Useful Education Ideas

Through years of message discipline Republicans have successfully branded their party, in that liberals, conservatives, and swing voters alike can all recite the core Republican cannon of low taxes, small government, family values, and strength on national security. Unfortunately, however, voters cannot do the same for Democrats or progressives.

The Democratic Party is undefined in the minds of many voters who claim that they still don’t know what Democrats stand for. Equally problematic is the success at which Republicans have infused key catch phrases into the public lexicon such as “tax and spend,” “moral values,” and “war on terror.” This branding and language gives even weak Republicans a core narrative about themselves and their philosophy that is easy for them to espouse and for voters to internalize. These disparities have consistently left Democrats and progressives more generally at a disadvantage in campaigns and in debates over key issues.

The Voices for Progress (VFP) project is a collaborative research project between Westen Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, funded by American Family Voices, to overcome this disadvantage. Its mission is to assist progressives by developing language and narratives that connect with voters on a personal, emotional level in the short-term, as well as help the progressive movement brand themselves effectively in the long-term.

The goal of the VFP is to develop and test principled stands on issues—emotionally compelling values statements and narratives about where we stand—so that progressive leaders, elected officials, and others do not need to practice the politics of avoidance (trying to change the subject instead of addressing issues head-on), resort to off-putting or euphemistic language, offer defensive hedges without clear underlying principles (particularly on wedge issues, e.g., “I believe we should register new handguns but not old ones”), or adopt “conservative-lite” positions designed to avoid offending certain constituent groups perceived to be opposed to a progressive position. Embedded in these narratives should be readily remembered phrases or
sentences that evoke the broader principles underlying them.

The goal of this project is not to develop “talking points.” Progressives are by definition free thinking, and their values range from center-to-left progressive. Rather, the goal is to develop a menu of well-tested principled stands, from center to left, which progressive organizations and individuals advancing progressive causes can use if they find them helpful and consistent with their own values and goals, so that they are not constantly reinventing the wheel or speaking to the public in ways that do not resonate emotionally. The evidence is clear that the language on the left needs an “extreme makeover” so that we stop recycling the tired, poor, and huddled phrases of the left (e.g., “the environment,” “reproductive health,” “I’ll fight for people”) that lost their appeal decades ago and have little appeal in the political center.