Modern politics: Abysmal marketing for even worse products

The comms efforts from both parties are seemingly directed inward — like a corporation that spends most of its ad budget pandering to its own employees.

Given the unconscionable state of modern politics, the poor marketing efforts of both major political tribes hardly seems like the biggest concern. After all, the best marketing in the world isn’t going to improve the crappy products they’re trying to sell to us…

As I wrote in The Nevada Independent recently, we’re on the precipice of a general election between the two worst candidates either party could possibly nominate — and it’s actually likely to be a pretty tight race:

Objectively speaking, Donald Trump might be the only Republican candidate capable of losing to President Joe Biden in November. The irony, however, is that President Biden might very well be the only Democrat capable of losing to former President Trump — and they’re both on track to be the nominee of their respective party. 

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In an election year when the only thing either party had to do to gain a massive advantage was put forward a relatively inoffensive, competent and popular candidate, neither is on track to do any such thing. Instead, both parties are in the process of catapulting the two least electable individuals one could imagine into the general election. 

One explanation for this phenomenon is simply that partisans on both sides are so convinced of the absurdity and unelectability of their political “others,” they seemingly don’t believe the quality of their own candidates matter all that much. And it’s easy to see why such a belief could take hold in both parties. After all, being the “lesser of two evils” has proven to be enough to win elections time and time again. 

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Yeah, we should strap in for an excruciating election year.

However, beyond the obvious insanity of our current political moment, the utter lack of interest within either party to proactively expand their base by reaching out to new audiences is an interesting phenomenon to me — if only because it dovetails nicely with my general obsession over branding, messaging and storytelling.

After all, activists, partisan pundits and even the politicians themselves are actively working to narrow their appeal rather than expand it. Consider, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene enthusiastically calling for all non-Trump voters to be “eradicated” from the Republican Party; or MSNBC’s ridiculously dismissive reaction to learning that the majority of Virginia voters have the audacity to disagree with Democrats on illegal immigration:

Sure… maybe it is a bit odd that Virginia voters would consider illegal immigration to be their number one concern — but casually expressing disdain for such a widely held opinion is a bit odd as well. Aren’t these “thought leaders,” political pundits and politicians supposed to kiss the public’s ass and pretend to understand “ordinary” voters?

While I could go on for hours about the stupidity of our current political moment, that’s not really what this newsletter is all about. Instead, it’s about communication, branding, storytelling and marketing. And in that regard, what we’re seeing in politics is a stunning disinterest in those basic components of persuasive messaging from either major partisan tribe.

Indeed, what passes for political messaging nowadays is about as far from traditional big-tent political “marketing” as one could imagine. Sure, we’ve long lived in a world awash with political tensions, partisan rhetoric and tribal virtue signaling — but today’s world seems virtually void of any genuine effort to actually persuade those voters who are not already loyal to the lunatics running either major political cult party.

It’s as if marketing, as a concept, is no longer a component of electoral politics.

To understand what exactly I’m on about, it’s helpful to understand the difference between marketing and advertising…