I was continually frustrated by her refusal to highlight the truly good things they had done and results achieved. But I also appreciate they probably found it an impossible needle to thread to tout accomplishments while avoiding being labeled as out of touch or not understanding the struggles of everyday Americans. And while your quote obviously shows recognition of that, I sadly don’t think that’s how any statement trying to portraying a strong economy would have been framed in the media, or attack ads, or social media memes.
Yeah the problem is there’s no good response about the economy that fits into a sound bite or debate answer. And unfortunately “It’s complicated, listen to my hour-long TED talk that goes into all the subtleties of the economic situation and how it compares to the rest of the world” just doesn’t work.
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And it’s hard to say the average American is better off when that’s not what Americans are saying in polling.
Of course if we have the same inflation rate as today in 4 years and continued market highs, then obviously everyone will say they are better off because those 2 tough inflation years will be much further in the rear-view mirror.
And then Donald can just yell stock market all time high! And and the formerly disgruntled people under Biden will be like damn, Trump has turned it all around.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Tweet/Truth yet today about the stock market all-time high.
If you’re doing messaging at the debate, you’ve already lost. I’m with skydiver. The battle over whether the economy was good or not was lost due to the fight between overwhelming right wing propaganda in online media vs. basically nothing equivalent on the left.
The problem for online media on the left is that you need a villain for people to come together to hate on, and the obvious one, billionaires, are necessary to bankroll online media.
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Going hard left ain’t going to work either. The country is just broken in a way that can’t be fixed.
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Oprah and Michelle would both be bad be candidates that will fail miserably with Latino men and men in general.
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Women are off the table for now for Democrats. The first female president will probably be a Republican, or maybe a VP that ascends to the presidency. Once we break the seal and people realize “oh she’s just boring like most presidents” then maybe it’ll become a viable option.
AI is going to level this playing field. They’re the anti-tank drone of misinformation tools. Easy/cheap to deploy compared to the damage they can cause. The right definitely used this to their advantage.
Unfortunately you can’t really legislate this away without trampling all over free speech.
As to “why arent progressives doing as well this time” this feels a bit disingenuous - they are constantly sabotaged by their own party either directly or indirectly. This is hardly debatable. They should have taken their voting bloc and held some feet to the fire when the dems briefly had some control, but that didn’t happen.
Ultimately, I’m not sure that Dems could have done much better. This shouldn’t be an argument between leftists saying the party didn’t go left enough and anti-leftists saying the party went too far left.
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This is where I’m at, Republicans have won the messaging war, and it has very little to do with policy, and their takeover of social media is going to be extremely difficult to combat. So basically waaf
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I don’t think the problem is how far right or left they are. The problem is that regardless of where the focus groups have them ending up everyone knows at this point they have no intention of enacting 98% of what they run on. They have shown this for decades. Very hard to get people enthusiastic for that reality regardless of the politics. Meanwhile on the other side we have simple messaging like MASS DEPORTATION and everyone knows they 100% intend to do it.
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While it should probably be all the bad stuff that is going to happen to certain groups of people, honestly what gnaws at me the most right now is that by mid 2025 the latest they are going to be touting all of the same exact economic indicators that exist today to tout a booming economy and everyone is going to buy it hook, line, and sinker. They’ll probably start with the stock market even before he is sworn in.
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The Rock Dwayne Johnson
The end of Ezra Klein’s interview of John Stuart on his podcast gets to this. The Republican messaging was very simple, they blasted ads about illegals are coming to kill you and the libs want to sex change your kids. And it’s effective. The Dems are the ones who are stupid for falling into the trap of thinking the trolling comments from the right about what policies were or weren’t enacted are serious things to engage with.
Well even if they aren’t going to do the mass deportations they’ll do a great job of making a spectacle out of deporting a few people, which in this day and age, might as well be the same thing. Perception is reality.
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The Dems are the party of technocrats, white papers, and evidence based policy. Those things are all objectively good, but they aren’t that useful for messaging. Really the only super effective Dem messaging that I can remember off hand is when Obama put a lot of emphasis on “You are dying because you don’t have access to health care, I will use the Federal government to get you access to health care”. Simple, relevant, does not require reading a white paper to understand.
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Yeah, be technocrats in the privacy of your own home or at work or whatever, not when you are out on the public stage.