AOC Gave a Much Better DNC Speech in 2024 Than in 2020. Here's What Democrats Can Learn.
The evolution of her speaking provides a useful lesson for America's politicians.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has come a long way.
Her insurgent victory in a House Democratic primary six years ago put her on the map among progressives, but her condensed speaking role during the 2020 Democratic presidential convention — which lasted all of 90 seconds — demonstrated that she was still a backbench lawmaker, whatever her social media clout was.
But AOC earned a much bigger speaking role during this year’s presidential convention, speaking to cheers during a primetime speaking slot on Monday night.
Besides the length and prominence of the two addresses, I noticed something else: the text of AOC’s speech was much more jargon-free and more readable.
In the 2020 address she said:
In fidelity and gratitude to a mass people’s movement working to establish 21st century social, economic, and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages, and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past; a movement that realizes the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few at the expense of long-term stability for the many, and who organized an historic, grassroots campaign to reclaim our democracy.
If you don’t have a college degree, I’m not sure what any of that means to you (and it’s hard to understand even for many of people who do have one).
The 2024 speech, on the other hand, was much more straightforward. An excerpt:
I am here tonight because America has before us a rare and precious opportunity. In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class—because she is from the middle class.
She understands the urgency of rent checks, groceries, and prescriptions. She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights as she is to taking on corporate greed. And she is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring hostages home.
There’s an easy way to check how decipherable each speech was.
For years, I’ve worked as a part-time educator on the side, tutoring kids and teaching small classes. One of the tools I learned about when I was getting my teaching certification was called a readability formula.
Teachers use these formulas to gauge how grade-appropriate a certain text is. After all, if you’re teaching 2nd grade, you don’t want to give your students a text that is scored as appropriate for middle schoolers.
You can use online formulas to just plug in various texts, so that’s what I decided to do with both the 2020 and 2024 speeches.
The 2020 speech gave back the following result:
Reading Difficulty: Extremely Difficult
Grade Level: College Graduate
Age Range: 23+
The 2024, on the other hand, gives you this:
Reading Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Grade Level: Ninth Grade
Age Range: 14-15
That’s a big improvement.
Most Americans read at around a middle school level, meaning that the more difficult the text is, the harder it is for them to understand what the writer or speaker is saying.
Let’s remember, our politics is strongly polarized by education. Far more Democrats have college degrees than Republicans do.
It’s been a frequent frustration among the party that Republicans can win working-class voters and have been winning more of them in recent years. Democrats usually argue that their policy framework is just better for these voters.
But Democrats want to reach more working-class voters who have been shifting to the GOP, they need to learn to speak like them, too.
This is something that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump does very well.
I put a section of one of his recent speeches in Atlanta into the same formulas (he talks so much I couldn’t fit the entire thing into the prompt without going over the limit). Here’s the result I got back for him:
Reading Difficulty: Easy
Grade Level: Fourth Grade
Age Range: 9-10
As you can see, Trump’s remarks are extremely accessible. There are few Americans who lack the education to understand what he’s saying. AOC is moving in Trump’s direction — and that’s the right one.
Now, I’m not a Democratic consultant and I’m not wearing any kind of partisan hat. I want both major parties to be more responsive to the public. But you can’t be responsive to the public if you can’t even have an understandable conversation with them.
Democratic progressives, in particular, are so fond of an ever-changing lexicon that’s popular among college graduates that they can barely converse with the large number of Americans without degrees. That’s not only bad for Democrats, that’s bad for democracy.
I’m sure a lot of progressives will read this column and equate my advice with telling them to dumb down their language.
But instead of thinking about this as a matter of smart or dumb, think about it as a different language. I wouldn’t go to Paris and start speaking Spanish and I wouldn’t go to Barcelona and start speaking French.
Think back to AOC’s remarks from 2020. There was a much simpler way to say what she was saying, and it would’ve reached and impacted far more people.
She could’ve said something like: “This movement is fighting to for gay people and straight people alike. We’re against racism, and we are against war. We don’t want the rich to have it all. Whether you’re a man or a woman, we are for you and your rights.” The readability score on that? About the same as Trump’s remarks.
It’s a lesson I also learned when I was working a field campaign for a progressive district attorney candidate. Our literature often talked about “mass incarceration” and I noticed that the people whose doors I was knocking on found the rhetoric odd or even comical (like people telling me that’s Alabama, that’s not here). So instead I’d just say something like: Hey, you don’t want your kids locked up just for trying marijuana, right? It cut through all the jargon and got to exactly what our campaign was about (we won).
But it seems like AOC is well on her way to realizing the power of using accessible language, which will make her a much more effective communicator with a broader political horizon in her future. Politicians on both sides of the aisle could take note.
One thing to note about automated readability index is that it does give deference to semicolons by treating her 2020 speech as one extended sentence. That being said, the speech is still chock-full with extended buzzwords that hike up the number of characters per word.
She's also seemingly learning how perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to legislation (something other members of the squad have not come around on). I recall when she had that odd crying moment on the house floor after they authorized replenishing the iron dome in like 2021 or something and now she supports the Iron Dome (which everyone should for obvious reasons) but it just shows she's also learned more and has been able to change.