Play it again, Joe. Biden bets that repeating himself is smart politics
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has his zingers (“This is not your father’s Republican Party”). He’s got patriotism (“This is the United States of America, dammit”). He’s got a geometry-based explanation on how to grow the economy (“from the middle out and the bottom up”).
Move over, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Biden has his own greatest hits, and he’s keeping them on repeat.
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If you’ve heard one of the Democratic president’s recent speeches, you’ve basically heard them all — and you’re sure to keep hearing the same refrains in the year-plus leading up to Election Day 2024. People in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah will get to sample the playlist starting Tuesday, when Biden makes a three-day swing through the Southwest.
Biden knows where the country is in the arc of history (“at an inflection point”). He knows what the middle class needs (“a little bit of breathing room”). Did you know his wife, Jill, is from Philadelphia? Yep, he “married a Philly girl” and will be “sleeping alone” if he fails to root for Philadelphia sports teams.
The repetition is a strategic choice — one with a scientific basis in a society that is loaded with distractions. People need to see his TV ads and speeches dozens of times before they truly absorb them, his campaign believes. The president has built a multi-decade political career on repeating the same stories to explain the principles behind his policies.
“That’s communications 101 — developing a compelling message and repeating it again and again,” said White House communications director Ben LaBolt, who noted that marketing has a “rule of seven” in which a customer generally needs to see a message at least seven times before making a purchase.
LaBolt noted that most voters are busy taking their kids to soccer, making breakfast or commuting to their jobs. ”They’re not consuming news like they’re sitting in the White House briefing room — you have to repeat a message over time so that people remember it,” he said, noting that this has become increasingly the case in a fractured media environment.
The president has staked his reelection on convincing a wary public that the economy is rock solid because of his policies.
That means Biden is putting his economic pitch on repeat, hoping to break through the daily clutter by delivering his message often enough that voters will recall it and accept it as truth. The White House thinking is that voters will turn out for him if they know that their new bridge, new factory or tax break for an electric vehicle came from his legislative accomplishments.
He’s even repeated in speeches the importance of repetition.
“We got to let people know what we’ve done and how we’ve done it and why we did it,” he recently told donors in Chicago after delivering a speech about “Bidenomics” — a term he has used at least 39 times during the past month in public remarks.
Philly girl Jill Biden has her own estimates for how often her husband deploys one of his other favorite phrases about the economy.
“It’s the future of our workforce, how we strengthen the economy from the bottom up and the middle out,” she said at a recent childcare event. “Joe has said that, I think, a million times.”
Close readers of the president’s speeches will note that sometimes “middle out” and “bottom up” switch places. The first lady led with with “bottom up,” while her husband has lately been more of a “middle out” guy. But the administration sees the Friday jobs report as proof that the philosophy works as 187,000 jobs were added in July and the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5%.
