a framing problem — once you’ve accepted a losing political gambit, it’s hard to regain your position with language alone, no matter how many focus groups and polls you commission. The lines are not always clear, but if politics were a pop song, think of conflict as the mood, instrumentation, and beat; frame as the melody, chords, and bubble-gum lyrics; and messaging as the vocal flourishes.
As the opposition party in Congress, Democrats’ ability to shift the conflict in Washington is depressingly limited. But America is a big country, with many Democratic governors and even more Democratic mayors. Consider the gerrymandering wars. Democratic governors have responded to Texas’s new gerrymander by promising to redraw their own lines, thus accepting the brutal reality. But why not use this focusing moment to instead call for proportional representation as an end to single-member districts that enable gerrymandering altogether and an end to the two-party system that single-member districts create, thus reshaping the conflict entirely?
A theory of conflict
Consider this: What was Kamala Harris’s 2024 slogan?
Most people can’t even remember, because the campaign never settled on one. The closest thing — “We’re Not Going Back” — defined the party in purely defensive terms. Campaign slogans may be silly. But they are the one opportunity to distill a campaign and define a conflict. And all successful political movements understand, whether by design or accident, that the side that defines what the dominant fight is about usually wins.
Take the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill: After some message testing, Democrats settled on calling it “One Big, Ugly Bill.” (How much did that message-testing cost?) Democrats tried to emphasize the cuts to Medicaid, which were generally unpopular, as were most pieces of the bill. But this is hard to message: In many states, Medicaid operates under a different name, and its funding flows through different programs, so it’s hard to see it as a direct benefit. Plus, these cuts will go into effect after the 2026 midterm elections.
By contrast, Vice President JD Vance telegraphed Republicans’ strategy clearly on X: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Come the midterms, which conflict — Medicaid policy or border security — will resonate more? Which conflict has been more central to American politics for a decade? If you are not sure, you may not understand how conflict works in politics; the more emotional, high-intensity conflict dominates.
Conflict defines politics. And if you don’t have a theory of conflict, it doesn’t matter what your theory of messaging or mobilization or issue-speak looks like.
So what does a theory of conflict look like? The best guide remains E.E. Schattschneider’s 1960 classic The Semi-Sovereign People. He writes:
What happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position.
His insights are deceptively simple: Conflict organizes politics because conflict is interesting, and the most important political battle is always the battle over which battle matters most. Coalitions and majorities follow from the battle lines.
“The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power,” Schattschneider argues. “He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts.”
Another example is President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump has framed tariffs as a recipe for American greatness and strength. Trump defines the conflict as between those who see the long-term benefit of an American manufacturing renaissance (a promise about the future), against those who might complain about having to pay a little more.
By focusing on prices, Democrats are accepting this frame, and thus, the conflict about American greatness. They are ignoring that the larger story is about the status and might of America. Even calling it a “tax” accepts this premise. People may grumble about taxes, but they can be willing to pay higher taxes if they think they are getting something in return.
So why not name the tax more directly to make its unpopularity stick a little more? ? Naming things gives them a specificity that makes them more memorable.
Could Democrats define the conflict around tariffs not as a generic tax, but as an “isolation tax” — a premium we are paying to isolate ourselves from the world? This substitutes a different conflict: whether America wants to cut itself off from the world. Or: a “nostalgia tax” — a premium we are paying to recreate the past. This substitutes in a new conflict — past vs. future.
Such conflicts only work, however, if they fit with a larger set of policy fights that reinforce the conflict. They can’t just be floating messages. The important thing here is to understand how conflicts define the alternatives. And most importantly how consistent actions reinforce the conflicts, even if they are stunts; as long as they are interesting stunts. Trump showing up to work at McDonald’s or dressing up as a garbage collector during the campaign was an obvious stunt. But it was interesting and memorable.
This works in mundane contexts too. When I want my kids to clean up, I don’t ask whether they want to clean or not — I ask whether they want to clean now or in five minutes. They always choose five minutes, having failed to recognize my displacement of the real conflict by my strategic definition of alternatives. They would make excellent Democratic campaign managers.
How conflict definition works
For a master class in political conflict definition, consider how Franklin D. Roosevelt framed the 1936 election. Rather than defending New Deal policies on technical merits, he redefined the entire battle as a struggle between ordinary Americans and corrupt elites. His October 31 speech at Madison Square Garden demonstrated this strategy perfectly:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
The MAGA-infused Republican Party’s frame has in many ways echoed the broad strokes of the FDR-led Democratic Party. Mitt Romney’s Republicans fought on traditional conservative terrain: “job creators vs. job takers,” with immigration as a technocratic problem requiring “self-deportation.” Trump torched this framework entirely. His conflict: Corrupt elites betrayed ordinary Americans. Immigration became invasion. Republicans transformed from the party of capital gains tax cuts and H-1B visas into the party of working-class rage against globalist elites who shipped jobs overseas.
At times, Democrats have steered the conflict. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign defined a brighter future against the failed politics of the Bush administration, particularly around the Iraq War. But Obama’s “hope and change” offensive became eight years of governing reality. By 2016, Democrats had transformed from insurgents into incumbents, with Hillary Clinton running explicitly as Obama’s third term — defender of Obamacare, guardian of norms, and seller of the narrative that America already was great.
Joe Biden doubled down on the defensive, campaigning as democracy’s bodyguard who would restore “normalcy” and “decency.” When Trump redefined politics as “the people vs. corrupt institutions,” Democrats defended those very institutions against populist insurgency. Democrats have been struggling on this battlefield ever since. They never recognized how they got trapped there. In casting themselves as the stewards of democracy in 2024, they offered only a meager defense of the unpopular status quo.
How to create a new conflict
As Schattschneider understood, “Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.” When frontal assault produces stalemate, you don’t need better tactics — you need a different battlefield.
New conflicts can emerge from identifying real contradictions that current politics can’t resolve and starting new fights. These are hard to find, and even harder to commit to, because to succeed they often require picking fights with your own side (as Trump did in 2016).
One leading contender on the Democratic side comes from the Abundance movement. The movement identified a genuine problem: America struggles to build. Housing, clean energy, transit — all blocked by regulations, lawsuits. Their solution: Make it easier to build.
Sounds nice. But where’s the conflict? It’s too polite, too technocratic. Who exactly is doing the blocking? The movement gestures vaguely at “NIMBYs” and “regulations,” but it doesn’t name names.
Real conflict transformation requires what FDR understood: You need villains. (As he famously put it: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”)
What if you take the Abundance insight, but name the enemy? Call them the Extractors. These are the people who hoard their existing wealth, be they private equity firms, the oligarchs, NIMBY homeowners, monopolists, or Trump and his cronies.
They extract your rent through housing monopolies. They extract your data through tech monopolies. They extract your repair rights through hardware monopolies. Trump extracts your wealth through tariffs (a Trump Extraction Tax) — creating artificial scarcity at the border, then selling exemptions to the highest bidder. Extraction without building.
This also inverts Romney’s old frame about “makers” and “takers.” The nurse in the understaffed private equity hospital? She’s a maker. She’s making people healthier. The firm that cut staff to extract fees? They’re the takers. The farmer growing food? A maker, producing sustenance for the country. John Deere blocking their right to repair their own tractors? Taker.
New conflicts create excitement — they bring in people who were sitting out the old fight. They create new enemies and new allies. They scramble existing coalitions. When you redefine the conflict from “liberal elites vs. the real Americans” to “builders vs. extractors,” the farmer who voted Trump because of cultural grievances might join with the young progressive who can’t afford rent along with the entrepreneur who can’t start a business and the social media content creator who finds all her data is now being used against her. All are makers and builders, oppressed by current extractors. And the extractor-in-chief, Trump, is getting rich while creating the ultimate scarcity through executive graft and tariffs.
Maybe “builders vs. extractors” isn’t the right conflict. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But the point is this: You can’t message your way out of fighting on unfavorable terrain. You need new terrain. You need a new conflict if you are losing the old one.
Schattschneider called the people “semi-sovereign” because they can only choose between conflicting alternatives, developed by the major parties. The implication: Popular sovereignty depends on leaders willing to open up new conflicts and create new choices. As he understood: “The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive. It is the competition of political organizations that provides the people with the opportunity to make a choice. Without this opportunity popular sovereignty amounts to nothing.”
The people are waiting to be sovereign. They just need somebody to give them a fight worth joining.
The post The 65-year-old theory that helps explain why the Democrats keep losing appeared first on Vox.
