Democrats Need To Be Better At Messaging Their Pro-Family Policies To Get The Credit They Deserve

Update to Child Tax Credit Payments Begin Today – Thank A Democrat:

Today (July 15), families across the country will see the first payments from the Child Tax Credit expansion enacted in the American Rescue Plan – $3,600/year for kids under 6 and $3,000/year for kids over 6.

Unlike the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, these tax cuts go straight into the households of American working families. This will help millions of Americans pay their bills and lift children out of poverty. The expanded child tax credit could “cut poverty in half”.

This pro-family tax cut was passed with only Democratic votes. Not one Republican in Congress voted for this bill. Republicans no doubt will now try to tout the benefits of this program and claim credit for it, and they will be lying. Do not fall for their lies. You have only the Democratic Party to thank for this financial assistance.

A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 61 percent of respondents said they’d received the credit — a $300 payment per month for every child under the age of 7 and a $250-per-month payment for every child under the age of 17. But only 39 percent of respondents said that the payment had a major impact on their lives. And while 47 percent of respondents credited Democrats for passing the expanded child tax credit, just 38 percent credited President Joe Biden.

One more time, this pro-family tax cut was passed with only Democratic votes. Not one Republican in Congress voted for this bill. Just how unattentive and ungrateful can Americans be? (Because the money is directly deposited into their bank account, there is not a check for Joe Biden to put his name on).

Sam Stein at Politico writes, Dems thought giving voters cash was the key to success. So what happened? (excerpt):

Those numbers are causing agita on Capitol Hill, where there is growing concern that in a rush to continue legislative momentum around infrastructure and Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan, the party has failed to hammer home the benefits of their first big bill: the American Rescue Plan.

“It’s great to deliver and do things, but you have to actually go out and tell the f—ing world about it,” conceded one top Senate Democratic aide who worked on getting the child tax credit passed. “That’s not a two-month project. It has to keep going.

Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid  noted, “the moral case for passing the child tax credit remains quite profound. Researchers at Columbia University found that 59.3 million children nationwide received payments in July 2021. That month alone, they wrote, the program “kept 3 million children from poverty.” Extended through its duration, the program could “reduce monthly child poverty by up to 40 percent.” Combined with all Covid-related relief, “it could contribute to a 52 percent reduction in monthly child poverty.”

Democrats negotiating the Build Back Better legislative package have pushed to extend the program expansion until 2025. And Biden himself has leaned into that policy specifically as a way to sell the larger reconciliation package.

The question confronting the campaign apparatuses within the party, however, is how can they turn any such extension into actual electoral positives. For some, it’s simple: You keep building a record that you can take to the voters as a case for remaining in power.

“All of this is part of the stew you need to put together to create a post-pandemic, economic boom in 2022,” said one top party operative, in reference to both the child tax credit, the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better initiative. “And if you succeed, there is a clear argument to make that Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress came in, got to work, rescued the economy and put money in your pocket. You can see the ads. But it’s an ugly path to get there.”

Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at Data for Progress, does polling for Fighting Chance for Families, a group that is working to extend the child tax credit. The data he has shows wide support for the expanded tax credit among Democrats and independents. But the more interesting number, he argued, was found in the crosstabs.

Republican parents who have gotten the benefits, he said, support Biden at a higher rate than their non-parent Republican peers. And that, Winter added, is a decent thread of optimism for Democrats who thought the policy would serve them well both morally and politically.

“I think there was a triumphalist narrative that if we provide this benefit, we will remake American politics,” Winter said. “But I think this misreads the literature on policy feedback slightly. The place where this works is at the margins. That’s where the struggle is waged.”

He went on from there.

“It’s really hard to remake the electorate, but if you can provide clear benefits to Republican parents, then you can pick off maybe not the module Republican parent, but the marginal one. And if you can pick up the marginal ones, then you can maybe win the next election and that solidifies it even further.”

Sam Stein was a guest on The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, along with ASO Communications founder Anot Shenker-Osorio, to discuss how Democrats can better communicate all they’re doing to improve the lives of their constituents. Transcript.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post says Get the message right, Democrats: The reconciliation bill is about supporting families:

As Democrats continue to negotiate details of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, they should look to the latest American Family Survey from Deseret News and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University. The seventh edition of the survey, released this week, offers many insights into how families fared in the pandemic and, more importantly, how the government can help them.

First, federal aid to families makes a difference — and recipients know it does. The survey reports: “Single parents with children remain the group most likely to experience a serious economic crisis, but at the same time, 2020 and 2021 saw a marked decrease in the number of families who reported such a serious crisis.”

Why? Government was there with “massive federal aid distributed under both the Trump and Biden administrations.” A wide array of Americans “including three-quarters of low-income American families told [the pollsters] they needed the aid to get by and that it helped them.” Put differently, the support from the American Rescue Plan, which passed exclusively with Democratic votes, made a difference. Maybe Democrats should remind people who lent a hand and who fought that aid tooth and nail.

Second, women bore the brunt of child care during the crisis:

Women also expressed more concern than men about how being a working parent affects both their ability to parent well and their ability to advance their careers. The gap between those who said being a working parent makes those activities harder and those who reported that it makes things easier was much larger among women than men. While both men and women who work full time were more likely to say that it complicates their parenting and work life, mothers who work full-time feel disproportionately the burdens of working parenthood.

Finally, the survey shows overwhelming support among Democrats (61 percent) for “helping families directly and spending money on programs and institutions,” and even 43 percent of Republicans agree. “The most popular form of benefit is cash assistance, and Americans favor an average benefit of around $2,400 per year.” That suggests adding up the cash benefits under Biden’s proposals would be beneficial so that voters understand what they are receiving. Moreover, a strong plurality (48 percent) want the wealthy to pay for these benefits, as Biden’s plan proposes.

Other polls confirm that the elements in Biden’s plan are extremely popular. A CBS News-YouGov poll shows that 88 percent of Americans favor federal funding to lower drug prices (Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, call your office!); 84 percent favor extending Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing; 73 percent favor paid family leave; and 67 percent favor universal pre-K. Responding to the question about who should pay for it, 68 percent say wealthy people and 67 percent say corporations.

The administration should take away several key findings from these and other polls. First, stress the aspects of the plan that respond to felt need from parents and other caregivers, especially women. In the long list of items in the bill, these may impact voters the most. Second, whether Medicare expansion is the wisest use of funds is debatable, but it is politically popular. Biden should remind voters again and again that this is part of the plan. Third, emphasize that Republicans oppose all help to families in his proposal and object to corporations and rich people paying for the plan.

Democrats have devised a pro-family, politically popular basket of social programs despite uniform Republican obstruction. Which party cares about average Americans? Which believes in helping families? If Democrats do not toot their own horn, no one else will.

Jennifer Rubin told Lawrence O’Donnell in an earlier segment of his show, Transcript:

I love when Joe Biden gets down into the weeds of policy because I`m a policy wonk, but that`s really not the way to do politics in America. He really has to set a much higher bar and talk about his package as one that is pro-family, that is pro-democratic, that is pro-national unity and begin to talk in the language of values pointing out that Democrats are the repository of those values now.

Republicans are antithetical. They`re hostile to those values. And I think unless they do that, he`s going to be mired down in a never-ending scrawl of details and media coverage and Republican accusations.

* * *

O`DONNELL: And, Jennifer, the Republicans, I`m not hearing quite the same values rhetoric for them that we have in the past because so much of their rhetoric involves talk about fraudulent elections, stolen elections, all of this stench of corruption that Donald Trump imagines and spews.

RUBIN: Yeah, even they, I guess, find it hard to talk about values when they`re winking and nodding at violence, when they`re seeking to undermine elections. So I think they have just decided to go mean and that somehow convinced themselves that what their base wants is the meanest junk yard dog in the yard and that they are going to be it and they are going to simply attack, attack, attack.

And the Democrats have got to figure out a way to not be on defensive, to go on offense to point out what they`re doing, but more importantly to set forth why their values, why American values are the way we get through this.

We don`t get through this by screaming foul when we lose elections. That`s not the American way. We don`t get through this by denying that the president is the president. We don`t get through this by seeking to prevent people from voting. That`s not the American way, and I think Democrats really need to understand the depth of the trauma we`re in, the depth of the peril that the democracy is in and really rise to the occasion.

And it`s hard because I know Democrats love talking policies. They love talking about all the great things they`re doing, and there is a lot of great stuff in this bill that Joe Biden is in favor of, but if you only talk in the details and there`s so many details, you get lost in the weeds. And that`s why I think a values conversation that elevates the Democratic Party is what they really need.

In the video clip above, ASO Communications founder Anot Shenker-Osorio explains to O’Donell:

O`DONNELL: Anat, you studied, this kind of communication. How does the communication chain work from the president of the United States telling people this is what I did for you today, down to the actual voters who need to know that?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO, FOUNDER, ASO COMMUNICATIONS: Yeah, I`m glad you`re asking me.

So, a message is like a baton that has to be passed from person to person to person. If it gets dropped anywhere along the way, by definition, it isn`t heard, and even someone with arguably the largest pulpit, right, the president of the United States, the notion that what people think about Democrats is actually made out of what Democrats say or do is almost laughable.

And in fact, it is the media, I hate to tell you, that determines what it is people hear about these programs. The child care tax credit, for example, was dropped right around the same time as what happened in Afghanistan. That swamped the coverage, and to me, it is very, very sad that the numbers that you report are there are certainly not what we`re seeing in our nightly focus groups very much reaffirming that and in the polling we`ve done privately, but it`s also utterly unsurprising.

If the media isn`t telling folks about these things, then how is it they`re supposed to get this message, even if the president is reporting on it?

* * *

ANAT SHANKER-OSORIO, FOUNDER, ASO COMMUNICATIONS: Yes, what I would say about that is that motivated cognition is a hell of a drug. And what I mean by that is that the more the descriptor of the human cognitive processing system would be I`ll see it when I believe it, not the other way around.

What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?

I described this phenomenon years ago in Epistemic closure and the ‘conservative misinformation feedback loop’ media bubble.

In lay terms if you`ve ever had the experience of trying to tell one of your friends that the guy that she`s dating is a complete and total jerk and you provide her fact after fact after fact and they are just going ping, ping, ping, that`s what I`m talking about. But spread across massive issues of social justice and economic well-being.

And so people are incredibly adept at discounting factual information that`s simply weeding it out, not paying attention to it, ignoring it that doesn`t fit their pre-existing frame.

And so it`s precisely as you said. If they have an existing story line about, quote, unquote, what Democrats do and how they behave, then facts are pretty much impervious to it.

The MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump has developed its own “alternate reality” which is impervious to truth and real world facts. Their unhinged conspiracy theories are their “reality” for them. They are beyond reaching because their alternate reality is reinforced by the “conservative misinformation feedback loop” media bubble. Propaganda is a powerful destructive force.

Now, rather than get very, very sad about that, because one could, but one still has to go on. We could recognize that we have to speak as your previous guests were saying in the language of values. And more than that, as I often like to tell people, “don`t take your policy out in public. It`s unseemly.”

Messaging about policy is always less effective than what that policy delivers. So when we ask people, how do you feel about paid family leave? They`re into it. When we say instead you`re there the first time your newborn smiles, they`re way more into it.

When we say raising wages very popular. When we say instead everyone makes enough to care for their family, way more popular.

What Democrats need to do when they do have the mic is stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie. Stop talking about the names of your policies and instead speak to voters in imageable terms about what it would feel like to have that as the reality in their life.

And so it`s not a child care tax credit, which is the name of a policy. It`s you go off to work and you feel great about what your kid is and you know that they`re safe, loved, and cared for and that you can afford it.

The Build Back Better Plan is divided into three parts: the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 relief package, which passed in March 2021; the American Jobs Plan, a proposal to rebuild America’s infrastructure and create jobs (i.e, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act); and the American Families Plan, a proposal to invest in areas related to childcare and education.

Democrats need to stop talking about a top-line number for a “budget reconciliation plan” – John Q. Public has no idea WTF you are talking about – and get back to talking about what is actually in the American Families Plan. FACT SHEET: The American Families Plan; What’s in Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan? The feckless media villagers have their own agenda, they are not going to do this for you.

And get back to talking up the child tax credit Americans are already receiving in the American Rescue Plan. Maybe have a bumper sticker made along the lines of “Thanks Democrats For My Child Tax Credit!”

Take an old lesson in marketing from Elmer Wheeler, head of the Tested Selling Institute, on the principles of Tested Selling: Wheelerpoint No. 1, “Don’t Sell the Steak—Sell the Sizzle!”