Imaginary Money Beach

There's a model of politics that the political and media class live inside so completely they've stopped noticing it's a model and not real life.

Let’s call it ‘imaginary money beach.’

It looks like a long stretch of sand and the voters spread from one end to the other; progressives at the far left, MAGA at the far right, everyone else somewhere in between, with most voters clustered closer to the middle. Your job as a party is to figure out where to put your ice cream stand. Place it too far left and you capture more of your base but lose the middle. Place it too far right and you lose your base chasing moderates as they vote third party or opt out all together. The optimal placement is somewhere near the center, close enough to your base that they'll walk in for you, close enough to the middle that you pick up the ‘persuadables’ who could go either way.

This is the median voter theorem built on imaginary thinking where unending economic growth is both possible and good. It has been the operating logic of Democratic Party strategy since Clinton ’92. It's why consultants and pundits talk about "moving to the center," why candidates triangulate, why every platform gets smoothed into something bland and inoffensive enough to not scare anyone in the middle or ever make actual change. The beach is assumed. The voters have no other choices. The only variable is candidate placement.

Part of why Obama in 2008 is considered such a success was because he didn't move to the center, he ostensibly moved left and found a whole new crop of voters who had never bothered to vote walk to the stand before. Young Millennial voters, first-time voters, people who had concluded the ice cream wasn’t really worth it. He didn't win the middle. He expanded his reach and found new voters.

But that was the imaginary money beach at its most functional, before the ’08 crash, when social media was considered a social good; a moment when enough people still believed voting the beach was worth visiting.

Here's what the model doesn’t account for: the people who are leaving the beach entirely, or who had such a bad experience they will walk farther just to vote for a competitor because they don’t like your business practices.

They're not at the progressive end. They're not at the MAGA end. Some are surfing. Some are foraging in the woods. Mostly they are stuck in beach traffic. They're doing something else altogether because they've concluded, rationally, based on decades of evidence, that the imaginary money beach has nothing for them, or they are unable to access the beach altogether. Together they agree however, that whatever flavor the ice cream stand is serving this cycle, it won't taste like anything that changes their actual life and that sitting on the beach waiting for it to change is a chump’s game.

They need an ice cream stand that can throw a party and lure them back. The real marketers in the house know it’s not an issue of placement, it’s a failing brand and a shitty product. Getting those citizens back isn't a stand placement problem. It's a frequency problem.

Why it's called the imaginary money beach:

The beach itself is a construct of the imaginary money world; the VR where monied consultants opine to monied media personalities, and work with other grifters who take real money and make vaporware. For them the world of politics is a game of positioning, where the question is which message tests best with which demographic segment, where a $3,000 voters pamphlet fee is a minor administrative cost rather than a month's rent, and voters just have to be served the ‘right story’ and who have no other power to make change.

The people who built the beach, who maintain it, who sell the ice cream: they live fully in that world and can’t imagine the lives of the people who don’t. Their material reality is stable enough that politics feels like chess. Move the piece here, capture the voters there, optimize the placement.

But a growing number of voters live somewhere else entirely. They live in the bill money traffic jam on 101- they can see the beach, but they know they will never get to live there. Costs keep going up and nothing else does, career loyalty is a trap, homeownership is a fantasy, and the math to find a parking spot and get to the sand doesn't work no matter how carefully they run it. The youngest three generations of Americans (45 and younger) own only 11% of US assets. Boomers own 51%. That's not a policy statistic. That's a description of two different physical realities. Two different relationships to the beach.  More and more people are getting drop kicked off imaginary money beach, not because they don't care, but because a layoff or other unexpected emergency put them back in the traffic jam they thought they had escaped, while others opt out in whatever way they feel they can.

Marketers understand something the ice cream stand consultants don't:

Getting people to buy ice cream requires getting them to the beach in the first place. The people who have left aren't going to respond to better placement. They respond to the right noise, the right frequency and tempo, that makes the beach feel worth coming back to. Not because the stand moved. Because something about the beach itself changed, because the ice cream stand moved off the beach and started selling in traffic.

This is what Obama understood in 2008 and what the Democratic establishment has been trying to replicate ever since without understanding why it worked. It wasn't the messaging. It wasn't the positioning. It was that enough people who had left the beach heard something that made them believe it might actually be different this time.

They were mostly wrong. The beach didn't change that much. Bernie started a pretty good beat, but it was easier to talk about stupid people and uninformed apathetic voters and hating Republicans as a way to fundraise… and so the next cycle fewer people came back, and the cycle after that fewer still, and now here we are: a Democratic Party that keeps optimizing its ice cream stand placement while the beach empties around it, and smug consultants who keep insisting the problem is that the stand isn't centered correctly or doesn’t have the right bunting. Who call themselves progressive, while profiting from the game they have created of our governance. The middle aged white dudes who dismiss the young mothers and trans activists talking about bill money realities as unserious because they can't afford the entry fee they have added to access imaginary money beach.

The Challengers were directly asking voters: how do we make the beach worth coming back to? And the entire political establishment dismissed that question as not mattering.