At a certain point we have to accept that it's not "messaging" it's the product. I have my healthy disagreements with the product, especially on Gaza and immigration, but it's obvious which product is better between what Kamala offered and what Trump offered.
I don't think there's any "messaging" that can sell decency to bad people.
No, this one's on the voters. My working theory on radicalization is that the Dems' party leadership completely ceded all these spaces (podcasts, video games, streamers, low brow events like MMA) and assumed nothing would change from 2022. As usual, the Dems' party leadership grossly miscalculated the consequences. Gen Z (males mostly) underwent a change in their values at a time when they had developed zero party loyalty.
The good news is that there are voices from the left and from the center who are already in these spaces. The infrastructure is there.
The hard pill for the party leadership to swallow is that the voices in these spaces with the greatest ability to win back Gen Z are not people with whom the party elites have ever shown a willingness to work. They would much rather trot out Oprah, Beyoncé, and Jimmy Kimmel. If I'm being honest, the GOP has done a far better job of actually responding to what young people in their movement have been asking for. Their outreach has adapted to how young people in the 2020s think, as well as how they consume media.
The Dems? Well, they had some cringeworthy "Creators for Kamala" initiative, exhibiting the same inauthenticity that plagued the candidate herself as people grew accustomed, then tired, of her stump speech.
There are 74M bad people, and as long as Dems continue to allow it to happen by ignoring how Gen Z thinks and consumes media, that number will grow even as older Republicans die out.