How to Be Memorable (Or Not): Messaging Lessons From the Dems, Round 2, Night 1

Let the games resume!

Last night ten candidates took the stage (nine returning, one new as MT governor Steve Bullock replaced Rep. Eric Swalwell) for the second round of the democratic primary debates heading into the 2020 election. Moderator Jake Tapper prefaced one question with a telling comment when he said, “In polls, more Democratic voters say they’d rather have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump than who agrees with them on major issues.” The underlying question – which we’ll spend the next year trying to figure out – is: What does that candidate sound like?

My goal for this series, as stated in my analyses of night-one and night-two of the first round of debates in June, is to provide an APOLITICAL discussion of the respective candidates’ messaging strategies and skills, and some applicable communication take-aways for each of us to consider in our efforts to be persuasive, charismatic, relatable, credible leaders in our own jobs, families and communities. (As I’ve stated in all my posts in this series: I keep all of my own political opinions to myself.)

The Winning Combination

The winning candidate will need to find the balance between being seen as smart enough to have solutions that are both desirable and possible, while being able to express their ideas in a way that listeners can easily “get it.” This is easier said than done.

Ironically, the best way to seem smart to others is to make them FEEL smart by stating your main ideas in a way that makes it so simple for people to understand that they think your answer must be right. In contrast, several candidates showed signs of what I call the “expert’s curse,” where they speak in terms that show they don’t realize what isn’t obvious to others, which usurped their own potency. 

For example, John Delaney had clearly thought through issues like healthcare and climate change and drawn up plans that are probably logical and fact/numbers-based (at least on paper). But in explaining why he thought the Green New Deal was unrealistic, he said that it was partly due to the fact that it tied climate change to universal healthcare and guaranteed government jobs. For many viewers, these concepts are so big that they seem unrelated (which, to Delaney’s point, they should be), and mentioning that they are “tied to” the Green New Deal is too abstract to be meaningful.

An analogy might have made this more digestible, such as, “Imagine if you were only allowed to buy a car if you also agreed to use a certain doctor when you were sick. That’s how messy this proposed plan is!” Now maybe that’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the picture, and far more viewers would have found his stance much more personally relatable. I.e., they’d “get it.” That’s where the power of persuasion is anchored.

Based on this, and how I believe Donald Trump effectively talked his way to the presidency in 2016 (where Hilary Clinton also fell very short), and having already experienced Round 1 of the Democratic primary debates last month, there are a few messaging priorities that are going to determine how the playing field will narrow from 20+ to one official Democratic candidate. But at this stage of the game, candidates need to be MEMORABLE.

Why Being Memorable Matters

Let’s face it: if you have twenty competitors for a job, you need to do something that’s going to make you stand out from the crowd, or you’ll get lost in the shuffle. Like many employers, some voters might weigh certain demographic qualities more heavily in their decision, such as geography, gender, race, sexual orientation or religion, but in the end they still want the most qualified applicant. The problem is that, after a while, all resumes start to look (and sound) the same, and one blurs into the next. The question then becomes how to stand out in the right way and launch yourself to the front of the line.

The answer is that, on the one hand, if you’re lucky, you need a “breakout moment” for a quick Vitamin B12 shot to the campaign, but with or without that, for sustainable traction you need to be able to summarize your stand on each issue in very simple – and repeatable - sound bites. What’s frustrating is that last night there were very few of either.

Breakout Moments

Breakout moment wise, there were a (very) few inspiring and noteworthy comments, although none had show-stopping explosions of applause or cheers from the audience. For example:

• Bernie Sanders, enumerating benefits such as dental care and hearing aids that Medicare For All would provide seniors, was challenged by Tim Ryan who said, “You don’t know that, Bernie,” to which Sanders retorted, “I DO know that! I wrote the damn bill!”
• Elizabeth Warren shot down John Delaney in response to his nay-saying about the validity of a plan she supported, with: “I don’t understand why anybody goes through all the trouble of running for President of the US just to talk about what we can’t do and what we shouldn’t fight for!”
• Marianne Williamson gave a wonderfully “no duh” response when asked why she was qualified to assess the need for a $200-$500 billion debt payment for reparations for slavery by poignantly stating, “What makes me qualified? I did the math! 40 acres and a mule (with interest)…”
• John Hickenlooper opposed the idea of pulling out of conflict areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan citing that it would cause a humanitarian crisis for women – to which even (I think it was Warren’s voice) interjected “Thank you!”
• Peter Buttigieg redirected the conversation with humor, recognizing that whether the candidates embraced socialist principles or more moderate ones, the Republicans would label them as ‘crazy socialists’ so there was no point in worrying about what the Republicans would say, and everyone should simply stand up for what was right.

Sound Bites Matter

Since nobody stole the show on that front, it brings us back to the need for sound bites that are, as I like to say, “tweetable and repeatable.”

Sound bites should include an action verb and an observable result, and be something short and pithy that every candidate can recite on reflex. In 2016, Donald Trump had mantras that were crystal clear in the outcome goals, ranging from “Build a wall” to “Lock her up” that served two critical purposes: The first is that when his supporters joined together, thousands upon thousands of people would chant these refrains together in stadiums. It strengthened a sense of unity around a common cause (or enemy), with a desired outcome. And chants are great because the more people say something out loud or hear it from others, the more they are likely to believe it.

Just as importantly, people could recite them in passing conversation, whether in discussion at home, at the lunch table at work, or anywhere else. In 2016, when I asked people who they planned to vote for and why, I was amazed at how often people explained a vote for Trump by simply saying, “He’s going to make America great again.” And even those who hated him could recite the promises, if only to decry them. Again, the more easily a message is shared, the more quickly it spreads. Sound-bite messaging is necessary for people to know who you are and what you stand for.

It’s not that candidates need to be reductive and substitute meaty plans and informative specifics with trite clichés. Rather, they can explain as much detail as necessary, but be able to summarize the main point at (ideally) the beginning and end. For greatest effectiveness, the “so what” summary needs to be spoon-fed in these contexts.

Once again, not one Democratic candidate has managed to do this consistently. Bernie Sanders is the strongest in this area, partly because he has reiterated such goals as Medicare For All and a $15 minimum wage time and again. His challenge is two-fold: First is that he doesn’t identify three to six core take-away messages that people can lean on as what defines his candidacy in a way people can remember and repeat. If he bookended his talks with that kind of summary, people would be far more likely to (perhaps even unwittingly) evangelize for him.

Second is that even within answers in the debates, he actually included many such sound bites, but they are almost always referenced in passing in the middle of his answers. He needs to flip it: start with the sound bites to get them out first, then explain as needed. Alternatively he could try to end with them, but given the debate time limits, there’s too much risk that time will evaporate before he remembered to squeeze them in. This is what all other candidates need to do as well.

Here are a few good “tweetable-and-repeatable” sound bites from last night’s debate stage. If a candidate’s name isn’t listed here, it’s because I didn’t catch any that fit the criteria:

• Sanders: expand and create universal background checks, do away with the straw man provision, do away with the gun show loophole, do away with loopholes that exist for gun manufacturers selling large amounts of weapons into communities that are going into gangs, end segregation in schools, triple Title 1 funding, raise teacher minimum salaries to $60k/yr. (Note: repeated refrains are good rhetorical devices, but verbal phrases that need multiple prepositions like “do away with” are much clumsier and more abstract than simple, single-word verbs like “end.” Should it matter? No. Does it? Yes.)
• Tim Ryan – Get a Chief Manufacturing Officer; Convert industrial agriculture into regenerative agriculture  (Note: these technically meet the short, action verb, results-oriented sound bite criteria, but they lack any form of pithiness. They are so jargon-laden that they have no real meaning or personal connection to 90% of the listening audience. Plus, with 21 syllables in the latter example, it’s not exactly an easy refrain that gets stuck in your head. Theoretically, people could tweet and repeat them… but nobody will.)
• John Delaney wrapped up the end of his comment about “kitchen table pocketbook issues that matter to hard-working Americans: building infrastructure, creating jobs, improving their pay, creating universal healthcare and lowering drug prices.” Why were these only referenced once, almost as an afterthought? They should be central to his campaign.
• Peter Buttigieg – (Again, referencing these in the passing context of structural democratic reforms to get money out of politics): end the electoral college, amend the Constitution to end Citizens United, have DC be a state (weak verb), depoliticize the Supreme Court with structural reform.

It’s sad that only a few candidates had these clear examples of what they would achieve as president (and admittedly, Tim Ryan’s examples are a stretch to include in the list). Many others had the missed potential for sound bites, but missed the opportunity, e.g. Warren’s multiple references to her being ready to fight (process oriented, not result-oriented), or O’Rourke’s claims of banning PAC contributions to contributions to any member of congress or candidate for federal office (too verbose).

If there were a prize for the most missed opportunities for good sound bites, John Hickenlooper would have won it. He repeatedly gave a litany of “tweetable-and-repeatable” concrete accomplishments from his tenure as governor of Colorado ranging from stricter gun control laws to universal Pre-K, all of which are seemingly parallel to what he would seek to do on a national level. However, much like in Round 1 last month, he listed them all in past tense, leaving it to the audience to extrapolate the parallels for themselves. Why not preface the whole thing by saying something like, “As I did for Colorado on a state level, for our country on the whole I will ensure X, build Y, and abolish Z”?

Now, maybe I missed a few from some other candidates, but even if I did, it’s also sad that they were so fleeting that I missed them given that I was actively hunting for them. Again, that’s a failure on the part of the message sender, not the recipient. 

What about Storytelling?

After Round 1 last month, I also looked for candidates’ use of personal stories. Tonight, there were no winners in the storytelling competition. Warren came close, trying to share the story of her friend Addie (sp?) who has ALS, referencing his age, wife and son’s names and ages, which humanizes the relevant issue. But she started the story too late and got cut off before she got to the point, then tried to redirect the next question back to it with “But I’d like to finish talking about Addie.” This was met with a few snickers, which I attributed to recognition of an obvious pivot to avoid the actual question and force the story in, but she reacted with, “This isn’t funny; this is about someone who has health insurance and is dying…” Now, she’s right, it isn’t funny at all, but in my opinion the moment backfired because nobody wants to be scolded, especially if my interpretation of the chuckle – or a different one – was correct, and they didn’t actually think Addie’s story was funny at all. Either way, she didn’t win that point.

 Many referenced personal experiences but failed to narrate them as relatable stories. For example, Governor Steve Bullock shared two incredible pieces of personal history: (re: health care) that his son had had a heart attack at twelve years old, and (re: gun violence) that his eleven-year-old nephew had been shot and killed on a playground, but beyond the mentions, there was no emotion, no connection to the events. They were golden opportunities to connect with the audience and the issues that slipped through his fingers.

Amy Klobuchar mentioned her friend Nicole whose son died trying to ration his insulin, and another mention of a child who died of prescription opioid addiction with her dying words being, “mama, it’s not my fault.” Buttigieg also had two story opportunities, when mentioning that his mother-in-law’s life “was saved by the ACA but who is far too vulnerable,” and how “at an event yesterday a 13yo asked me what we were going to do about gun safety.” But once again, all of these references are one-liners lacking the inherent qualities that make a story powerful. Yes, I know there are time limits. If you’re going to tell a story, you have to make every second count. Some candidates do that much more effectively than others.

Granted, the strongest from Round 1 – Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Bill DeBlasio – are all on stage tonight, so fingers are crossed for some good story fodder on Day 2.

If anybody is going to take the lead AND be that candidate who can beat Donald Trump, they need to get these points in place fast.

Want to know how Cohort 2 did on Wednesday night? Here's my take on who closed the deal, and who got closed out.