Paul Bass Photos
New Haven convention power couple Rosa DeLauro and Stanley Greenberg at Tuesday's strategy confab.
Chicago — The media’s not fooling voters into worrying about the economy. They’re generally worried. Democratic elites need to recognize that fact to win national elections.
Stanley Greenberg, the New Haven campaign guru who helped Bill Clinton (and then Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela) win national elections, offered that take during a Democratic National Convention week panel focused on strategies for winning not just the 2024 presidential election, but future ones as well.
The panel discussion — entitled “Innovating for the Public Good: R&D for Democracy” — took place Tuesday morning in a third-floor conference room of the Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel. An organization focused on building strategies for preserving and strengthening democracy — called Innovating for The Public Good — organized the event, which drew 50 people, including party strategists, pollsters, and elected officials.
It featured researchers and consultants who have spent decades trying to figure out how to elect Democrats.
One of them, Joe Trippi of the Lincoln Project (who helped engineer the social-media savvy 2004 Howard Dean campaign for the presidential nomination), argued that Republicans own the media outlets like Fox News and Twitter that have convinced people that the state of the economy is a problem despite numerous indicators of economic strength under the Biden administration.
“I love Joe Trippi, but I do not believe that the reason why people believe the economy is doing poorly is because they’re getting that result from the media,” Stanley Greenberg told the gathering.
“We live in metropolitan areas where the growth takes place. We don’t see what’s happening to real people.”
His latest polling shows that the economy tops voters’ concerns this year by more than 30 percent over any other topic.
He urged Democrats to tackle voters’ economics’ “kitchen-table” economic concerns head on rather than arguing against them, emphasizing holding corporations accountable and taking government action to help the middle class. He said Kamala Harris has been succeeding in building support across voting groups in her nascent presidential campaign.
He also noted that President Joe Biden focused on a different “identity politics” message in his Monday night convention speech extolling his record in office. Greenberg noted that focus as a contrast to Harris’s — and in Greenberg’s view the more promising — strategy.
Greenberg echoed other speakers in urging Democrats also to speak the language of moderate voters who might agree with the party’s economic platform (as well as its stance on issues like abortion) but not relate to how liberal elites sometimes discuss the issues.
Greenberg was reprising a message he delivered for then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign. Based on focus groups he did with Reagan Democrats in Macomb County, Michigan, he urged Clinton to focus on concerns about people who feel the system fails to reward people who “work hard and play by the rules.” He went on to advise the successful campaigns of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and South African President Nelson Mandela.
The conference began with welcoming remarks from U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who was hailed as a champion of efforts to protect democracy and legislating for the “public good” against attacks from Republicans. (She was also hailed as a Congressional “fashion icon.”)
DeLauro — who is married to Greenberg — traced positions taken by 2024 national Republicans and the positions in the GOP-supporting Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” report, such as abolishing the Department of Education, replacing civil service government positions, shrinking government support for the needy, to Newt Gingrich’s 1990s-era “Contract for America.” She described the party as “hell bent on destroying the social safety net and making government illegitimate.”
DeLauro, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, chaired the powerful committee when her party last controlled the chamber.
“I’m hoping to get the gavel back next year,“ she declared to cheers.
After the conference, Trippi spoke more broadly with the Independent about his current longer-term project to counter the rise of the political right: Building a “decentralized social network” with an algorithm that promotes civil discourse and debate. (It’s scheduled to launch on Labor Day.) The 2004 Dean campaign broke new ground in mastering social media; the Obama campaign took it to the next level in 2008. Donald Trump mastered Twitter as a means of direct communication with voters, Trippi noted. He said he believes Harris might be riding a new wave of grassroots “meme”-based support-building. “The memes are catching up with people that are no longer watching television” or following other traditional media outlets. Click on the video to watch him make his case.
Previous NHI DNC coverage:
• City Teen Casts Youngest Vote For Harris
• Klobuchar Dishes Deep With CT Dems
• DNsCenes (Night 1)
• DNC Live Blog, Night 1: Biden’s Last Hurrah
• Tong’s DNC Diary Day 1: “There’s A Pit In My Stomach”
• Delegate Dunleavy: There’s Work To Do In Chicago
• Tong’s DNC Diary Day 2: Kaboom!