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Donald Trump is waging a fascist takeover of the United States, siccing the Justice Department on his political enemies while deploying federal troops to “liberate” Washington, D.C., where crime has been steadily declining. Democratic politicians are responding the only way they know how: by heeding the advice of the wonks who helped get them into this situation in the first place — and whose advice is to avoid discussing what Trump is doing.
Blue Rose Research, the firm led by Democratic establishment darling David Shor, produced a memo earlier this month digging into the effectiveness of various messages related to Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C. The firm advised that messaging around Trump’s “rising authoritarianism” was “highly unconvincing,” while messages that say Trump wants to “distract” from his damaging tariffs or horrifying Medicaid cuts were more effective. Meanwhile, Republican messaging about how Trump is clamping down on gang violence tested through the roof.
The Aug. 15 memo, a copy of which was reviewed by Rolling Stone, could explain, at least partially, why Democrats haven’t exactly been going to the mat over Trump sending the military into the nation’s capital and him threatening to do the same in other liberal strongholds.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was asked Sunday on CNN what the party’s plan is to fight the president sending troops into Chicago. He only offered that Trump has no authority to do this, and that he supports the men and women working in law enforcement. He also, as the Blue Rose memo suggested is effective, cast the federal takeover as a “distraction” from Trump’s unpopular policies. Jeffries didn’t seem too worked up about any of this, delivering his talking points with a complacency that certainly did not bely that the United States is currently experiencing a militarized dismantling of representative democracy.
Republicans appear convinced — despite the polling data and public backlash to the contrary — that Trump’s military deployments and hostile takeovers on American soil can be a win-win situation for them politically. Various operatives and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that the “tough on crime” politics typically redound to their favor, so they welcome Democrats picking that fight. However, two Trump advisers note, if Democratic figures try to avoid the subject, or tread too gingerly, they risk looking weak to the public in the face of Trump’s displays of armed military force.
“Any Democrat who has to take a poll to find out that voters want to be safe from violent criminals has a more fundamental problem,” says John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters.
While Blue Rose Research isn’t a household name, the firm has enormous sway in the Democratic Party and with the liberal pundit class. Vox has described Blue Rose’s leader, Shor, as perhaps “the most influential data scientist in the Democratic Party.” After the election, New York Times liberal columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein invited Shor to explain why Trump won, characterizing him as “a very skilled interpreter of data” who “has gotten a lot of things right before other people did.”
Klein helpfully noted that Shor “works with campaigns and progressive groups, so he has a perspective from the inside,” without explaining the full significance of Shor and Blue Rose’s work to try to elect Kamala Harris, which failed spectacularly.
As the Times explained elsewhere, Blue Rose handled much of the ad testing for the Super PAC Future Forward as it worked to support Harris’ campaign. Blue Rose’s team was effectively embedded within Future Forward, which served as Harris’ primary outside spender and spent $560 million to boost the Democratic ticket in 2024. It’s worth noting that many of the ads run by Future Forward were completely unwatchable — overstuffed with tidbits about various policies, provided too quickly for a casual viewer to process and often presented by random narrators.
Blue Rose has worked with much of the Democratic Party apparatus — the Democratic National Committee; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its outside spending arm, Senate Majority PAC; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its independent arm, House Majority PAC.
The firm is prone to bold proclamations. Among its contributions to the 2024 campaign was the idea that running negative ads against Trump was ineffective, and contrast was more important, according to people familiar with the Blue Rose operation. (Democratic National Committee officials are still incensed that Future Forward eschewed attacks on Trump.) Another was that the Super PAC should deploy its ads late in the campaign, when the cake was already nearly baked.
These proclamations are typically based on experiments, randomized-controlled trials, that are supposed to determine the efficacy of ads and messages. Critics question whether this is a viable way to test the impact of political messages, as well as the methodology — which Blue Rose doesn’t share — based, in part, on who exactly is participating in its web panels.
Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, made an apparent dig at the methodology on Sunday, joking on X that the Democratic Party is being run by “people who sign up to take online surveys about the persuasiveness of various digital campaign messaging vignettes via consumer reward programs.”
One progressive research expert says the people participating in Blue Rose’s randomized-controlled trials are “terminally online people who take a lot of surveys for some kind of compensation.” (Another source put it more bluntly, describing the participants as “weirdos.”)
Blue Rose did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.
A common criticism of the Blue Rose model is that virtually no one consumes political ads or messages the way these participants are viewing them. Most people watching TV or scrolling through their social media tune out such messages or skip right past them; an ad needs to grab their attention in a way that won’t be replicated in the tests.
“A message nobody hears cannot persuade them,” says the progressive research expert. “They’re testing with a captive audience when their task is to actually get heard — meaning get people to stop scrolling in the first place. What they’ve tested is so bland no one is going to notice.”
There’s also the issue of what the firm is measuring. The questions about Trump’s takeover, for instance, were designed to measure how certain messages affect whether people do or don’t approve of Trump.
A Democratic Party operative says that’s “not how people’s brains work, it’s not how the media environment works.” The progressive research expert says that “Trump disapproval is a meaningless metric,” adding, rhetorically, “What do you get if more people disapprove of Trump?”
Talking about Blue Rose’s advice to Democrats to sidestep the topic of Trump’s military takeover, the Democratic Party operative notes: “Trump taking over D.C. by police force is salient right now. If you open up Instagram, it’s all you’re looking at — it’s out there, and people are seeing it. You can’t choose what’s salient.”
The operative notes that Blue Rose is, of course, selecting what messages to test. The messages are often written by its team — and those messages aren’t necessarily good.
Indeed, by its own metrics, the firm’s messages calling Trump’s military takeover a distraction from tariffs and Medicaid cuts only tested in the 52nd and 51st percentiles among the messages it’s tested so far this year — or “barely above average,” as the firm noted. Why not try writing more messages?
“If you try a message and it doesn’t work, the conclusion shouldn’t be that there’s no way to talk about this,” the operative says, adding that Blue Rose puts out its advice “with a lot of authority, and people listen to it.”
Beyond the basic premise, the methodology, and the messages the firm is choosing to test, there is something fundamentally unsettling about Blue Rose’s approach — and that of the Democratic Party — to Trump 2.0 overall.
In the military takeover messaging memo, the firm advised Democrats that people basically don’t want to hear about it — as Trump prepared to expand the military crackdown to other blue cities. Messages about Trump being a “wannabe dictator” tested poorly, yet Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator.” Messages about Trump putting “democracy at risk” tested badly, but just three days after the memo was released, Trump was promising to sign an unconstitutional executive order asserting that states follow his own rules for elections.
Trump is attempting a fascist power grab, out in the open, for all the world to see — and Democratic leaders and their wonks don’t feel like it’s worth their time to even warn the public about what Trump is doing, or what he’s likely to do next, let alone try to stop him. But what else, exactly, should America’s opposition party be doing right now?
As the progressive research expert puts it, “It’s absolutely mind-boggling to be discussing message testing in response to abductions, concentration camp construction, and unleashing [the] military on Americans.”
One Democrat who hasn’t been afraid to call out Trump’s regime is Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Harris’ vice presidential candidate.
“I am willing to say each and every one of us are unified around the idea that this cruelty must end, this slow-rolling attempt at undermining democracy,” Walz said on Monday during a Democratic National Committee meeting. “I always get in trouble for it and I’ll continue to say it, and I don’t think we do ourselves any favors when we don’t name it: These are fascist policies.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, meanwhile, on Monday posted a photo of himself standing alongside other Democratic officials in Chicago. “I am sounding the alarm on the real crisis we face today,” he wrote. “Donald Trump’s overreach is what our founders warned against — it is unprecedented, unwarranted, and un-American. There’s no emergency here that calls for military intervention.
Pritzker and Walz might have just failed the Blue Rose message test. On the other hand, they’re actually doing their jobs.
