Economics is another form of storytelling—specifically, it’s the story of who gets what and why. And as the rise of trickle-down and middle-out economics shows us, telling the right story at the right time can transform the economy for a generation. The same is true for politics, but simple and easy-to-understand narratives are notoriously not a strength of Democratic politicians. That’s what the folks at the Winning Jobs Narrative Project are trying to fix. On this must-listen episode before the midterm elections, Bobby Clark and Melissa Morales explain why messaging matters to voters.
Bobby Clark is a Communications Strategist who advises philanthropic and progressive advocacy organizations on investments in communications research, structures, and campaigns. Bobby led the team that developed the Winning Jobs Narrative.
Twitter: @bobbyprogress
Melissa Morales is the Founder and President of Somos Votantes (C4) & Somos PAC (527), which are currently running multi-million dollar Latino-focused electoral programs in battleground states ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Twitter: @Melissa_in_DC
The Winning Jobs Narrative Project https://winningjobsnarrative.org
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
David Goldstein:
What the hell are Democrats doing wrong?
Melissa Morales:
Voters are really aligned with Democrats around values and around the things that we all want. I think where we become misaligned is really around messaging.
David Goldstein:
We’ve talked about this from the very first episode. We have this emphasis on narrative.
Speaker 3:
And we’ve been focused so much on this podcast on economics, but obviously the same thing goes for the politics.
Bobby Clark:
With the same policies. The way we frame them makes a huge difference in how they’re received.
Zach Silk:
They basically got the story wrong.
Speaker 5:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle. This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Zach Silk:
Hey, I’m Zach Silk and I’m the president of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
I have been at this politics thing for almost 20 years now and one of the things that I find most frustrating is that when it comes to economic issues, voters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies. And when it comes to actual outcomes, Democrats are overwhelmingly better for the economy across the board, for working people, for business people, for everybody. The economy simply does better under Democratic administrations than it does under Republican administrations, and yet the majority of voters still trust Republicans over Democrats when it comes to running the economy. Hey Zach, you’re a professional political. You’re a campaign guy. What the hell are Democrats doing wrong?
Zach Silk:
Well, Goldie, they’ve basically got the story wrong. If you control the story, you control the world. This idea though that is that you need to be able to tell people a story about how the economy works, who gets what and why, and how you are on their side. In a democracy you need to be on the side of the voters. And we have messed that up on the left, and particularly the Democratic party has really messed that up. And part of that is because we have really not figured out how to tell a compelling story. So much what happens in progressive politics and in the Democratic party are a little bromides or bullet points or talking points. That’s not a story.
David Goldstein:
That’s not a story. No. Stories have heroes and villains and they have dramatic arcs. And it’s not like you’re cheating, it’s not like you’re not taking this seriously. We are a storytelling species. This is how we understand the world and our place in it, through stories. And we’ve talked about this from the beginning, from the very first episode of Pitchfork Economics, we have this emphasis on narrative. And I’ll tell you here at Civic Ventures on the podcast in particular, we have spent a lot of time, our main focus has been on how to tell a better story. And we’ve done that largely as storytellers. We’re very think tank-like in the way we come up with new narratives and we come up with new policies. Where we’re not a think tank, Zach, is that we don’t actually do any original research.
Zach Silk:
That’s right, yeah. And so today, obviously we believe strongly that the stories we tell ourselves is the world we’re going to get. And we’ve been focused so much on this podcast and all of our work on economics, but obviously the same thing goes for the politics. And that’s what our guests today are going to talk about. We’ve got a team from the Winning Jobs Narrative Project. Let me just say that again. I love every word in this title. I love winning. I don’t know about you. Jobs are things that we talk about a lot. We love jobs. And narrative. It’s all about the story. So they’ve figured out how to put three of my favorite things, winning, jobs, narrative, into one project. And it’s all about centering working people in a jobs and economy frame. A story about how working people are the engines of prosperity. But not so much in the way we talk about at Civic Ventures, which is very economics focused, it’s much more about how we talk about it in our politics. And they figured out ways to really make this extremely compelling. I don’t know. I’m really excited to talk.
Melissa Morales:
This is Melissa Morales. I am the founder and president of Somos Votantes and Somos Pack, which are a set of Latino voter organizations and I’m also a member of the Winning Jobs Narrative project team.
Bobby Clark:
Hi, my name is Bobby Clark. I’m an independent consultant. I work on large scale narrative and messaging projects and one of my clients is the Rural Democracy Initiative and they have loaned me graciously to the Jobs Narrative Project.
David Goldstein:
Kind of like in soccer, you’re on loan from one team to another. So let’s talk about that team. What is the Winning Jobs Narrative?
Melissa Morales:
So the Winning Jobs narrative project has been an over a year long messaging project at this point, which is really grounded in a couple of things. First, the awareness that the data is showing us that we are seeing shifts among non-college voters in this country, and a curiosity about why that is. So we embarked on a year long research project that is still ongoing and has at this point interviewed about a hundred thousand voters or had a hundred thousand voters answer survey questions across the country, to really try to nail down not only why we’re seeing these shifts, but how are voters talking about the economy, how do they want to hear themselves represented and how we talk about the economy and what that means for politics.
David Goldstein:
You would think that a lower case winnings jobs narrative might have been a no brainer for people running elections. Was there anything like this that existed prior?
Bobby Clark:
So we started this project in April and May of 2021, first with a large scale scan of what existed prior. And so we took a look at nearly two decades of research, public and private, that we were able to collect. And we also looked at major initiatives that were already underway in the progressive movement, including things like efforts on [inaudible 00:06:59] economics. And so we took note of that, we did a landscape scan and then we set our research agenda with all of that in mind to understand what are some of the weaknesses that maybe still persist in a progressive economic narrative? What are the opportunities to really double down on some things that clearly are important? And where can we contribute new thinking to help illuminate what is a core economic narrative that really resonates across race and geography?
David Goldstein:
And tell us a bit more about the research agenda and what you learned.
Bobby Clark:
We started very broadly with multiple forms of qualitative research, first just to really dig in on a few things and listen to voters. And so we had nearly 3000 conversations with voters. We did online journals, we did online focus groups, we did interviews with voters on the street and in a number of states just out in their normal daily life. And then Melissa led a lot of deep listening, deep canvas conversations, in a bunch of states that she may wanted to talk about. And then we’ve also, we’ve followed that up with a pretty massive and continuing quantitative research to understand some of the things we’re seeing more broadly and then also to begin to apply what we saw as an important core narrative across issues. So we could provide specific guidance to advocates across a range of issues of not just that this narrative is important, but here’s how it works on clean energy, here’s how it works on student debt, here’s how it works on Inflation Reduction Act. We’ve got the data to show that these are winning messages.
Melissa Morales:
So I think one of the things that has been really unique and actually makes this project very useful is what Bobby just touched on, which is the fact that we are taking not only the message in narrative frame and sort of handing it to people, but actually taking this to real issues that campaigns are dealing with every day and saying, “Okay, here’s how that frame would look applied to this subject. Here’s how that frame would look applied to that subject.” Because one of the biggest problems, as somebody who runs program across the country, one of the biggest problems we’ve had in the past has really been how do we take these massive research projects and implement it in program? We’re three weeks out from election day, my team right now is hitting about 70,000 doors a week across the country and I don’t have time to sit and read 120 page deck and try to figure out how to implement it. So I think the usefulness of this project and the uniqueness of it really is in the implementation piece.
Zach Silk:
What were some of the places? I mean clearly we know that, in general progressive economics has been much better for the working class in this country and economic performance has been better when we are centering the working and middle class. Yet what we do know is that there’s real deficiencies for progressive candidates on this question of who’s better for the economy. And I’m going to assume some of that came out in your research, that people have real doubts about this because of something we’re doing. We’re not telling the right story, it seems to me. Can you reflect on that?
Bobby Clark:
There are multiple, there are five key themes to the narrative and some of them seem pretty intuitive but we make choices a lot of times to not follow these very obvious things that can help us better connect with all voters, especially working class voters. And one of them is simply that they need to hear themselves in our narrative. And we often choose as progressives… There are lots of things, we have a big complex movement and we focus on a lot of things and we sometimes forget to lift up just average working folks within the narrative. And so one case in point is the child tax credit that hit last year. It was primarily talked about by a lot of Democrats as something that lifted children out of poverty when that was really important. It was an incredibly important anti-poverty initiative. And it was also even bigger than that. It was also a huge boost for all working families. And so one of the things that we can remember to do is just to include working people in the narrative. Even when they’re very specific target things that we’re working on, there are also ways to talk about that, not just in the targeted way but to relate the issue more broadly to all working people.
Melissa Morales:
I also think, Bobby, as part of that, one of the things that really came out of this project that I found optimistic, was that voters are really aligned with Democrats around values and around the sorts of things that we all want. Better healthcare for our families, good paying jobs that allow us to pay the bills while also still going home to spend time with our families. All of these things that people need, the tools and opportunities that they need, to build a good life. That we are aligned on. I think where we become misaligned is really around messaging.
And one of the biggest things that for me, I really resonated with, my parents both have an eighth grade education, they really fall into this category of voters that we’re talking about ,was sort of agency and people’s agency around building their own future. So often I think in our messaging and Democratic messaging with the best of intentions, we come off as almost patronizing. We are a savior who’s coming in to save the day. I think that same example around the child tax credit. When we sold it, we sold it as we are lifting half of children out of poverty. Where that frames the government in the starring savior role and people as someone who needs saved. When we flipped that narrative and tested it with our values frame, which was that the child tax credit would provide families with the tools and opportunities they needed to get back to work so they could provide for their families, we were not only able to increase support for the child tax credit but we were able to increase support on the statement. ‘Democrats care about people like me’. And that I think is sort of the sweet spot that we want to be in when we’re thinking about these narrative elements and how they apply to the policies that Democrats are already enacting.
David Goldstein:
That is the thing that I was most impressed with in your narrative architecture, the primacy of putting working people back at the center of the economy, of making them the heroes of the story. Which is something I know as we’ve been pushing middle out from our office over the past five, six years, we’ve tried to impress on politicians but they don’t always seem to embrace.
Bobby Clark:
We did a test at one point. There was an ad that had come out from the House majority pack that was focused on, it was all the great things that Democrats had done. Democrats have lifted us out of this horrible crisis and all these policies are delivering for people. So we tested that. That didn’t read to us based on everything we’re seeing that really people see themselves as the heroes in their lives. They’re not looking for a savior. They want to be supported, they want people in their corner, but they do see themselves as the hero of their own story. And so we flipped the script and we tested it. It had to have with a message that was hardworking Americans have brought us back from the pandemic and Democrats are getting things done for them by lowering costs, bringing back supply chains. And so just that subtle change made a really significant difference in how people perceive the message. So with the same policies, the way we frame them makes a huge difference in how they’re received.
David Goldstein:
I’m curious, I don’t know in your research whether you have feedback on this, but Trump has this habit of making himself the hero of his narrative. That it’s no always nobody has done more for X than him. How does that play with voters?
Melissa Morales:
So it’s really interesting. This is actually my fourth interview today. We’re sort of in the midst of the all out blitz ahead of election day. And I’ve gotten this question about Trump a few times now. And my response has been that I think he would be very, very disappointed to hear that he is not at the center of people’s narratives anymore. He almost never comes up in conversations at the doors. And so I think in a pandemic year where Trump was out saying, “Jobs, jobs, jobs, we need to keep the economy open for working people”, people heard themselves as the center of that narrative. We were thinking about that in a year where the pandemic has exacerbated every everyday economic anxiety that people already have for people who didn’t have jobs and had been laid off, they needed a job desperately. For people who had jobs, they desperately wanted to keep those jobs. And so that sort of narrative, people automatically saw themselves. Working people saw themselves as the center of that narrative. So we’ve tested that and I think that is what people responded to more than the, “nobody has done more for X people than I have”. But I guess we will see if Trump decides he needs to run again in a 24, whether that remains true.
Bobby Clark:
One of the things that was also all very much a part of his approach and his narrative was his ability to make people feel seen and heard and valued. And so simply showing up in communities that often are not prioritized by politicians. Talking about the things that they desperately want to hear from politicians. So rebuilding supply chains. One of the things we’ve seen in this research is that is an enormous pain point for many Americans that we’ve outsourced so many jobs. It’s a huge part of why they understand that that’s a big factor, a big contributing factor to global supply chain breakdowns and rising costs. And he really focused on that issue. To the point that there was a survey last summer by another group that had Republicans held a 25 point advantage on trust fighting outsourcing. Which is really stunning because that’s never been a part of, it’s not been a major part of, that I’ve been able to discern of an overarching Republican narrative. But it was something that Trump really prioritized. And so it’s something we talk about in our narrative. Part of centering worker people is really focusing on the things they most care about. And he had a way of doing that so that it wasn’t just about [inaudible 00:17:40] personality. It was also really people felt seen and they felt like someone is focusing on the things that matter most to me.
Zach Silk:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that we often reflected on in 2016 at our shop. And as you know, we’re very narrative first here and we are been very focused on this idea of speaking to working people. And one of the dangers we saw with Trump was, set aside all of the horrifying racism and sexism and a variety of other isms. But some of his core message when he was going to places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, rural Pennsylvania, was he was elevating the issues that no one else were talking about. And I have to say it was obviously very potent and it was part of our nervousness headed into that election, was his ability to channel people’s understandable anger of feeling like the political system doesn’t work for them. And that, I think, has shifted a bit. I’m actually pleasantly surprised, Melissa, that he’s not so much on people’s minds now. And I think part of it is he’s moved away from that. It’s really much more about him now, his messaging and his communication. Although he’s done a lot of help to the Republican party by making people feel like they may be on the right side of a lot of these economic issues.
Melissa Morales:
Yeah, I think one thing that’s interesting about that in the way that Trump did it, because I never want to give him too much credit, is that he centered people’s concerns in a way that really played into the why them and why not me dynamic. Democrats are worried about these other people over here and they’re not worried about you. And it really set a dynamic of that dynamic of why them and why not me. Where I think we want to flip that with Democrats is that using this narrative by centering working people at the center of the messages that we are putting out there, what our research found is when we can answer the question of why not me for voters, the why them becomes much less important. So by centering workers in our narrative, we are showing them that they are important and it eliminates the why not me piece of that dynamic. In which case why them is not as at the forefront of everyone’s mind. So I think it really is more about not playing groups against each other but really leaning into workers as the driving force of our economy. And I think if we can do that, if we can center them, we answer a lot of the uncertainties in voters’ minds.
Zach Silk:
We’ve been at this for a while on this idea of middle out and the president has taken on this idea of building the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, which we couldn’t be more delighted about. And I’m curious what you saw intuitively voters had in their mind when they think about the economy and how that might have interrelated with this notion of middle out. Which really in our view is much of what you’re saying, which is really the purpose of policy should be focused on building the working and middle class because that’s what leads to prosperity in the economy. And I’m curious what you heard from voters themselves, what their intuitions were, as you were going through this project.
Bobby Clark:
I think that’s part of the value of starting as we did. After our big research scan we started with a lot of just listening. And because we wanted to hear what did people come up with on their own? How do they feel about jobs and work and how does the economy work and what does it look like for there to be a good economy? What does it mean to you? And so we had so much rich content from people just speaking in their own words with their own perceptions. And the thing that really was striking to us is that just how overwhelmingly people believe in this idea of a middle out economy. That average working folks, small business owners, family farmers, that they really are the engines of the economy. If they’re doing well, that means the economy’s doing well. That’s how we should measure the health of the economy, not how Wall Street’s doing. That’s just what people came up with on their own.
And to the point that Zach, we had a bit of an internal debate about… I was actually overstating for some on our team, I was overstating that point in some of our early presentations about our call, that to the degree there was a fight about trickle down versus middle out we seem to have won. The people who have worked on that have done great work. But I was reminded by a lot of our research team that there still are these notions of trickle down that persist to people. And so we argue that middle out economics is really important for us to expressly assert and have as part of an area for two reasons.
One is we need that to be activated in people as they’re thinking about our policy agenda like raising wages and student debt relief and all of those things. But it’s also true that it is very popular. It is incredibly popular. It was even popular with rural people and people who are more moderate. But it’s a popular across all groups. And so it’s a powerful place to be in messaging. If you can make a statement that is going to get a lot of enthusiastic head nodding and then follow that with the policy prescription or the candidate you’re talking about, it really is a powerful idea that we believe is widely held by people.
Melissa Morales:
Also, a couple of follow ups to that. I think first is that it feels like the pandemic really created a moment in an environment where workers realized how much they are worth and the fact that they are really, that it is the workforce that is driving the economy and not the top down. With the economy shutting down and people having to stay in and everything that happened that was wrapped up with the economy during the 2020 pandemic year, it really showed people, A, we are the driving force in this economy, and B, there are things that we need to be demanding in exchange for that. Like good wages, like good healthcare, all of it. It created this whole moment where people really had that aha light bulb moment.
The second point that I would make is in regards to, there’s still that little bit of trickle down that hangs on in people’s minds about whether when big corporations do good, that means they do things like create jobs. And I’m thinking of, for example, Walmart. Where I’m from a small rural town in Kansas and Walmart is one of the biggest employers in town. So I think that is why because that little bit remains in people’s minds, it is so important that we get the villain messaging and the villain narrative correct. Which is that we can’t talk in absolutists. It can’t be all corporations, it can’t be a sort of all type of messaging. It has to be tied to bad behavior. So it’s not just billionaire corporations, it’s billionaire corporations who are raking in record profits and raising prices on working families. That sort of bad behavior people get and that’s why it’s so important that we are very specific and exact about how we use that messaging.
David Goldstein:
It’s interesting about your first, point during the pandemic when we started labeling low wage workers as essential workers, it appeared in the moment to be a language that was used as a force of coercion to force people to risk their health and the health of their families to get back to work. But it really seems, through the pandemic, that low wage workers took that to heart. That they-
Melissa Morales:
Absolutely.
David Goldstein:
That the folks working in restaurants and in grocery stores and elsewhere, they were essential, they are essential. And that’s a notion that has been lacking from our economic narrative for several decades.
Bobby Clark:
That’s absolutely right. We were really struck as we were doing this cause the pandemic was still going. And there were a lot of folks in our research team that have been at this a long time and it was just really clear to everybody that the pandemic in some ways was just a huge economics class for everybody in society. People got to see very clearly their role in the economy. They got to see that the economy is a thing that is constructed, it’s intentional. And we can make different choices. It’s not just a thing that exists.
David Goldstein:
Right. When your employers and your political leaders are telling you you’re essential, it makes sense that you realize you should demand to be paid that way. And I think that’s a lot of what we’ve seen.
Zach Silk:
It wasn’t that long ago that people thought of the economy like the weather. Which was a thing that happened to them that was based on natural forces that were out of people’s control. And in reality the pandemic reminded everybody that the economy is constructed and choices are made about how the economy works. And their role in the economy, I think, was really crystallized. We’ve often lamented that people treat the economy like the weather which means that they let a lot of policy makers off the hook. These policy makers made decisions that put them into the mess they’re in and we need to make decisions that get them out of the mess. But it’s not going to happen naturally like the weather.
Bobby Clark:
Yeah, absolutely.
David Goldstein:
We’re, I don’t know, what, 20 minutes into this and we haven’t actually specified the specifics of your narrative. I know Melissa, you mentioned at one point about having 120 pages of research. But the project managed to drill this down to a four pager. Could you just share with us the five major elements of your narrative?
Bobby Clark:
So the first point of the narrative is we have to center working people, the heroes. That’s the starting point.
The second element of the narrative is that we have to demonstrate that we value work, we appreciate work. And we can do that in a couple of ways. We can focus on the fact that people are so hard working and what they should be able to expect for that. We can also talk about the fact that we aspire to support people in their work. So statements like it’s not just about more jobs, it’s about jobs that pay people enough to take care of themselves and their families and contribute to their communities. Because those are the things that people want. And Melissa talked about agency earlier, people want to be the architects of their own life, they want to be participating members of society, and their work is a key way that they do that and they want to see that we understand that, appreciate it, value it and are focused on that.
Number three in our narrative is middle out economics. It’s really, in some ways it’s the heart of the narrative. It’s a point of agreement with people broadly but it’s also something we need to make sure and have activated in people’s minds as they’re thinking about the policies, the policy agenda that we have and the things we’re focused on, which are on them. And there are lots of ways to do it. We can make statements like working people are the engines of the economy. Everyone understands that. We recently tested the President’s language. We need economy from the bottom up and middle out. People understand that. That’s very popular. We can make statements like when workers do well we all do well. There are lots of ways to lean into middle out economics, but it’s really important that it be present.
Number four, Melissa spoke earlier about the importance of getting the relationship of government to people right. There’s a lot of energy around this idea in the progressive movement that government needs to have a supporting, not starring role, but we don’t have a lot of facility and we don’t have the language to do that. What we have suggested, and we again drew this from a prior project that was a big branding project that was done for the Democratic party, that we believe everyone should have the tools and opportunity to build a good life. Tools and opportunity as opposed to helping is received very differently, even when we’re talking about the same policy. Other language we can use for that, everyone needs a foundation.They can build on. All of those things, the important part of that story is what people do with that foundation and what they do with the opportunities and tools. Equipping people with those things is not the end of the story.
And then finally the fifth point is we need to always remember to relate our policies broadly to everyone and to the economy. And on that point we point to the work of Professor John Powell from this Center for Inclusion Belonging at Cal Berkeley who has really put forward this idea, targeted universalism. There are lots of people who do that kind of work .but I think he’s really contributed some really nice language to think about it. But we engage in a lot of targeted policies on the left and we do a better job in advocating for those policies if we take the time to make the case of why it’s not just good for the people for whom we’re targeting, but it’s also good for all of us. And there are ways that we can do that.
On student debt relief, one of the tests we did is reminding people that that’s part of a broader agenda that’s about lowering costs of healthcare and energy bills. When we do that, that’s received differently by people. We can also make the case that when working people get a chance to get ahead, like the millions of people who will experience education debt relief, they’re going to turn around and spend that money in other ways. A lot of that work’s been done on also when minimum wage increases. That it’s not just about the minimum wage workers, it’s about all of us. And in some ways, that’s all very sort of inherently part of middle out economics, but just remembering to make simple statements like that’s good for everyone, good for the economy. That alone changes how people receive it.
So those are the five narrative elements. And again, I think middle out economics is, I think in a lot of ways the heart and soul of this.
Zach Silk:
Kind of narrative work is long run, as we all know. It takes a long time to have it developed and baked and then distributed and people to adopt it. And yet here we are, only a few weeks away from the election. I’m curious what your thoughts are as practitioners and Melissa, I know you’re observing and overseeing people in the field. How is this project impacting this election? How do we see it so far?
Melissa Morales:
Yeah, so I can say from a program perspective that. I think a couple of things. Is that we have been working really hard on the core project team to basically brief as many people as we can to get this socialized and out there. To have people talking about it and using and implementing immediately. And have been trying to provide the resources for people to be able to do that. So that’s step one.
I think step two is what is the actual implementation look like? Somos is definitely using this messaging in all of the work that we’re doing. And that’s this massive door to door program that we’re holding but also TV ads, radio ads, digital ads. This messaging is in everything that we’re doing and baked in as well as at a lot of our partner organizations. And then I think has been really exciting for us to see that there are, as campaigns start to publicly put out ads, that we’re seeing some of this messaging begin to be mirrored there. I think for example, Senator Cortez Masto, some of her past few ads are very much mirroring this narrative. And I think whether that’s because they have seen it and are using it or they are seeing the same thing in their research. Either way, I think seeing this narrative get out there has been very, very exciting for us.
Zach Silk:
One of the things that we’ve run into a lot in our work as we’ve been trying to center working people in our economic narrative, is there is a resistance on elements on the left to talk about hard work. I don’t know exactly what to ascribe that to. I think some of it is this feeling of exploitation. Obviously the way we’ve designed our economy over the last 40 years, there’s been a lot of worker exploitation. But at the core of an American of value set is this idea of working hard. And I know from what I’ve seen in your research that’s echoed back to you from workers. That there’s an honor and dignity about work that matters to voters. Yet we find a lot of folks in our progressive allies who are very resistant to adopting that kind of language. And I just wanted the two of you to reflect on that because I think we know it’s a tension in the progressive movement.
Bobby Clark:
There are valid reasons why people on the left are leery about it. There are ways that the right has tried to weaponize this idea of hard work in very racially, very overtly racially and racialized ways. There is, we believe fervently in a robust safety net and or want to guard against things like work requirements. And then there’s also some in the progressive movement who correctly believe that we all have inherent worth just as human beings and that should be valued and that an emphasis on work can take away from that. And we even had, well…
So the thing that we’ve contributed and we’ve had lots and lots of conversations with organizations that are very boldly progressive about this and that we don’t have to be… What most people value around work is not something we need to be afraid of. It’s not inherently conservative. And if we’re seeding that ground to the right and the ways that they try to speak into that, then we’re not even competing over these values that are so central to people. There was a survey by More in Common in 2018 that led to their Hidden Tribes report. And they asked a series of paired response forced choice questions to try to get at underlying values. And one of the questions was, which played a greater role in where you are in your life today, hard work and effort or luck and circumstance? Overwhelmingly across the population people will say hard work and effort. People of color will say that at a higher rate, even than white people. Latinos and rural people say that at the highest rate, is over 80%. We see our work as very important and central in our lives. And the only way that looks different is we look at ideologically and a group of about 10% of the population [inaudible 00:35:58] of activists will say luck in circumstance is more important and about 70%, I believe.
And so it’s not that we’re wrong, I might have answered the same way because we see all of the structural unfair ways that people are disadvantaged, no matter how hard they work. But it doesn’t take away the fact that most people see that their work is really important and central in their lives. And provides a lot of self-worth, being able to provide for your family, being able to participate and contribute in society. And so we just need to understand that first of all, that is not an inherently conservative view. That’s that those are the values that people hold around work. We need to show that we value that too. And we don’t have to give into any of the right wing framing or ideas to do that. We can do that with an authentically boldly progressive value set and agenda. Melissa, you’ll much better job of speaking to this than I did.
Melissa Morales:
No, I think that was great, Bobby. And I think it was a really good point to ask this question because there is that sort of tension there. Should we be talking about this at all? And I think where my mind goes is how could we not? The amount of times that the concept of hard work and those exact words came up in our conversations, in our interviews with people, was staggering, consistently came up. And I think where we struggle with it is to that point that so much of hard work has been exploited and not respected. I think it’s a lot less about the dignity of work, which sets up this dynamic that was hard for us to get through in focus groups and interviews. But when we got down to it with people was really much more about respect. And I think there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about this. I think we should absolutely not be leaning into the Republican frames of romanticizing physical labor for the sake of physical labor or the bootstrapy rugged individualism that Republicans have really leaned into around exploiting people’s hard work.
But what was interesting to me during this research project is that’s not how we heard people talking about it. That’s not how people talked about their own hard work or how they saw themselves. We really heard hard work being used not as a noun itself, but as an adjective. They’re hardworking people, that’s who they are. They’re hardworking people. So recognizing people’s humanity, but that this is something that’s a part of their identity. And the importance of hard work for people was based in family and opportunity and dreams and agency and all of these values. Over and over, we heard the word contribution, which really does align with the collectivism of the left and is something that we can lean in on. And I think what we found, which was really eye opening to me, was in setting up that dichotomy that frames hard work on one side as romanticizing physical labor and they’re exploiting you and hard work on the other side about respect and what we should be demanding in return for that hard work, by setting up that the dichotomy, we really allowed voters to reject the value frame of romanticized physical labor and a bootstrap economy that Republicans were offering.
David Goldstein:
Our final question, and we give you free reign on this, is why do you do this work? Melissa, why do you do this work?
Melissa Morales:
The reason that I’m really feel passionate about this work and about this project in particula. Is coming from the home that I do, my parents both have an eighth grade education. They both fit into this working class narrative. That’s how I grew up and really grew up seeing the sorts of bad policies and the way that they affected us and what could we do to get good policies enacted. And so that’s what I do every day, whether it’s trying to figure out how we’re messaging better from a policy perspective or trying to reach voters. And I think for me that’s really the beauty of this project, is it is one of the first messaging projects that I have seen where I feel like if I take this home to my dad and when I take this home to my dad and my mom, that they can actually connect with this message. That it gives us something to aspire to, that it gives us something to demand and it gives us a frame to do that. So really excited to be a part of this and to be carrying it out in the field right now.
David Goldstein:
And Bobby?
Bobby Clark:
I think for me, my first big immersion into deep at scale narrative work was in the marriage equality movement. That’s actually where I met Zach for the first time. And I got to have a front row seat to the pivot we made on that movement from a rights and justice frame to a love and commitment frame, which was all about overcoming the othering of same sex couples and being able to help America feel more connected to same sex couples and also to the issue. And I saw how powerful and transformational that was to get it right and that we could go from an issue that was in the thirties and seen as a political liability on the left to being actually something that was a powerful winning issue. And I think a lot of the lessons from that movement and the work that was done on marriage are broadly applicable on other issues.
And I think on jobs and the economy, I think one of the things we do on the left is we actually other ourselves by communicating to ordinary working folks in ways that don’t resonate with them and make us seem as though we’re unlike them and can’t be trusted. And we can change that. It’s not true and we can change it. And I’m really encouraged with how far we’re come in this project and I hope that we can keep going.
David Goldstein:
Well, thank you both for the work you’ve done, for all the hard work you’ve done.
Melissa Morales:
Thank you so much for having us.
Zach Silk:
Well I want to reiterate what I said at the top. One of my favorite words is winning. I like winning. And apparently this crew does too. And part of winning is starting where voters are. The great challenge of the entire left apparatus, whole progressive movement, is it does not center voters first. It lectures voters on what they should do and who they should be and why their ideas are better than the voters’ ideas. Let me tell you, that just doesn’t work. I have got to say, I think one of the most important things is to start where they are. And people, understandably, they take pride in their work.
And the interesting thing, and I can say this because I did not come from an elite background. I came from a hard working background. People had a lot of pride in their job. And one of the great tragedies of the market fundamentalism and the trickle down ideology has been, it’s hard to have pride in your job when you are being so exploited. Because your job is no longer prideful when you’re being so exploited. And I think we need to get back to, it’s good to have pride in work, it’s good to have pride in your job. That’s where they begin, that’s where people begin, in their world.
Now, the big forces are at play and there’s no doubt about it that the system tilts all of this to this lucky few, which part of our job is to rearrange that. And if honoring work is part of getting the rearrangement, we should embrace it because that’s going to lead to winning.
David Goldstein:
And so this gets to one of the best approaches to something like this when you have a narrative that works against you, you need to co-opt it. You need to grab onto what they’ve primed voters to understand and give it that 180 degree twist. And I think the best example of this, and we’ve talked about it many times on the podcast, was when it comes to the minimum wage, this idea that if raise the price of something, people buy less of it. If you raise wages, it’s going to kill jobs because businesses will hire fewer workers. And people understand that they’ve internalized it, that is a supply side argument. And we come in there and we make the pro worker flip where we say, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers. And that is the inverse. It’s the demand side argument. And it’s not entirely a middle out argument but it does put workers at the center of the economy. It says that the way you make businesses grow is to pay workers more so that they’ll have more customers who can buy more stuff. And voters are set up to understand that to be true. And if you have a choice between the market fundamentalist raising wages, kills jobs and the middle out when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers, I think most workers would prefer the latter.
Zach Silk:
Yeah. Well, let’s just say it. Listen, this is an election season. It’s extremely important that you register to vote and you cast your ballot by Tuesday, election day. Most people out there have options, all kinds of options, early voting, absentee voting, any number of things. Make sure your vote, it’s incredibly important. Your vote does matter. And what we’re hoping to see is that in this election, we begin to make progress on instilling this narrative in the political ecosystem and we keep pressing forward.
David Goldstein:
On the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we’ll talk about how big tech captured creative labor markets with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, The authors of the new book, Chokepoint Capitalism.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer, follow our writing on media at Civic Skunkworks and peak behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.