Democrats Must Take Opinion Data Seriously When Proposing New Programs

… Just quoting a poll that says that “a majority of Americans support proposal XYZ” reveals little or nothing about the actual appeal of a Democratic initiative. In past decades conservative think-tanks and their funders invested very substantial sums in public opinion and messaging research before they released major proposals. They recognized that it makes no sense to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political advertising that features conservative proposals and not invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in research on how to best package and present them. It is time for progressives and Democrats to follow their example and invest far more in serious in-depth opinion research on new progressive proposals than they have done up to now. CONT. – pdf

Andrew Levison, The Democratic Strategist