Democrats' messaging failure on inflation
Inflation was the perfect topic for Republicans to run on; it's a gift from the universe to the opposition party, especially when it occurs world-wide. There is little to nothing the party in power can do to eliminate it once it ramps up because A) Congress is responsible for fiscal policy and rarely gets contentious things done quickly, and B) even if Congress broke records in getting legislation passed, it still takes time to go into effect and impact the economy. When inflation is world-wide, the situation is even worse: any effective measures to reduce inflation would strengthen the dollar (since other currencies are weakening with their own inflation) and negatively impact American exports.
Fighting inflation when it is world-wide as now is a political loser. Ignoring inflation -- a forefront, daily issue for many voters -- is also a political loser. When this situation occurs, Democrats need to respond with measures to support Americans most negatively impacted and simple explanations that cutting inflation will mean fewer jobs, and that's not the answer our country needs.
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to point to corporate profiteering. There is evidence that large corporations used the inflationary environment to increase prices, which increased inflation further while enriching management and shareholders. I think the indispensable Katie Porter and her whiteboard pointed this out. On the other hand, she had a very close election, so I'm not sure how effective this message was. The problem I have with the whole messaging frame is that it seems to ignore significant variables and make invalid assumptions. It seems like the idea is that there is a proper power utterance that will persuade people to vote for Democrats, and it's only a matter of being clever enough at word smithing to find that power utterance and utter it. But in reality it's questionable that there is an audience for the utterance, at least in the sense of a persuadable audience. It's also questionable that Democrats have the means of purveyance. Of course Democrats can purchase ads and promulgate them, but there's nothing like the incessant hammering throughout all hours of the day, across all segments continuously, that Fox News and Hate Radio and the rest of the right wing propaganda apparatus are able to provide. The left has no equivalent apparatus. Moreover, even the non-right-wing media is hostile to Democratic ideas (for example, during the austerity years, the beltway view of Obama budgets was that they were inflationary, and mainstream centrist pundits were demanding balanced budgets). So the information dissemination infrastructure has been generally hostile to Democratic ideas, especially economic ideas (less so, I think, for ideas concerning social justice). And most of the voters who aren't already Democrats are unpersuadable (they pretend to themselves and others to be open minded but aren't). In this context I doubt that it's at all possible to craft a magic message that can somehow break through and convince a lot of people to vote for Democrats. At the same time there's a further assumption, that Democrats are a homogeneous group that can come up with an agreed-upon message. Democrats are a diverse outfit and they will predictably put out a variety of messages on any given issue. So, sure, maybe there's wrong ways to message ("Vote for X, he doesn't suck as much as Y"
, but I suspect it's harder to find a single correct power message that will make a lot of difference. The dream of finding the right message probably just keeps a lot of consultants in business.
ETA -
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@MikeOkuda
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Which party represents fiscal responsibility? The Democrats. Which party represents reckless, irresponsible spending (and tax cuts for the very, very rich)? Republicans. Numbers don't lie. Vote accordingly.
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9:35 AM · Nov 8, 2022
that the current economic situation is "permanent" and "unchanging", when instead, structural changes have actually been made outside of the Federal Reserve, that will actually start solving the problem at the foundation.
The talking point of "inflation" that when you look at the fundamentals of everything else going on around it, and trying to nonsensically distill this down to some kind of simplistic "messaging", is idiotic. What you just posted is essentially a regurgitation of RW talking points.
I have posted this over and over on DU (I suppose you haven't seen it) -
Shows the daily level of the federal funds rate back to 1954. The fed funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions (banks and credit unions) lend reserve balances to other depository institutions overnight, on an uncollateralized basis. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets eight times a year to determine the federal funds target rate. The current federal funds rate as of July 27, 2022 is 1.58%.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart
This is NOT your 1970s/1980s economic environment. After years of near 0% interest rates after the 2007/2008 stock market crash, the rates were back on the rise in 2018 and into 2019 just ahead of the pandemic (as seen in the above graph) and BOOM. Back down again.
"0%" is NOT NORMAL.
The UE is the lowest in decades -
and the number of jobs created is historic and has beat out previous Presidents -
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@BillPascrell
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Democrats build economies, republicans wreck them.
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8:47 AM · Nov 12, 2022
The value of the dollar doesn't fit "The Narrative®" either as our currency has rapidly become a safe haven as a global currency as compared to others -
and establishes how much the pandemic (and how the world responded to it) has everything upside down.
were fully prepped to slam Democrats for "messaging failure." 
