It’s kind of surprising and slightly counter-intuitive how abysmal the Democrats are at waging a PR campaign. After all, when 90+ percent of journalists are ideologically predisposed to support you, like you, believe in you, and protect you, then your PR efforts should be a slam dunk. But they’re not.
And there’s an excellent reason for that.
One of the biggest obstacles that non-liberal PR professionals encounter in the realm of public policy is media hostility. To overcome it, many PR pros try to figure out what the media will likely talk about anyway and then develop a new, clever “hook” that somehow shoehorns them into the topic’s narrative. (Think of round-number anniversaries of major news events that will generate retrospective coverage and analysis.) It’s often a successful tactic, but its key deficiency is that you’re limited to the journalists' work desk and media calendar: If they weren’t already considering a story on that topic, they’re indifferent to your new, original spin on it.
It's a deficiency that left-leaning PR pros don’t have to deal with very often because if Democrats support it, so will the media. It’s a huge systemic advantage.
Yet the Democrats have been shockingly – and embarrassingly – inept at optimizing this leverage.
Right now, the Biden campaign is working feverishly to negate the fallout from the debate disaster. They’re courting the mainstream media and working the phones with key congressional leaders and leftist donors to blunt calls for Biden to drop out. They’re stepping up Biden’s schedule, spackling him with a Trumpian orange tan, and trying to drown out the old media cycle with something new (and slightly more inspiring than Biden stuttering, stammering, yammering and gazing goggle-eyed into the Land of Make Believe).
And it’s failing – not because the media won’t cooperate with them, but because they are.
Biden’s first priority must be to placate, reassure, and solidify his base before he’s abandoned. Like most things in Biden’s life, time is NOT on his side: The longer he waits, the greater the Chinese Water Torture (drip-drip-drip) of Democrats calling for him to resign. At the current trajectory, those numbers will steadily grow, and the story will have very, very long legs – and just one additional negative moment (i.e., Biden gets sick and hospitalized; he has another high-profile brain-fart during an interview; he forgets to put on his pants; etc.) and the floodgates of left-wing opposition will simply be too great to withstand. Without an iota of hyperbole, it’s now an existential crisis for his reelection campaign.
And yet, he sought to rectify this problem… by waiting a week and going on ABC News?
If this were 1994 and not 2024, that might be a smart tactic. But today, it’s indicative of the Democrats’ larger ineptitude: They don’t understand the problem, they don’t understand their audience, and they can’t comprehend basic human psychology.
From the very beginning, Biden should’ve planned a slew of shorter, one-on-one interviews with left-leaning podcasts, pundits, and Internet shows. He should’ve spent less time arguing about what an amazingly fit guy he is and more about how he’s the only man who has beaten Trump, and he’s still the best guy to do it again. Even if he doesn’t actually believe it, he should have made it the cornerstone of his crisis communication strategy.
But he didn’t.
He didn’t reconnect with the Left’s Echo Chamber; instead, he snubbed them. He pretended like they don’t exist – that all that matters are the Mainstream Media Gatekeepers, i.e. George Stephanopoulos. And with the airtime he had, he was much more interested in defending his record as president than persuasively arguing that he’s still the best man to defeat Donald Trump in 2024.
Right now, his liberal audience really doesn’t care how mentally fit Biden is. They don’t want to be reminded of yesteryear’s policy highlights either. In fact, they’re relatively indifferent to how well he will (or will not) do as chief executive for another four years. But they want to be reassured that he can still beat Donald Trump, and Biden is refusing to give them what they want.
His messaging is off because he wants to sell his audience something different than what they want to buy.
Ironically, this is almost exclusively a Democrat problem; for Republicans, the opportunity to transform media gatekeepers into advocacy allies is nearly non-existent. (That’s why secondary, non-direct PR tactics are so necessary.) But for the Left, the crisis is still growing because the media gave Biden exactly what he wanted while not understanding it’s not what their audience wants.
The two are not the same.
Joe Biden is selling that he’s done such a wonderful job as president that he must be allowed to continue. But the Left doesn’t really care what he did; they just care that he’s not Donald Trump. But Biden’s ego won’t let him accept this reality.
Socialism is a very attractive, highly seductive ideology, sans one minor little hiccup: It’s wholly contrary to human nature. On paper, socialism has theoretical appeal, especially to academics; in practice, any economic system that’s diametrically different from fundamental human psychology can’t pragmatically function. But from economics to politics to PR, this is how the Left views the world.
When your entire worldview is at odds with human nature, it’s almost impossible to build a PR campaign that bridges the gaps between where you are now and where you need to be. PR only works when you meet your audience where they actually exist – as opposed to meeting them where you wish they were. You can’t sway public opinion if your vantage point isn’t rooted in reality. Instead, you’re just marketing to yourself.
It’s why the mainstream media is still hemorrhaging viewers – and why Biden will continue to hemorrhage voters.
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