The Much-Maligned Democratic Brand

How the GOP flipped the narrative from success to failure

I voted last month at the Southampton campus of SUNY Stony Brook. After showing my ID, a volunteer handed me a broadsheet ballot with one side listing candidates’ names under the offices they sought and the other showing several local referenda.

I did not recognize a single candidate’s name. But I did recognize the name of my political party for which I proceeded to vote up and down the ticket, fully cognizant of the extreme distress the other party has wrought on the nation through its overt corruption, gross incompetence, racism, and its implementation of Project 2025.

Flashback to 2014: I’m seated at my booth at NYC’s Balthazar restaurant with a DC-based colleague and Bill Burton, former U.S. Press Secretary to President Obama. I invited Bill to join us in order to gauge his reaction to a video initiative we were planning. I had coalesced a group of senior New York-based PR/marketing executives to help identify four timely political issues, e.g., access to healthcare, pocketbook economics, women’s and minority rights, the environment, etc…

We planned to crowdsource short video submissions from the public, but with one caveat: the videos must juxtapose the Democratic and Republican positions on each issue. We’d then seed and amplify the very best of these clips.

I laid it out for Bill over scrambled eggs. He looked at me and quickly said: It won’t work. He intoned that people don’t vote by party affiliation. They vote by candidate.

This past summer, I shared this decade-old breakfast encounter with a former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, the Obamas, and Joe Biden. Without skipping a beat, she said she concurred with Burton’s assessment, oblivious to the Republican strategy to destroy the Democratic brand and any semblance of policy success it could claim.

“…a vast, ruthless, corrupt, radical left machine that controls today’s Democratic Party” - Donald Trump

“…it was obviously a Democratic shutdown” - JD Vance

“a seditious and politically motivated influence operation” to sow “distrust and chaos in our Armed Forces” - Pete Hegseth on the six Democratic lawmakers behind a video on unlawful orders

“…the Democratic Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization” - Stephen Miller

“We have certainly witnessed Democrats taking extreme stances and backing radical criminal groups,” and claimed Democratic leaders have shown “support for terrorists like MS‑13 and Tren de Aragua.” - Kristi Noem

“House Democrats voted to shut the government down” and are “using the American people as leverage,” adding that they “knew it would cause pain and did it anyway,” which portrays Democrats as intentionally cruel toward ordinary families - House Speaker Mike Johnson

“Democrats” and “the left” are masters of gerrymandering and of driving crime and chaos in “Democrat cities” - Sean Hannity

To further elevate this denigrating discourse, Trump even tasked his social media content marketing team to produce a deep fake video putting words in Democrat leaders’ mouths that they never uttered:

Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and that “if we give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.” - not Sen. Chuck Schumer

There isn’t a day that goes by that Trump and his Republican sycophants don’t take to the airwaves and podcasts to call out the “Democrats,” nearly always preceded by some unsavory adjective. Sadly for the Dems, this strategic and incessant GOP badgering has proved wildly successful, despite the impressive policy successes of Democratic administrations, e.g., record-low unemployment, a rollicking economy, real infrastructure progress, and a future-forward clean-energy agenda.

The Orwellian GOP partnered with the right-wing media ecosystem to erase all of it, e.g.,

• Low Favorability: A July 2025 Wall Street Journal poll found that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, the highest share in that poll’s history, dating back to 1990. Only 33% held a favorable view.

• Approval Ratings: A Quinnipiac poll in early 2025 found that congressional Democrats' approval reached a record low of 19%, with 72% of voters disapproving.

At the same time, Congressional Democrats remain in a sick time warp of anachronistic decorum, using terms like “my esteemed colleagues” or “friends across the aisle” to describe Congressional Republicans in media interviews, even as these so-called friends vociferously malign them and their party.

Our video crowdsourcing project, which included a direct response mechanism to register voters, never came to fruition. However, I tried again to advance this compare-and-contrast communications approach during a spring 2016 meeting in the West Wing of the White House, just as Hillary was landing the Democratic nomination for President. I was subsequently introduced to HRC’s PR “consiglieres,” given lip service, and ultimately the hand. I guess my decades of NYC PR cred paled in comparison to the Beltway’s Democratic apparatchiks.

I do concede that a candidate’s public persona counts for a hell of a lot, e.g., Zohran Mamdani. Yet, every voter sees two primary teams on every ballot in voting booths across America, along with many unrecognizable candidates.

What should the Democratic communications consigilieres consider? In every interview and public appearance, their leadership and their surrogates must call out the Republican Party by name. They need to broaden their messaging beyond Trump, minimally to instill a level of comfort in a vote for their downtrodden party. Also, it’s unlikely this “president” will last a full second term. And it’s not just re-branding the Republicans in Congress, but also those in the Executive and Judicial branches, especially the six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

There should also be a paid advertising and influencer component to this strategy, as the fragmented and rightwardly shifting earned media ecosystem has lost more than a few teeth. There’s more than ample, fact-based material to construct a stark comparison of the GOP’s failed policies and ruinous efforts to undermine the Constitution with the enviable track record of past Democratic Administrations.

Trump is temporary, but Trumpism (Republicanism) is growing despite the anecdotal positive election outcomes thus far in 2025, which I believe occurred more out of disgust with the GOP than robust confidence in the Democratic candidates. The Dems are gaining by default, not through any discernible PR strategy of their own.

Peter Himler is the founder of Flatiron Communications, a NYC-based PR/digital media consultancy. He previously led the media practices at four of the world’s more esteemed global public relations firms.