Hello Merge Tag: Where Social Media and Politics Intersect

Building Trusted Messengers with Dan Pfeiffer

May 16, 2024

Dan Pfeiffer, progressive messaging expert, discusses the importance of trusted messengers and involving everyone in the election process. Emphasizes the need to narrow the news chasm between what is happening and the voters. Touches on strategies for empowering local advocates, Democratic brand and media strategy, campaign infrastructure transitions, and launching of Anxiety Relief Fund and Volunteer Recruitment Campaign.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Empowering Local Advocates for Political Conversations

03:58 • 6min

Democratic Brand and Media Strategy

09:51 • 19min

Strategic decisions and challenges in campaign infrastructure transitions

28:46 • 4min

Launching of Anxiety Relief Fund and Volunteer Recruitment Campaign

32:55 • 3min

Dan Pfeiffer is a giant in the progressive messaging space.

Along with many impressive titles under his belt, he worked on the Obama campaign and served as senior advisor and White House Communications Director for President Obama.

He then went on to become an influencer for democracy (my term, don’t blame him). He’s a best selling author and a co-host of Pod Save America. He also hosts the podcast Pollercoaster, co-hosts Political Experts React on YouTube and writes the extremely influential newsletter Message Box.

Needless to say, Dan is a man with a ton of insight into messaging for Democratic campaigns.

The primary purpose of Message Box is creating campaign messaging style memos for everyday people.

Campaign staff and operatives write and receive these all the time. But Dan realized that we can no longer win elections simply relying on campaign staff and operatives.

If the Democratic party wants to win elections, at every level of government, we all have to be involved in the process.

So in Message Box, he shares talking points and context around the stories of the day, in a way that is useful and relatable not for full time Hill staffers, but for anyone who wants to be involved in the march toward progress.

Because, in his words, “This whole election comes down to narrowing the news chasm between what is happening and the voters.”

We covered:

The importance of trusted messengers and the need to give them the training to help get the message out
Having different strategies for the public internet vs the private internet
Why campaigns need to learn to give up control, and relinquish that control to our supporters. They know the people they’re communicating with, we have to trust them to speak in a way they know will resonate.
The brand of the Democrat Party, both what it is and what it could be
What Democrats can learn from Trump’s nurturing of the MAGA media system
The all-of-the-above approach to reaching your audience
Spam PACs and what the Democratic Party can do about them
What could have become of the Obama For America campaign infrastructure after President Obama won in 2008
And so much more!

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