Losing By Default

Great article by Sabrina Schaeffer in Forbes.  The most important lines are:

A central tenet of political behavior research is that public opinion can be massively influenced by elite discourse, especially if elite opinion is all coming from one side . . . huge shift in opinion, across the political spectrum, can occur if the flow of political communications becomes one-sided. 

There is more good stuff, but that gets to a big part of our current political dynamics. A large (and disproportionately young) fraction of our population hears political communication that is overwhelmingly one-sided.  The vast amount of political communication from the right-leaning populist media is lost on them.  That isn’t what they are seeing and hearing (and it isn’t designed to reach them anyway). Better candidates giving better speeches would be . . . better but for many people who would otherwise be persuaded, those better speeches would go unheard and those candidates would be invisible until they could be caricatured. 

Thirty-second ads are too short to build a real connection on either a personal or intellectual level.  Reaching them with a well crafted message that goes on for several minutes and makes an argument relevant to their lives would be a start, but it would also take an investment, and who will do the investing?  There is a shortage of enforceable trust on the center-right when it comes to the effective spending of campaign money.