A month ago in this space, I offered some arguments for optimism about the upcoming mid-term elections for the majority of Americans who don’t want to see Trump Republicans return to power. Voter turnout has jumped dramatically since 2016, and the voters who surged in to vote in 2018 and 2020 tilted more blue than red, meaning there are plenty of potential Democratic voters out there. Current events like the Ukraine war also still offer the possibility of scrambling voter leanings. And finally the demographic and geographic shifts caused by the pandemic and more white collar professionals taking advantage of work-from-home options to move out of cities might also tilt some purple areas in a bluer direction.

To be sure, I’m whistling past the graveyard. The national Democratic party is like the Titanic with the iceberg in sight but no ability to steer, struggling to govern with a very narrow majority in Congress and failing to connect much with voters. Liberal pollsters who focus on core Democratic constituencies like Black voters, working people and young people are especially worried, pointing to a huge collapse in enthusiasm and predicting that many of these vital voters will sit out the mid-terms. A recent story in the New York Times detailing how little voters even recognize the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed at the beginning of Biden’s presidency as making a difference in their lives only reinforces the warning signs of a coming electoral disaster.

Right now, national Democrats seem to be staking most if not all of their hopes on the upcoming hearings of the January 6th Select Committee, which has been investigating the Capitol riot and what led to it. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans haven’t forgotten about January 6th and still want the people behind it held accountable. As recent leaks suggest, there was a criminal conspiracy led by President Trump and abetted by many Trump Republicans to promote, pay for and pardon a deadly attack on our country and the democratic process. Televised hearings, which are now slated to start June 9th, could indeed “blow the roof off Congress” as Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the committee’s leading members, has been saying. But will it motivate Democratic voters along with moderate independents to come out this fall to block Trump Republicans from victory? Maybe, but only if we somehow buck the historic tendency of many Americans to forget everything but “what did you do for me lately.”

In that context, a recent memo from Mike Lux, a progressive political consultant with long experience from the bottom to the top of Democratic electoral politics, seems worth elevating. Working with the Lake Research polling company, Lux’s firm American Family Voices has been spending a lot of time talking to voters in the small- to mid-sized counties in the Midwest that have been hardest hit by deindustrialization. These “factory town” communities are where Democrats did well in 2008 and 2012, but then saw a net loss of about 2.6 million votes into Trump’s column. They’ve been slammed by bad trade deals, high rates of suicide and opioid addiction and the foreclosure crisis, Lux writes, and the unions that used to fight for them and involve them in politics are either gone or a lot weaker too.

Lux and his colleagues found two important things talking to these voters. First, Democrats can best win them over with populist economics: tax the rich, hammer corporations for price gouging and profiteering, bring jobs home, help small businesses against corporate monopolies are all themes that resonate and also offer an answer to voter concerns about rising inflation. But his second finding is more critical: These voters are sick of “partisan bickering” and not receptive to political messages from either party. Here’s what Lux, who makes a good part of his living producing political ads, wrote about this:

“Along with their cynicism about the political parties is an even deeper cynicism about political ads. We, of course, had a variety of reactions to the range of ads and statements tested, and some of them tested pretty well. Yet one of the things that struck me the most about the focus groups was that before showing people our ads, people would talk about economic issues in a way that was almost word-for-word similar to the ads we were about to show them, but after hearing those ads, some still would say things like ‘Oh, that’s what Democrats always say’ or ‘I just get tired of all the negativity in ads.’ Voters have heard so many ads over so many years that their natural tendency is to be skeptical of all of them. Campaigns are going to have to be creative about how to communicate with voters.”

This rings true to me. Politics as it is practiced today, in the form of messaging wars on television and online, is just too far from most people’s lives. A well-made ad may “go viral” on social media and generate campaign cash, but there’s not much evidence voters pay much attention or get persuaded by paid media. Most political scientists agree that paid political ads have no discernible or lasting effect on voter choices, but most political consultants keep making and running them because candidates and donors believe they work (and the consultants get a big cut whether or not they do). So Lux’s conclusion from this finding really astonished me: He says Democrats are “going to need a lot more to win this year than campaign ads: we need to build community.”

He goes on to describe what that needs to look like: “Candidates and party committees should be spending time doing things like sponsoring community events like [Ohio Senator] Sherrod Brown’s ‘movie nights,’ which he does in the old movie theaters of Ohio’s mid-sized towns, where the theme is to build community spirit and togetherness. Or they could set up events that were community health clinics where people come in and get health care assistance that they couldn’t otherwise afford. Or Chautauqua style events, where musicians, community theater performers, poets, and community organizations spend a day in a community.” Even better, I’d add, instead of opening campaign offices for a few weeks, stocking them with fresh-faced volunteers from out of town, and then closing as soon as the election is over, Democrats could invest in year-round community centers like the union halls of old, where people gathered to socialize, have a beer and talk politics.

Unfortunately, Lux is a rarity among his colleagues. I don’t think Democrats are likely to shift the tens of millions of dollars they now have slotted for expensive ad campaigns this fall into community fairs or mutual aid programs. They’re going to keep doing what they’ve always done and pray for a different result.