When an Action Alert Is Not Enough
Adapting to the new media consumption ecosystem
While the Senate was debating the GOP megabill, I texted a colleague, “want to play a fun game? Go to foxnews.com and see how far you have to scroll to find anything about OBBB.” Spoiler alert: it was buried way, way down. (The top story at the time was about the man who murdered four Idaho college students in 2022 pleading guilty.)
There are plenty of analyses to be done about how this destructive legislation came to be law, but I want to focus on one lesson that’s already abundantly clear: we need to talk about how to communicate around public policy in a mid-2020s ecosystem — and beyond.1 Consider not only how few voters had even heard much about the bill a week before its passage, but how few knew what was actually in it:
As I wrote on LinkedIn:
the only provisions that more than 60% of voters have seen, read or heard about 'some' or 'a lot' are relatively minor ones around taxes on tips and overtime pay. Barely half are aware of Medicaid impacts (and of those, there is more support than opposition for "work requirements," telling you who has won that messaging battle so far), and only a minority know about the SNAP food impacts. While this is only one poll, it's concordant with others I've seen.
(For comparison: while deep knowledge about the Affordable Care Act wasn't outstanding leading up to its March 2010 passage, polling done in January 2010 found that strong majorities of voters knew the main points: 72% were aware it contained subsidy assistance for individuals to acquire health insurance, 68% knew it increased income taxes on the wealthy, ~63% knew about the basic benefits guarantees and Medicaid expansion option, etc.)
(Here’s the ACA polling, if you’re curious)
To be clear, I don’t think this is in any way, shape or form a failure of effort. Practically every advocacy group in America was jumping up and down about OBBB for months, making social media posts, writing op-eds, sending out action alerts to their networks, and so on; the bill was widely covered in traditional print, radio, and TV media outlets. Yet still, the messages hardly penetrated the public consciousness. Why? I think there are two main reasons: first, public policy communications hasn’t yet adapted to today’s fractured media consumption environment; second, groups were fighting on so many fronts that no clear message emerged.
An Attention Economy
Chris Hayes, the former MSNBC host and author of The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, once told Ezra Klein that “we’re reaching a crescendo where attention is now this market commodity that’s extracted and sold.” With so many media options accessible 24/7 in our pockets, it’s increasingly difficult to get people’s attention, and no one medium dominates. Consider this Pew data from last summer:
Speaking from experience, my immediate temptation when something comes up that I want to spread an opinion about is to write an op-ed (or a Substack!). This can still be useful, particularly if the desired audience is policymakers and highly engaged insiders, two groups that do commonly consume traditional media. It’s way less useful if trying to change cultural attitudes or activate a whole bunch of people who live in swingy districts represented by Republicans to call their representatives. A single viral Instagram post will reach orders of magnitude more people than anything I ever write for The Atlantic or The New Republic.
There’s also a question, by the way, of who is delivering the information. As this data from the Poynter Institute shows, people today — especially younger generations — aren’t only looking to journalists. So trying to make sure a journalist writes about a given issue or repeats a given quote is certainly useful, but it can be equally useful to have a podcaster or Instagram momfluencer or Twitch gaming streamer melding in the desired message. My point here is not to suggest furthering an unhelpful search for the ‘liberal Joe Rogan,’ my point is that the entire media consumption ecosystem has evolved and those of us trying to spread information about and influence public policy need to evolve as well.
A Too-Broad Message
We then come to: what message are we trying to get across? I think one problem with the fight against the megabill was that there were so many bombs inside it. Do you talk about the cuts to SNAP? To Medicaid? To the U.S. citizen children excluded from the Child Tax Credit? To rural hospitals? The effect on the deficit? The effect on immigrants? The effect on making the wealthy wealthier? The head spins.
Someone recently remarked to me that the Republicans are amazingly good at distilling nuance into a slogan. Democrats can talk at length about the need for comprehensive immigration reform that includes border security, rapid deportation for violent criminals, and a pathway to citizenship for those who have been here peaceably for some time; all the Republicans have to say is “Laken Riley” over and over again until you see the words scrolling across the backs of your eyelids when you lie down to sleep.2 I think that might be something of an overgeneralization — and it helps, of course, that conservatives have a well-oiled signal boosting media machine that reverberates through social media accounts, Fox / One America News Network / NewsMax, AM talk radio, evangelical megachurches and so on — but I do think we saw the tendency for liberal overcomplication rear its head again here.
Take health insurance. I think the hit to Medicaid coverage and the expiration of certain Affordable Care Act subsidies are probably the most consequential parts of the megabill, at least in terms of the most individuals impacted in the next few years. But even that sentence is complex, right? The hits are going to result from a combination of work requirements (which on their face sound OK, because how many busy low-to-mid engagement voters are unpacking what % already work or would be exempt, or how the paperwork requirements are really what messes people up?), reductions in provider taxes, and expiration of ACA provisions. Woof. Where was the avatar, the single phrase or name that stands in for or evokes all the values-laden wrongness?
(I’ll note that liberal family policy very much has this problem: we go for a laundry list of technocratic proposals3 — your child care will cost no more than 7% of your income! — and then we’re shocked when we can be narratively beaten back with the deeply sophisticated stratagem of calling child care proponents socialists that want to rip kids away from their moms.)
What Next?
As Hayes told Klein, today’s Democrats tend to care about curating what type of attention they’re getting, while Trumpist Republicans employ an ‘everything everywhere all at once’ strategy: “What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it.”
I’m working on developing a fully comprehensive theory of what needs to happen in the family policy space to adapt to this new environment, but I think a few principles are emerging:
More short-form video, fewer long written posts (he says near the end of a long written post).
Multi-channel/multi-platform communication strategies are now table stakes.
Lean more on affinity groups. Let me explain this a bit: in our algorithmically-defined/reinforced attention economy, one place people do spend their attention is in what might be considered content bands or content communities. Sports groups circling the fandom of a given team that hang on every rumor; dog owners of a given breed; crafters of various types; foodies; comedy fans; and so on. Many of these communities — some of which you’ve probably never heard of — are surprisingly huge. Take video gaming, something of which I know a thing or two (if I may tell on my own nerdiness). Video gaming conventions regularly draw tens of thousands of attendees, and streaming events or marathons draw tens to hundreds of thousands more. (When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played the game Among Us, more than 400,000 watched!) My point is simply this: all of these groups contain parents. You think gamer parents don’t also need paid family leave and good child care options? How about Cowboys or Nate Bergatze fans? Finding ways to get these groups organically talking about the forces that influence family life — like, say, legislation that is going to make their health insurance premiums spike and, among other problems, make it a lot harder to go to gaming conventions or football games or comedy shows — feels vital.
More coordination on a small number of key messages (the effectiveness of which are backed by research), ideally with an emblematic human example that resonates on a deep emotional and values level.
I’ll write more on this in the coming weeks and months, but let me just close by saying that while a great deal of attention and energy and funding is necessarily going to be geared toward defending against the damage that HR1 will unleash, we can’t only play defense: we have to evolve, or we will reliably fall further and further behind.
Fun fact: we are now officially over the halfway mark of the half-century. That is, we are now closer to 2050 than 2000.
I don’t think that this is about voters being dumb, by the way; it’s about the GOP having a better understanding of human psychology. The few times liberals have pulled this off it has been extraordinarily successful: think about the ‘Love is Love’ campaign. More recently, all the attention focused on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was shown to sour public opinion on Trump’s immigration policies.
There’s also a very real question about whether the policies themselves are the right ones and actually resonate with what people want, of course.