There are communication experts who don’t understand anything about politics. And pseudo-political experts who know nothing about communication. From this short-circuit comes a good part of the enthusiastic and sassy analyses that plague today’s public debate.

Let’s start with the basics. The real basics

Roman Jakobson – linguist, not spin doctor – explained that every message lives in a system: sender, recipient, context, code and channel. Translated: the meaning is not in the words, but in the place where you say it and in the people to whom you are saying it.

That’s why those who these days comment on the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York as if it were proof that “the left only wins if it is radical”, have understood nothing. Mamdani won, yes, but in New York, where the electorate is liberal, urban and organized around a strong identity agenda. On the same day, however, the Democrats won in Virginia with Abigail Spanberger, former CIA agent, symbol of the moderate wing, and in New Jersey with Mikie Sherrill, former Navy pilot, perfectly centrist candidate.

Three victories, three different Americas.

The minimum union to understand it is to remember Jakobson. The lesson is simple: you win when you are consistent in your context. When you build a message that speaks to people’s real needs. It can be radical or moderate, no matter, as long as it is concrete, credible, understandable. And when it is well communicated.

There is no magic formula, only an elementary recipe: coherence, context, communication. Whoever can align them wins. Who does not, loses.

The rest is provincialism disguised as analysis.

Because to believe that what happens in a district of New York says something about Italy or the whole of America is a reflection from the intellectual periphery: the same that pushes certain Italian communicators to cite Ocasio-Cortez as if it were a model exportable to Piacenza

Political communication is not universal
It is situated in a scenario with a space, a time, of the actors, an audience. And who forgets it ends up talking to himself, convinced to be a Risiko while he is playing with reality. Raising up the volume won’t be enough.