Framing the Choice Between Democrats and Republicans
In a 10-minute speech last Tuesday, James Talarico showed how it's done
The real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.
On Friday, I wrote that a perfect storm of events is forming to give Democrats their best chance in decades to win a statewide election in Texas. One of the items I addressed is the way the Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico talks about the choice facing voters.
Today, I would like to revisit Talarico’s acceptance speech to look at why I think it’s so effective, and how it could work as a model that any Democrat—regardless of their ideological positioning—can use to make a compelling case to voters.
Talarico’s framing centers on the above quote—that regardless of where we fall on the left-right spectrum, the real fight we face isn’t with each other but with those who lord over us by manipulating the political system to advance their ends at our expense.
This framing removes his campaign from the tired left-right debate that Republicans have been adept at using to divide the country and refocuses it on those invested in stoking those divisions. These terms favor progressives, who are at their most electorally potent when voters are united against an economic adversary who can credibly be presented as making life harder for people.
Talarico identifies this adversary as “the most powerful people in the world” who have broken our political system, our economy, and our social relationships because it serves their ends. Effective political framing defines an “us” and a “them”—and Talarico clearly identifies where voters should train their ire:
The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So they divide us on an hourly basis by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. They are closing our schools, they’re gutting our health care, they’re raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. …
Those billionaires want us looking left and right at our neighbors instead of looking up at them. They want to keep us from seeing all that we have in common. They want to keep us from realizing that there is far more that unites us than divides us.
Not since the Occupy movement contributed the idea that 1% of the country is setting the terms for the remaining 99% has there been such a clearly articulated statement about the politics of top-versus-bottom. But unlike Occupy, this is coming from a Senate candidate in red Texas.
The power of Talarico’s framing rests with how it resonates on so many levels.
It’s a moral statement. Talarico couches his opposition to the super-wealthy in the moral language of social justice while speaking to how people feel abandoned by a political system that doesn’t address basic human needs.
I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself. That’s what motivated me to go into public service. …
Despite our differences, we all really want the same things. A safe neighborhood, a good job with good benefits, a high quality, well-funded public school. And the ability to see a doctor when we need one.
A moral politics would address these inequities. An immoral politics serving the greedy few has not.
For decades, Democrats have ceded the language of morality to Republicans. Talarico reclaims it.
It links the virtue of “love thy neighbor” to public policy—and to a progressive agenda.
As a legislator, I’ve brought Democrats and Republicans together to take on corporate special interests, to lower the cost of housing, lower the cost of childcare, lower the cost of prescription drugs, including insulin. I am trying to love my neighbor through public policy.
Talarico asserts these are basic human needs that government is called upon to address—not items that should be managed by charities or private efforts outside the public sphere. By centering public discussion around them he is making a moral case for policies that progressives can enthusiastically support.
It is an aggressive message—and a bold one. By aiming high, Talarico is attempting to transcend petty politics and cast his campaign as a movement:
This is a people-powered movement to take on this broken, corrupt political system. … We’re not just trying to win an election. We’re trying to fundamentally change our politics. …
We cannot defeat the politics of division with more division. We can't win their game. We have to change the game. …
If you have voted for Democrats but you're tired of DC Democrats always folding, you have a home in this campaign.
It is an inclusive message.
My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. …
If you if you hate politics and you've never voted before, you have a home in this campaign. … And if you voted for Donald Trump but you are fed up with the extremism and the corruption in our government, you also have a home in this campaign.
It is a patriotic message. For generations, Republicans have successfully coopted patriotism and equated it with a right-wing agenda. Talarico challenges that connection and recasts patriotism as caring for one another:
This campaign is rooted in a fierce love for the state [of Texas], for this country and most importantly for all of our neighbors.
It’s a fresh message aligned with the appeal of generational change.
We're done being divided. We're done being played. We're done being pitted against each other. That old politics is dying, and a new politics is being born.
Talarico draws a sharp distinction from prior Republicans and Democrats by rejecting the politics of the past. His message is timely—and effective—because it draws on the disappointment and anger people are experiencing with MAGA governance. It might not have worked before Trump started destroying things, but it should find an audience with people who are looking for change and those who want the Democratic party to represent something new.
It’s a message that preemptively rebuts the predictable attacks that are coming, framing them as old and tired—an extension of the old politics that Talarico’s campaign has rejected. Of “the powerful people” who broke our political system, he says:
They're going to throw everything they have at us. They're going to call me a radical leftist. They're going to call me a fake Christian. They'll call our movement un-Texan, un-American. They'll call us a threat.
The only truth is we are a threat.
Talarico couches his moral message in scripture, which is an effective tool to use in Texas and other red parts of the country where progressives have been marginalized as amoral coastal elites. He references a certain “barefoot rabbi” from a prior millennium who preached love of God and neighbor, who “didn’t stay in his room” and took action against the corrupt elites at the seat of power.
This message comes naturally to a Presbyterian seminarian, but it is not an essential element of Talarico’s framing. Other candidates can adjust it to their background and audience. A secular framing of the top-versus-bottom message would be just as effective if it is communicated in moral terms.
The beauty of Talarico’s us-versus-them framework is that it can work as naturally with an audience of Democratic Socialists as it should in rural parts of Texas. And while it is best suited to a young candidate who is unaffiliated with the politics of the past, Talarico’s framing can unite Democrats in a year when voters are craving to be heard and are angry at the status quo but do not want to revisit the status quo ante.
As Democrats opportunistically expand the political map, they need to begin thinking about how they can win everywhere—especially in places where the politics of division have shut them out for years.
James Talarico has a simple and effective framework for making the case to voters who are becoming available to Democrats as the Republican party loses its moorings. I expect his message to resonate in Texas during the general election the way it resonated in the primary.
And if it can work in Texas, it can work anywhere.
This is such a good analysis of why James' message has broad appeal!
James hits the right notes. I am so tired of the left vs right argument. We are all in this together. Divided we fall. I don't have to see eye to eye with my neighbors to appreciate them as people who have many of the same fears and hopes that I have.