Why Democrats Can’t Afford to Keep Losing the Storytelling War

Then-U.S. Senator Kamala Harris at a Dearborn school in Michigan in 2019 | Susan J. Demas

Speaking as a Democrat myself, I gotta say Democrats are masters of self-sabotage. Only they could look at the political calendar, realize there were 107 days left before facing Donald Trump — a guy who’s basically been running for president nonstop since 2016 — and decide, “Sure, let’s swap in a new lead actor now, what could go wrong?” It’s like watching someone switch drivers with the car still moving and then acting shocked when they swerve into a ditch.

When I wrote Kamala Harris Deserved Better and then followed with What Kamala Harris Actually Got Right (Part 2), I wasn’t trying to canonize her or pretend she’s flawless. I was pointing out how the Democratic Party turned her into their scapegoat, a human shield for their own strategic failures. And yet every time I bring this up, the response is depressingly predictable. People reduce her political story to one or two talking points. She was too friendly with Liz Cheney. She didn’t say the “right thing” about Gaza. She was too polished, as if speaking in complete sentences is now a liability. Those takes feel neat, tidy, digestible — like a fast-food combo meal of hindsight. But they are not serious. Real campaigns are not single-cause morality plays. They are demolition derbies, with donors, consultants, coalitions, the media, misinformation, and structural barriers all smashing into each other at once.

Pretending Harris just “blew it” because of one line in a debate is like saying the Titanic sank because the waiter spilled soup in the dining room. It’s not analysis. It’s avoidance. It is disingenuous to emphatically say Kamala lost because she did one thing wrong.

And avoidance is exactly how voters keep walking themselves into the buzzsaw. Every cycle, I run into people who tell me, with a kind of smug finality, “These politicians don’t care about me; why should I vote?” And here’s the thing: I don’t correct them. I tell them, flat out: you’re right. Politicians do not care about you, the lone individual. They don’t care if you, personally, have a job, make a living wage, or even survive. What they care about is groups and consensus. That’s the system. That’s the math. That’s the cold fact I didn’t truly grasp until I was about twenty-five.

Rosa Parks is remembered not because one woman refused to give up her seat on a bus, but because that refusal became a movement, a collective force big enough to grind a segregated city’s economy to a halt. That’s what politicians respond to. Not the singular, but the organized. And until non-Trump voters internalize this, they’ll keep wringing their hands every time MAGA wins an election as though it was some unthinkable accident. It’s not. It’s coalition politics doing what coalition politics does: rewarding the group that shows up in force, unified by grievance if not by policy.

This is why the Republican Party in 2025 is locked in a state of sycophantic paralysis. MAGA is not just Trump’s mood swings; it’s a tribal identity. Step out of line, and you get exiled. That’s why even senators with Ivy League résumés suddenly sound like they’re auditioning for a spot on a right-wing podcast — they’re terrified of losing the mob’s loyalty. And here’s the uncomfortable truth Democrats keep sidestepping: a huge chunk of MAGA voters are perfectly willing to suffer. They’ll put up with higher prices, worse health care, collapsing schools, potholes the size of moon craters — and they’ll smile through it — so long as the pain lands harder on someone they hate. Call it recreational spite or political CrossFit: the pain is the point, and the workout “counts” if the libs hurt more. That’s the dynamic behind why they support him.

I’ve used this Lyndon Johnson quote in other pieces and I’ll keep using it because it’s too on-the-nose to retire: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” MAGA is basically the LBJ theorem in a red hat. The cruelty isn’t the glitch, it’s the subscription plan — the down payment on the fantasy that at least you’re not on the bottom rung.

That fantasy politics shows up everywhere. Back in 2020, when Harris was running for VP on the ticket with Biden, there was the whole Ice Cube saga. He blew off a group Zoom with her and other Black artists because he wanted a one-on-one, while defending his meetings with Trump’s people about the so-called “Platinum Plan.” The problem wasn’t that he wanted to negotiate — negotiation is politics. The problem was believing that Trump, a man with a decades-long record of disdain toward Black people, was suddenly going to morph into a civil-rights champion just because he let you sit in the room. That’s not strategy; that’s a bad episode pitch for Shark Tank. It’s the essence of fantasy politics: mistaking a photo-op for power, mistaking a slogan for substance.

There’s actual scholarship that explains why this kind of thinking has such a grip. Relative deprivation theory tells us people don’t measure life by absolutes; they measure by comparisons. You’ll tolerate your own struggles as long as your neighbor isn’t doing better; the second you think they’re moving up, resentment flares. Then comes the darker twist. In 2009, Combs and colleagues documented partisan schadenfreude — the perverse pleasure people feel when the “other side” suffers, even if they’re collateral damage themselves. That’s the political equivalent of the Joker in The Dark Knight setting a mountain of his own stolen cash on fire just to watch Gotham panic. Or think of Cartman, South Park’s eternal bully, who will happily wreck his own life if it means making someone else miserable — and still ends up the kid everyone hates. That’s the mindset: voters cheering their own decline as long as someone they despise loses more.

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Of course, Republicans didn’t invent this trick. They’ve just perfected it. The infamous Willie Horton ads of 1988 weren’t about policy nuance — they were about telling a scary story with a Black man as the monster. Before that, Joe McCarthy turned Cold War anxieties into the Red Scare, running a political career on the plotline that communists were hiding under your bed. This is the GOP’s natural register: find a villain, promise to destroy them, and hope nobody notices your own donors are looting the place while you’re busy burning books.

And yet, despite knowing all this, Democrats still seem shocked when the show works. They clutch their pearls and ask why voters fall for nonsense, then float the idea that maybe Democrats should try to “be more like Republicans.” Look, I get the impulse. I’m a believer in matching energy. If someone keeps punching below the belt, you don’t respond with a white paper, you throw a jab back. But Democrats cannot become Republicans, and thank God for that. Their coalition is too diverse, too invested in actual governance, too resistant to scapegoating as a unifying principle. You can’t build a movement around “it’s the gays’ fault” when your voters are gay, or Black, or immigrants, or just don’t buy the culture-war Kool-Aid.

That doesn’t mean Democrats are off the hook. If anything, it makes messaging even harder — and more important. You can’t just slap a flag pin on some washed-up TV doctor and expect the crowd to start chanting your name. But you also can’t turn every campaign into a 300-level seminar with footnotes and charts, then act surprised when voters check out after slide three. And when that inevitably flops, you can’t overcorrect and start talking to voters like they’re five-year-olds. It’s either The Federalist Papers or Sesame Street — no in-between.

The smarter path is to talk just high enough that people want to reach up and grab it. Think of Boyz n the Hood, when Furious takes Tre and Ricky to Compton, points at the “Cash for Your Home” billboard, and explains gentrification so clearly that people literally stop what they’re doing to listen. Gentrification is one of the most complex issues in American politics, but in that driveway scene he broke it down in a way that was completely digestible. Sure, it was a movie — but if Laurence Fishburne can make zoning laws sound urgent in a backyard monologue, there’s no excuse for Democrats with entire comms teams and consultants to keep fumbling the basics.

Or look at Bill Clinton in the 1992 town hall debate, when a voter asked how the national debt affected her personally. George H.W. Bush checked his watch and rattled off numbers like he was reading a budget memo. Clinton walked right up, looked her in the eye, asked about her struggles, and translated policy into empathy. It wasn’t his Arkansas twang that made him relatable, it was his ability to listen and connect. If a fictional dad in a movie can explain gentrification to a block in South Central and a future president can translate macroeconomics into a kitchen-table moment, Democrats can stop oscillating between dissertation and daycare.

Republicans, for their part, understand there’s a market for intellectual junk food and they keep it stocked. Enter the “Doctors of Bullshit.” Dr. Drew Pinsky graduates from late-night call-in radio to anti-expert pandemic punditry, laundering doubt with bedside manner. Dr. Oz turns daytime TV into an infomercial for miracle fixes, then repackages that brand into a Senate bid with “freedom” one-liners about vaccines. And Dr. Phil dives so deep into culture-war sludge that even Bill Maher — whom I don’t exactly consider an oracle — lands a clean public rebuke. If Maher is suddenly your fact-checker, you’ve wandered into the shallow end of the intellectual pool and started measuring depth in inches.

This is where storytelling stops being optional. The business world has already discovered the power of storytelling: narratives don’t just convey information, they create an emotional connection, establish trust, and make complex ideas stick. Entire industries now practice storytelling in business, tailoring messages so that people can see themselves inside the story being told. Of course, that doesn’t mean politics is a business or that it should operate like one — the stakes in self-government are far higher than selling products. But the lesson still applies: successful campaigns must go beyond listing policies and embed those facts within stories that carry voters along a moral arc — where we are, what went wrong, what we’ll do next, and what better looks like.

So if you actually want to end MAGA, start where we are, not in some consultant’s slide deck. Drop the fantasy of a perfect slogan or a perfect candidate. Evaluate leaders the way you’d evaluate a hire: who listens, who adapts, who can take a punch and still deliver? Accept the hard truth that a big slice of the GOP base will gladly burn their own house down if it means they get to watch someone else’s collapse. And for the love of democracy, stop thinking a strategy memo or a donor Zoom is a substitute for telling people a story they can actually feel. Talk just high enough that people lean in — not so high that they tune out. Quit treating politics like a Hamptons fundraiser, stop farming out your narrative to celebrities (we don’t need another George Clooney think-piece), and remember that voters aren’t looking for a Vanity Fair spread, they’re looking for a reason to believe.

Obama understood this when he sold the country on “hope” and “change.” Those words were, on paper, little more than platitudes — until he wrapped them in a story that made people believe something better was actually possible. That’s the job again now.

Get out of the donor bubble. Tell the story yourself. Make it clear, make it real, make it about people’s lives. Do that, and maybe, just maybe, the skies Democrats keep promising will finally stop being metaphors and start looking like weather.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He writes The Thinking Class Substack is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.

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