Opinion: Progressives need to step up with year-round, aggressive advocacy for facts.

Conservative media is an iron dome of outlets and strategies, sheltering their audiences from news and information that would change how they view the people on their ballots.

Despite losing his gerrymandered dominance in the Wisconsin Legislature, give Assembly Speaker Robin Vos a little credit—even with a setback that large, he feels no pangs of conscience that would lead him to do anything differently with his smaller majority. Truth be told, it’s progressives who need to make some changes in order to win more elections, and a recent interview with Vos provides one example when it comes to talking to voters about things like taxes, spending, and our public schools.

When Vos was recently asked about state Superintendent Jill Underly’s plan to propose major education spending investments in the next state budget, the Speaker had a  succinct response—that he would oppose a “massive increase in education spending, when we just gave the largest increase in a generation like 18 months ago.”

Short and sweet—and not the full story at all. 

Your neighbor certainly doesn’t know the full story. He or she just heard a short and sweet summary that makes sense on its face. If progressives are to improve election outcomes, they need their neighbors to hear that Robin Vos answer and then think to themselves, “Wait, that doesn’t match what I’ve heard over and over again about how state school aid hasn’t kept up with inflation for 16 years in a row.” Or, “Wait, that so-called ‘largest increase in a generation’ was a budget gimmick. A ton of that money never went to schools except in name only.” 

But our neighbors don’t know these things. They’ve probably never heard them—or maybe they did once during a brief door visit from a candidate or volunteer. However, they hear things like what Vos said over and over again instead of the actual facts on school spending.

On my radio show recently, Chris Thiel from Milwaukee Public Schools, outlined the conservative budget gimmick—how the legislature was able to claim it allocated $1.2 billion to schools even though about half of it ($590 million) went directly to property tax relief. There’s nothing with property tax relief, but it’s wrong to call it the “School Levy Tax Credit” if it never goes to schools. That’s just plain old mislabeling.

“It isn’t funding that you can buy a crayon with,” Thiel told me. “You can’t heat a school building with it. You can’t pay a teacher with it.”

Yet Vos and Republican lawmakers are gaining traction with the message that there was a $1.2 billion allocation to our schools, even though it’s a lie. In the upcoming state budget debate, they will repeat their talking point to every education ally who tries to call them out on it during public hearings of the Joint Finance Committee. I’m not saying the allies shouldn’t come testify. I’m saying their points need to be heard far beyond the committee hearings and well beyond the few crazy weeks of an election campaign.

This is only one example, but it properly illustrates what progressives need to do going forward. Spread the facts. Relentlessly. 

For far too long, far too many of us have imagined facts as individual helium balloons that would, in time, float above the fray of misinformation and gently land upon a voter at just the right time—with one really good piece of political mail or one really good political TV ad or one really pleasant candidate visit. But that’s not how it works. Right-wing media has successfully stymied factual information by creating an “iron dome” of outlets and strategies. Those little fact balloons are under assault like no other phase of our lifetimes—buffetted by “bothsidesism,” “whataboutism,” and of course, “alternative facts,” originally known as disinformation.

There is only one way for an iron dome to be overcome and that is for it to be overwhelmed. 

Building a long-range ecosystem for messaging and media is a column for another day. But use this simple example from Speaker Vos to ask yourself how progressives can use every platform (radio shows, social media, newsletters, etc.) and every format (videos, graphics, text, conversations) to turn just one fact into many messages, delivered year-round. Truly, the mission for progressives is to turn each little balloon into an army of drones. Facts are on their side, but the messaging battleground is not.