On Background w/ Fmr. WH Spox Andrew Bates

If you’re getting this email, it’s because I think you’re pretty smart.

And I think you’re part of the solution to figuring out what comes next for Dem communicators. What worked in ’18, ’20, and ’22 doesn’t hit the same in 2026, and it’ll feel even staler in 2028. I want to bring together smart people in our field to talk about what comms looks like going forward.

So, like every other person you’ve met in D.C., I’m starting a newsletter.

Five short questions. Five quick responses from a leader in our field. Delivered to your inbox every week.

I don’t have the answers to what the future of comms looks like. But I’m hoping we can figure them out together.

If you’re interested, you can opt-in below. If not, I still hope you get something from our first edition featuring one of the most seasoned flacks in our field and a good friend of mine from the Biden White House and Clinton 2016.

This is ON BACKGROUND:

featuring the wisdom of Andrew Bates, Senior Deputy White House Press Secretary for President Biden and currently a Managing Director at Orchestra where he’s steering clients through an increasingly bumpy landscape in D.C.

Andrew, what are you doing differently than you were 2-3 years ago?

Sleeping. Also, not spending 14 hours a day with y’all in the Press Office.

In terms of specific things I’m doing differently now, I’m trying to weed out “rules” communicators have been expected to follow but that don’t make sense anymore; rules that stifle creativity and put unhelpful distance between us and the people we’re trying to reach. The ways Americans get their information are changing faster than at any other time in history. The style and tone that people will accept has shifted, too. In politics there has often been a dangerous pull to sound too official, technical, or process-y. Now there’s a more intense demand from voters for personal openness, for getting to the point right away, and for constant relationship-building, especially through “heart on your sleeve” interviews, town halls, and streaming videos. Part of that is because old institutional walls have broken down. But it’s also because social media has been effectively anti-social, leaving a lot of people feeling less connected to each other than ever - and making them want to know who leaders are on a human level before they evaluate positions or agenda.

I think all of that means that there needs to be more empathy and more of a personal touch across the board. I try to act on that by listening to some of my own first instincts that I used to ignore because they seemed too unorthodox, and then figuring out how to combine those with lessons from practical experience.

What’s one interesting thing you’ve seen a Republican do recently?

I was surprised that Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator from Ohio, wrote an op-ed with Elizabeth Warren supporting an increase in the cap on the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, from $184,500. It’s rare to see a high profile Republican support higher taxes on the wealthy in order to expand opportunity for working people. Warren and Moreno wrote, “Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” It’s a good question.

What’s one interesting thing you’ve seen a Democrat do recently?

I really feel like the best way to reverse the harm that’s been done by social media and the exhausting crises people have been through during this whole period is to build up a healthy, unifying sense of community. So I’m always intrigued by Democrats who tap into what makes people proud of where they’re from and that show they want to win Trump voters over, not stereotype or vilify them. Like how Roy Cooper and James Talarico made their faith cornerstones of their campaign announcements. And how Cooper and Talarico both talk about the economic struggles that almost everyone can identify with weighing down morale in all the places they visit, and use that common ground to debunk attacks on immigrants and call out the billionaires and monopolies who are really at fault. That kind of community-based approach used to be much more common and it led to our biggest successes, like the Obama wave in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s underdog win in 1992. In the time since then, this drift toward being overly judgmental about people who disagree with us and becoming too technocratic in the way we talk about policy have been extremely debilitating.

What’s one comms thing you want to shout from the rooftops?

Don’t preach to the choir. Grow the congregation. A lot of candidates, executives, donors, and communicators fixate on what they want to hear themselves say. But that’s like getting onto a stage and talking to yourself in a mirror with your back to the people who took the time to show up. Instead, I feel like we should always be asking, “How can I make the tent bigger and more diverse? Have I put in the work to really know the people I’m talking to? Where do my values and theirs come together? How can I meet them where they are, in good faith and with cultural competence? How can I prove that I believe in what I’m doing enough that I want to talk about it every chance I get, including in challenging territory?” Voters are not play-doh. They’re human beings with agency. And there’s a good reason it’s called “earning” support: they are interviewing you, not the other way around.

What’s a good work story that you haven’t shared publicly before?

During the confirmation for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, I was one of the staff on her confirmation team who went to a lot of her meetings with senators in both parties. But I needed to miss her sit-down with Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from my home state of North Carolina. After Judge Jackson’s meeting with him I got a call from a colleague who told me Tillis had asked, “Where’s Bates?” I was surprised he knew who “Bates” was. He had printed out a tweet of mine from 2020 saying he’d lose to his Democratic opponent, Cal Cunningham, and signed it “Best regards, Thom Tillis.” That honestly made me like him.