Renaming Your Toxically Unpopular Political Position Will Not Make It More Popular

You've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord. But you should probably try to please him some other way.

Hello friends and lovers,

Here are two brief thoughts on politics.

1. Republicans Poised To Waste Time And Money On Futile Rebranding Effort

Ever since Dobbs, Republicans have been underperforming electorally. This is not surprising since strategists in both parties spent decades predicting it is exactly what would happen if and when Roe was overturned.

Nevertheless, Republicans find themselves in a bit of a pickle. A majority of Americans are pro-choice, and that majority is, for the first time in 50 years, more motivated on this issue than the pro-life minority. So, what to do?

The answer is obvious: engage in the mature but painful work of accepting that your own positions are out of sync with the country and moving them ever so slightly to meet the voters where they are.

HAhahahaah. Just kidding.

They’re attempting to do what every political group does when their position is unpopular. They are trying to come up with magic words that will trick people into agreeing with them.

Here is NBC News:

Republican strategists are exploring a shift away from “pro-life” messaging on abortion after consistent Election Day losses for the GOP when reproductive rights were on the ballot.

At a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans this week, the head of a super PAC closely aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., presented poll results that suggested voters are reacting differently to commonly used terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, said several senators who were in the room.

Democrats love nothing more than this nonsense. If only we call global warming climate change! If only we call gun control gun safety! If only we call natural gas fossil fuels!

None of this ever works, as I documented last year. If you tell someone who believes strongly in the rebranding strategy that it never works, they will say, “Oh yeah? What about the death tax??”

The rebranders are very fond of the story of the conservative rebranding of estate tax to death tax. They credit this rebranding with magic powers of persuasion. Americans loved the inheritance taxes, the story goes, but then Republicans started calling it the “death tax,” and Americans said, “Death? That’s not a very good thing,” and they turned on inheritance taxes.

This is all bullshit.

“The impact of the term on public opinion seems to have actually been relatively modest,” Yale researchers wrote in 2007.

“To control for the impact of the ‘death tax’ terminology in question-wording, the 2002 National Election Survey asked the question in two parallel forms and reported a difference of barely more than two percentage points; 67.8 percent favored “doing away with the estate tax” and 70.0 percent favored“doing away with the death tax.9 The 2003 NKK poll found a larger difference, of 6 percent, when it added the phrase “that some people call the death tax” to a question about the estate tax.”

Read the long-ish post I wrote about this last year:

It gives me great joy that Republicans are now engaged in this idiotic exercise.