“There’s something about the term ‘sex worker’ that just feels belabored,” Gianmarco Soresi tells me. “It’s longer than hooker or prostitute.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this subject never came up while I was writing speeches in the Obama White House. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, Soresi is not a political operative. He’s a comedian whose recent self-produced special, Thief of Joy, boasts more than 2.8 million YouTube views and a glowing review from the New York Times.
Still, Soresi and I are both professional word people, and in my professional opinion, he’s right. Sex worker sounds clunky. And I’m starting to think getting to the bottom of this kind of clunkiness might be the secret to resurrecting a Democratic Party whose brand remains, to borrow a term from political science, in the toilet.
An unfathomable amount of digital ink has been spilled on how Democrats should drive a message in the age of Trump. I know this, in part, because I’ve spilled some of it. Yet if I were to recommend just one piece of work on the subject, it wouldn’t be a paragraph from the DNC autopsy, an interview with an elected official or (sadly) my own mandatory former-staffer Substack. Instead, I’d tell them to watch a 30-second joke from Soresi’s hourlong standup special, which is otherwise devoted to divorced parents, the perils of being a grown-up theater kid and the comic’s regrettable tattoo.
Soresi, 37, possesses an increasingly common kind of internet fame: You’ve either never heard of him, or you see him absolutely everywhere. I started following him on Instagram about 18 months ago, and today, my feed is flooded with his clips: crowd work, podcasts, late-night appearances, hits on MSNBC and CNN. Like the moment’s most media-savvy politicians, Soresi courts mainstream outlets but doesn’t need them. Comics once announced that their star had risen by signing a deal for a special on HBO; today, they announce their arrival by being constantly on your phone.
Soresi isn’t a political comedian, but he wears his left-leaning heart on his sleeve — he recently headlined a Zohran Mamdani rally. His audiences tend to be equally progressive. I would suspect the total number of Trump voters who attended the Thief of Joy taping, at Los Angeles’ Elysian theater, was zero. So it comes as a surprise when, with about 15 minutes left to go in his special, he lowers his voice and adopts a confessional tone:
“I have a joke that I’m going to say later tonight, and that joke uses the term ‘illegal immigrant.’”
He pauses to let this fact sink in.
“And listen, I’ve had progressive friends who have pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey, you should reconsider that. It’s a hurtful phrase, it implies that someone’s existence is illegal. … And I listened to them. I’m not an asshole about this stuff. I went around the country, and Canada, and Australia, using the term ‘undocumented immigrant.’ And you know what happened? Stopped getting laughs. So I had to go back to my progressive friends and be like, ‘I’m sorry. Unlike you guys, I have to win the popular vote.’”
This isn’t my favorite joke from Thief of Joy. (That would be the “36th floor” one-liner from early in the hour.) But I can’t think of a better way to sum up the predicament facing Trump’s opponents with the midterms a little more than one year away. Too often, and frequently with the best of intentions, Democratic politicians and staff use words and phrases that voters do not.
For my fellow Democrats already halfway through writing a furious comment: No, I’m not suggesting that progressives run around the country yelling about “illegals,” or start sounding like a Young Republicans group chat. As he makes clear when I talk to him via Zoom, Soresi isn’t suggesting that either. This is about something bigger.
That’s why he brings up “sex worker.” He once used the term in a joke, before developing a fan base that shares his politics — and it sucked the air out of the room. It wasn’t that people didn’t like the punchline, he explains, or even that they wrote him off as some sort of social justice warrior. It’s more that they stopped listening, stopped thinking about him as one of them. “If the audience has already rolled their eyes,” he tells me, “how am I going to then get them to laugh at the joke which has nothing to do with this, or sometimes is progressive?”
Democrats don’t have to win over skeptical club audiences. They do, however, have to win over skeptical voters. How to do it? Inside the Democratic Party, the debate usually pits “popularism,” which argues for talking about things voters like in ways voters like, and “magnetism,” which argues that what voters really like is candidates who are willing to stand by their values rather than blowing in the wind. In politics more broadly, a seemingly endless number of phrases are considered inclusive by people on one side of the culture war and “woke” by those on the other.
The beauty of Gianmarco’s joke is that it transcends these debates. For people who see power as a means, rather than end unto itself, it’s important to have values. One function of political language is to convey those values, to tell voters, This is who I am. But in an electoral democracy, another function of political language is to tell voters, I am like you. Democratic candidates — along with their staff members, the influencers who help them distribute their messages and the outside groups that support them — can’t choose between self-expression and broad appeal. They have to do both.
You don’t often hear politicians talk about balancing the need to stand for principles with their need to appeal to audiences. But in many cases — particularly outside of the bluest states and cities — that balance must be struck. And Soresi, in a completely different yet related context, talks about the difficulties in striking it.
But here’s where things get really challenging. Not to nitpick Soresi’s punchline, but progressives don’t just have to win the popular vote. They have to win an Electoral College stacked against them. To take back the Senate, they’ll need to win elections in states Trump won by double digits. If the Supreme Court rules as it’s expected to, and allows Republicans to gerrymander minority-majority Southern seats out of existence, Democrats may also have to win the national popular vote by about five points just to win the House.
In other words, Democrats will have to win over voters who may not be hardcore MAGA, but voted for Trump at least once. That doesn’t have to mean — to use a phrase that I think would make for bad comedy — abandoning vulnerable communities. But it does mean talking to voters who are far more conservative than the average Democrat, in language that feels relatable to them.
One way to get at least some people who voted for Trump to like Democrats is to jettison humanities-department-coded phrases in favor of ones that the average voter might use. As an Arizona congressman in December 2021, Ruben Gallego banned his staff from using “Latinx.” I suspect it’s no coincidence that he’s now an Arizona senator, having outperformed the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket by more than eight points.
I’m not suggesting that if you’re a Democratic operative, you need to waste time squabbling over which words should go on the forbidden list. I do, however, recommend regularly talking with friends or family members who were open to voting for Trump, or who don’t follow politics that closely. See if what you’re saying holds their attention. If it doesn’t, trying find new language to make the same point.
And words are not the only way to connect, or fail to connect, with an audience. Emotions matter, too. Near the end of our conversation, I asked Soresi — who came up post-TikTok, and who seems to clearly belong to the majority of Americans with an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party — what Obama-era Democrats like me are missing. He pointed to the giant changes that took place in America, many of them while President Joe Biden was in office: wider-than-ever gaps between gazillionaires and the rest of us; tens of thousands of civilians killed by Israel in Gaza; the skyrocketing cost of homeownership; the rise of AI and its associated oligarchs.
Like all generations, today’s voters — and today’s young voters in particular — aren’t ideologically uniform. But if Democrats don’t share their anger at these changes, or at least show that they understand that anger, they’ll roll their eyes. They won’t listen to anything else the party has to say.
In the end, Soresi’s Thief of Joy joke doesn’t offer an answer. It offers a question. It acknowledges the tension that so often exists between expressing one’s values and winning people over. Regardless of whether they’re running in the bluest city or reddest rural county, Democrats who grapple with that tension will come across as both more authentic, and more appealing, than those who ignore it.
As Soresi himself put it on the interview podcast Good One: “How can I change your mind if you don’t like me?”
