In the United States, in Australia and around the world, shock election keeps following shock election. The world order that has been in place since the aftermath of the second world war is disintegrating. While globalisation has lifted many out of poverty and automation has revolutionised how we live our lives, these trends have exacerbated income inequality and economic anxiety.

The right has exploited these tensions to their advantage and developed a clear, nationalist narrative that focuses on protecting the average family from economic displacement. The left has come up short by attacking the candidates promoting these platforms as divisive and releasing with a repetitive laundry list of policies that we update on the margins every election cycle.

Whether it’s Scott Morrison or Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orban, the political right has exploited these anxieties to its advantage. It has made fear a primary tool – of immigration, globalisation, and being rudderless in a changing economy and world.

Be it Trump’s Make America Great Again or Morrison’s Building our Economy, Securing Our Future, they have given the electorate a simple narrative about reclaiming their national identity while protecting them from hardship.

In the last election, Labor became a rubber stamp for dozens of proposals by left-leaning groups, and while Morrison repeated a simpler message while engaging in retail politics with voters, Shorten delivered reams of policy details that may be better left to a political science classroom. Hillary Clinton, whose policy prowess cannot be called into question, released a white paper on dozens of issues, but her message, Stronger Together, didn’t fully address the disruption families were facing.

For the left to win again it must:

1. Distil its message into one that is simple, compelling and repeatable;

2. Provide a vision for how it will address the challenges of globalisation and automation in a way that supports the average family;

3. Run modern, integrated campaigns that reach voters where they consume information.

For all of his flaws, Trump is a brilliant marketing talent. Make America Great Again has become core to the identity of today’s Republican party, the rallying cry for a loyal constituency that cannot be convinced to believe anything negative about him.

The left must be as crisp and motivational. Bill Clinton famously said that winning campaigns are about the future, and the left needs to both prosecute the case against the right while outlining a plan to restore opportunity to the average family in a changing economy.

It should expose the right’s populist appeals as a lie. In the US, Trump’s only signature legislative accomplishment was a corporate tax cut that actually raised taxes on many individuals, his trade wars have caused devastation across industries, and he has surrounded himself with advisers from Wall Street, not Main Street. In 2018 Democrats won back the House of Representatives largely by focusing on Republicans’ attempts to take their healthcare benefits away.

Simultaneously the left needs a clear and consistent message outlining how it will help families thrive despite global economic headwinds. It needs to not just make higher education affordable but make clear what types of training are most likely to help students succeed once they graduate. When the core industry of a region is on its way out, it should help secure a new one rather than repeat the same wishful thinking about it coming back. It should make sure that all children have access to learning and support at younger ages. It can help workers continue to pursue their education in search of higher skills and income. That’s the path to prosperity, not a backwards-looking vision that closes borders to immigrants, rejects cooperation on pressing international issues and assumes that the profits of a handful of corporations will trickle down.

Once it has developed a message that includes contrast and a vision for the future, it must ensure it is repeatedly delivered to the persuadable voters who will decide the election. During the Obama years, Democrats maintained a healthy digital advantage that allowed them to build the model for a modern, integrated campaign. In 2008 they leveraged Facebook to pilot relational organising. By 2012 their communications and digital teams were working in a fully integrated fashion, with a sophisticated in-house studio able to produce multimedia content quickly and around the clock. But by 2016 Republicans began to catch up, aided by Trump’s unprecedented ability to control the news cycle through Twitter, outside investments in one to one targeting and digital paid media technology, and an understanding that Americans now primarily got their news and information through their mobile phones. Trump’s content was simple and shareable and his message was constantly repeated.

Labor similarly lost its digital advantage in 2019 from repeated claims about a death tax by the Liberal party and its allies to countless attacks on Labor’s spending. As the average voter increasingly gets their primary information from their mobile device, Labor must rebuild quickly to regain its advantage. Democrats are making the necessary investments to fight back to parity, with leading candidates hiring digital strategists in senior roles on their campaigns, progressives in Silicon Valley providing seed funding for new technology companies to scale quickly, and continuous testing to perfect how to persuade undecideds, motivative sporadic voters and deploy content rapidly.

The spread of misinformation requires a whole new approach to rapid response for the left. Campaigns won’t just respond to its opponents’ attacks in the daily news cycle with statements and tweets. The left will need to use social listening tools to catch misinformation quickly and use its communications and legal muster to fight back.

It will need to produce viral, shareable content that flags misinformation as false and responds with the facts. And it will need to hire staff with sophisticated understanding of the leading social media platforms prepared to respond to the onslaught.

This is a tipping point moment for social democracy. The left has now had time to study its opponents, reflect on their unexpected victories and expose some armourless flanks. It can fight the nativist and isolationist tide that it has seen take hold in too many countries around the world with great policy ideas, but its best chance to defeat that tide is by also running the smartest and most innovative political campaigns.

Ultimately that is how the left will achieve the goal of preserving the climate, achieving durable, broad-based prosperity and promoting security ties that protect civil society from the very real authoritarian challenge at the doorstep.