Not infrequently, I open my email to find a fund-raising request from the Democratic Party with a subject line that reads as though it was sent by a contrite boyfriend.
“Can I explain?”
“You deserve an explanation”
“Sorry to reach out on a Sunday”
“Let me try to convince you”
“Please”
“Can I level-set with you, Michelle?”
OK, that last one sounds more like a dippy business consultant trying to wow me with vapid jargon. But my point is that, right up front, these messages telegraph insecurity, pleading, chagrin. Hardly the vibe of a confident political team fighting the good fight. My overriding impulse is not to give the party campaign cash but to offer to pay for group therapy.
The Trump years have been hard on Democrats’ psyches. Every time the party’s leaders see the president nodding off on the job or read one of his late-night Truth bombs, they must agonize anew: How the heck did we get thrown over for that guy?
But enough with the public hand-wringing and self-flagellation, especially when it comes to asking people for money. Fund-raising requests are plenty annoying even when they aren’t pitiable. The blue team needs to claw back some self-respect and reassure voters that they aren’t being asked to back a bunch of losers.
Better still, maybe it’s time to rethink these toxic and tiresome pleas altogether.
Across the political divide, Republican solicitations are their own kind of nightmare. The faux urgency and scaremongering long endemic to political fund-raising have been — surprise! — turbocharged in the Trump era. American Carnage 4Eva! Each week I receive between a dozen and a thousand over-the-top warnings from the G.O.P. and its allies that boil down to: Give us $20 right now or Barack, Hillary and A.O.C. will send their baby-eating, terrorist-coddling, devil-worshiping minions to your house to imprison your family and turn your dog into a Communist.
The hysteria often comes with a fat dollop of Trumpian imperiousness, not requesting your engagement so much as demanding it. “Verify your G.O.P. Party Affiliation immediately,” instructed a message from Kellyanne Conway. Or how about this one from Donald Trump Jr.: “Have it back to us by 11:59 p.m.,” he instructed of a voter questionnaire, which naturally included a box to check indicating how much money I’d be sending.
And, MAGA being MAGA, the risk of being cast out of the fellowship hovers over everything. I have lost count of how many times I have been informed: “MAGA Membership: Canceled.” “Termination Pending.” “Final WARNING: Complete and total termination.”
For me, these read more like promises than threats. But mostly they come across as pure bunk. Pro tip: No political organization will ever terminate your opportunity to give it money. I promise. You can be a neglectful or abusive significant other, and they will always come crawling back for more. In fact, in between scolding batches of G.O.P. messages, I’ll sometimes get a conciliatory note reassuring me that I am still a valued part of the inner circle. Assuming I send money, of course.
One point in the Republicans’ favor: Scratch away the toxic layers of fear and hysteria in their solicitations and, if you squint hard enough, you can sometimes catch a glimmer of something constructive. Many of the messages are peddling a sense of pride and belonging — primal impulses at the heart of the MAGA movement. They put heavy emphasis on the value of maintaining one’s place in the fellowship, and by extension the sadness of failing to. “Patriot, your America 250 Shirt won’t make it in time if you wait,” a note from the National Republican Senatorial Committee recently cautioned.
A core problem — maybe the core problem — with Trumpism in general is that it relies on divisiveness and hate to foster that sense of community. This only makes it more crucial for Democrats to hawk a strong, confident, appealing counteroffer. Suited to the party’s ethos, of course. The blue team can skip the “Patriot” palaver. Its voters don’t roll that way. Likewise, bullying commands are unlikely to resonate in a party not trained to follow a strongman.
But making people feel part of something larger than themselves is always a good bet. Remember the hopey-changey energy of Barack Obama’s first presidential run? For all its retrospective corniness, that campaign made people feel great about themselves and the leader they were supporting. The Democrats should be focused on making voters proud to support their team again.
I get that mass money-grubbing is a dark art. Consultants test every element of how to get people — often people who pay only sporadic attention to politics — to open a message and then open their wallets. Tone, timing, background color, everything gets analyzed. During President Obama’s 2012 run, his fund-raising gurus noticed a bump in donations at moments when the candidate stumbled (for instance, a bad debate performance), so they streamlined the donating process to facilitate what came to be known as “drunk donating.”
Fund-raising solicitations are what they are because they generally work well enough with some fraction of recipients. At least in the short term. The longer view is another story. Deluging people with fake urgency and faux intimacy risks making them feel misled, disrespected and sour about the whole political process. “It erodes trust and energy” and ultimately “burns people out,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic communications guru. “In the long term, it’s not healthy for any political party to indulge in these sorts of tactics.”
Focusing on building relationships and a sense of shared values takes more work than creating quick hits optimized to elicit drunk donations. But considering the larger public’s tragically low opinion of and trust in the Democratic Party — the entire political system, really — Democrats need to shake things up. Maybe start by promoting an emotion other than exhaustion and a more inspiring message than: You have no other options.
With political parties as with boyfriends, few people are excited to invest in an insecure loser.
