Becoming America’s Party.

A brand strategy for fixing politics (and possibly winning a presidential election).

Four years ago the political landscape was a mirror image of what we see today. The Democrats held the White House. The opposite party was conflicted over how to dislodge them. There were too many hats getting tossed into the presidential ring — frustrating Republican efforts to coalesce around a message.

Maybe you remember the fateful primary season that began with Ted Cruz announcing his candidacy on March 23, 2015. He was followed by the likes of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chis Christie, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, Ben Carson. The field finally topped out at 17. (The 2020 Democratic contest has easily blown past that number.)

Enter Donald Trump, who took root in the thin soil of the G.O.P. like an invasive species bred to thrive on chaos and discord.

Trump knew little about politics. He had a crude but, as it turns out, effective understanding of how brands work.

A brand begins with a simple, easy-to-repeat narrative. For Trump, it was speaking for an idealized “forgotten man” left behind by the world’s elites.

Brands use symbolism to maintain a grip on the fickle attention of the mass public. Trump had his hat and his wall.

Brands are powered by emotion more than logical argument. Fear and anger took the place of intellectual content in the Trump campaign. They continue to drive his governing philosophy.

We still argue over whether Donald Trump won because he was brilliant, or evil, or maybe just lucky. My simple explanation is the president understands himself as a brand. His candidacy came at a political moment best addressed by thinking more like a brand than a political party.

This is an important lesson for the Democrats as they rally their scattered forces for an assault on the Trump monolith in 2020.

Thinking in terms of brand strategy makes it possible to find some advantage in a surplus of presidential candidates. It helps the party get ahead of the “Democrats are Divided” storyline that makes for catchy headlines in the media. It creates an opportunity to position voting for Democrats as the best defense against those who betray our democracy for partisan advantage.

It’s the democracy, stupid.

What modern branding organizations do well is understand the emotional needs of the mass public, then come up with ideas that speak to them. The best ones know how to work our splintering universe of media and culture, connecting with the brand loyal as if they were a social movement.

Political parties tend to think more like an old industrial era manufacturer. They start with the product they want to sell (candidates and policies), then go looking for customers (a coalition of interest groups). Long before the rise of Donald Trump, the Republicans were demolishing this way of thinking — give them credit for being ahead of their time — but they failed to come up with any functional replacement. You might be reminded of the party’s approach to healthcare policy.

In a 2012 Washington Post essay “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem,” Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two scholars known for careful non-partisan analysis, described the modern G.O.P. as “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The Republicans have created a vacuum where the country once had an imperfect but working two-party democracy. It’s an opportune moment for the Democrats to step into the breach, building a brand as the only functioning party we have left.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics finds one useful.

Political strategist James Carville once kept Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign on-task by reminding everyone, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The highest-order worry in the current cycle may well be our democracy itself, for all the obvious reasons. There is fertile territory here for the Democrats, if they can maintain a Carville-like focus.

America’s Party.

Here’s what the Democrats should say right now:

“The voices in the Democratic Party are America’s voices. The debates you hear are the hard ones the country needs to have — only instead of taking place between the parties they are all happening in one party. The Republicans have turned their backs on the nation’s problems. Healthcare. Climate change. Economic justice. A lawless president. Democrats continue to believe the big problems we face today will be solved the way we’ve always done it. By Americans pulling together to find big answers. Join us in the conversation.”

It’s a narrative that would serve the party well in the coming contest. It boils down to a simple expression.

The Democrats have become America’s Party.

I’m not suggesting this as a slogan, stamped with a TM and attached to every communication. It’s more an opportunity to own a piece of the nation’s mindset. The way the Dallas Cowboys used to be known as America’s Team.

It’s a way of thinking and talking. Imagine the field of Democratic presidential candidates taking a pledge to govern the nation as a whole once elected. Voters would find it a welcome contrast to a governing party indifferent to everyone outside its narrow base, treating the rest of us as if we were somehow an enemy.

It’s a big, advantageous expanse of high ground left conveniently open by the G.O.P. With it comes much of the patriotic symbolism that allegiance to Trumpism forces Republicans to surrender. The Constitution. The flag. The Statue of Liberty. Truth. Justice. Honor. Freedom. Families. E Pluribus Unum. Amber waves of grain. Purple mountain majesties.

Perhaps most useful, a soft re-brand of the Democrats as America’s Party gives voters an emotional place to land that doesn’t feel so poisoned by the frighteningly divisive politics of the moment.

The china shop tires of the bull.

Donald Trump campaigned as a disruptor. It’s the one promise he has certainly kept. The appeal of this grows less as people come to understand what’s getting disrupted is their own daily lives.

The reality TV approach to governing — creating continual crisis to distract from continual dysfunction — has frayed the nation’s nerve endings beyond anything one might expect at a time of relative peace and prosperity.

The recent episode in which the president threatened tariffs unless Mexico stopped all migrants crossing the border is a prime example. It stirred up a wild week of economic chaos, only to end up right about back where the whole thing began. The storyline came off as too transparently manufactured. The ending was contrived. In the TV world this is called “jumping the shark.” It’s a good indication people are ready to change the channel.

Still, political wisdom is wary about making the contest about Trump. We hear the old “never wrestle in the mud with a pig” admonition.

Thinking like a brand offers a more nuanced approach. The communications strategy is less obsessed with the political clash at the top. More sensitive to the emotional currents running through the population at large. It leads us to compelling ways to tap into the exhaustion people feel right now.

In an interview with Pod Save America, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “Democrats should feel good about the fact that so many talented, well-reasoned people want to run for president.”

A brand strategy would elevate that, saying it’s Americans that should feel good. The change is subtle, but instructive. It leaves the candidates free to do what they do best — talk about their ideas for running the country — while the party works to hijack the narrative of an unruly primary season being a problem. Speak instead of it as the sort of rejuvenating energy our abused democracy needs, and a healthy alternative to the cult-like nihilism of the G.O.P. #JoinTheConversation would be a useful hashtag.

Such a strategy doesn’t have to shy away from being combative, as long as it does so in a voice that stays on-brand as the defender of our ability to work together and get things done. For example, #UnTrumpDemocracy.

It inspires bigger, more conceptual thinking. Some 11,000 lies into the Trump presidency the Democrats might borrow a page from John Kennedy’s 1960 campaign where he used The Missile Gap to hammer his Republican opponent. Make The Trust Gap a thing. Through every presidency beginning with George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington, America’s word has been a national asset. Now that’s all been squandered. It’s dangerous.

We don’t have to brainstorm the whole campaign here. The point is the brand strategy makes it easy to come up with ideas. They all ladder up to a broader brand narrative. And that helps a crowded field of competing presidential campaigns feel more like one.

When pundits say the Democrats need a communications strategy that makes it harder for Trump to own the news cycle and cast them as a socialist rabble, this is what they’re talking about.

The party isn’t over, yet.

The seeds of what we like to call the two-party system grew out of the turbulent years following the 17th century English Civil War. Elections for Parliament were being contested for the first time. Crowds were taking to the streets. Whigs and Tories emerged as nicknames for those arguing about shifting power to the people or to the king. Eventually the Whigs and Tories became formally organized to represent diverging political philosophies.

Political parties have ebbed and flowed ever since. Tories ended up on the wrong side of the American Revolution. Whigs went out of business in the U.S. when they flubbed their answer to the slavery question. The body politic ended up divided into Democrats and Republicans

The ground is shifting under the two parties once again, against a backdrop of social media, cable news, the internet, tribalism, Russian hackers, you name it. All these forces dilute party influence, making their world more Darwinian and unpredictable. Today’s party politics feel a lot like the free-market jungle where I’ve spent my career. That’s the world where brands evolved to help corporate organizations connect with a fluid public consciousness.

Following the 2016 election I started wondering if that meant the advertising and marketing disciplines might have better ideas for communicating in our brave new political world. At the time I wrote, “Ultimately, this isn’t about pushing the party to the left or right, or even to the center. It’s treating the majority of potential voters like a good brand treats its customers. Listening to them. Respecting them. Connecting with them emotionally.”

My thought experiment here takes that a step further, illustrating what a little creative thinking makes possible. Rather than waiting for the candidates to sort themselves out and give the party its spokesperson, it outlines a way for the Democrats to start working now to make the election a contest between “I alone can do it” and “We the People.”

The effort would require an adjustment of mindset. Politicians tend to see themselves as rational actors in a system built to debate competing policy ideas. I spent some time at party HQ during the last election. It all gets tactical in a hurry. There’s always another fundraiser to organize. Another bus tour. The all-important ground game. What I’m talking about here is more like strategic air support. It could be effective in the same way, if only because it’s an unexpected new tactic.

The world is changing faster than many institutions, including political parties, have been able to adapt.

The rise of populism has been one response.

A good branding strategy might be a better one.

Reference: Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem, by Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornsteinof the American Enterprise Institute, published April 27, 2012 in The Washington Post.