Obviously a ridiculous over simplification to make the point that when the gop message to the world ‘oh look the libs care more about - insert whichever inane fluff is Fox’s talking point this week - blah, blah’ we need to be more ‘fuck off’ and hammer home the things which that audience care about rather than risk upsetting all the bleeding hearts in the world by defending the inane fluff. As a party the Dems need to worry less about trying to win voters who are never voting for them and stop being so condescending to others who might. If that means a few racists vote dem so be it. Fuck em, at least this way they won’t get what they want.
As I recall, the GOP’s base has more or less done this. I don’t recall them getting any particular groundswell of support by banging the bathroom wars drum. It may not be a great idea to make trans rights the flagship policy, but I think it’s worse to make pre-emptive concessions. There are such easy and non-woke avenues of pushback available against virtually every talking point that, if they can but actually nut up and fight, imo the Dems should be at worst unafraid, and at best welcoming, of GOP lines of attack on that front.
I mean, I’m in Ohio now, there’s still no statewide law preventing business from firing you if you’re gay, the Dems out here are definitely not banging the drums on LGBQT issues. When was the last time Dems ever talked about this during the primary season?
You don’t. But defending it with them is how it gets on the major stations nightly news programme. Ignore Hannity and Tucker and if the MSM ask you about it ignore that too and hammer home what that audience cares about. This is what the GOP does so successfully and the Dems absolutely suck at.
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One problem is that some people think that messaging should be about facts and policy positions when it should be about emotions and narratives.
Centrist Dems are afraid of inflaming passions when we should be willing to play with fire at the risk of burning it all down.
I’ve never felt that I have advocated violence here. What I do advocate is making people care enough that some people are going to be angry and giving them space to feel rage, with the understanding that if you reach a critical mass, you will always have some people willing to act inappropriately.
I see the problem as people wanting messaging to be influenced by the values of the Enlightenment when we live a post-Enlightenment, postmodern world.
The Dems definitely need to find someone who is willing to cut really nasty attack ads for them and run them through Super PAC’s. Hire a real advertising firm and tell them to dig deep and that honesty isn’t the primary objective.
The fact that we ever played nice again after 2004 blows my damn mind. I’m talking the entire list of hard negative tricks that Karl Rove and Roger Stone invented. If they’ve done it once and it worked that’s permission for us to do the same thing.
On Trump that means putting his mob ties and business dealings front and center everywhere people place their eyeballs. We don’t have anything better to spend the billion plus dollars we’re going to raise for 2020.
I have been enraged by many of the posts/opinions on this topic so have been refraining from posting. Not healthy for me or good for the discussion. I have a trans kid, so the idea that I’m supposed to shut up about their rights and safety, or be OK with their rights and safety being “set aside” is very tough to swallow. And being told that my stance is “virtue signalling” really got me going quite a bit in an unhealthy direction. Of course it is our tendency to care more about issues in which we have a personal stake, and of course issues involving our children are going to get us emotional. So I’ve been trying to recognize that.
Part of my issue with the argument that some of these issues should be removed from anti-Trump messaging as part of a larger strategy is: I don’t believe you. I think BLM is the result of terrible treatment of Black people by law enforcement under everybody since forever. If I were Black my response to “quiet down, stay on the down low and we’ll take care of you once we’re in office” would be “fuck you”. I don’t think there’s any evidence that anyone approaching an “establishment” politician is going to do jack shit about really changing things. So when somebody says “your messaging is harming the overall cause”, my response would again be “fuck you”. The other approach, going along to get along, hasn’t helped anywhere close to enough. Or, it’s helped so slowly as to be hard to discern.
But I can understand the strategic idea of working for the better of two evils when the worse is SO MUCH WORSE like now. I despise Biden. But Trump is as bad or worse than Biden in every area in which Biden sucks, plus Trump is also terrible in many other areas as well. I despise Biden but I will crawl through glass to vote for him if it’s him vs Trump.
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FFS, let’s not give President Florida Man free advertising like we did last time. Like, do you think “Trump hangs with mobsters and scams people” is gonna do anything other than fire up his base?
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Yeah man I hear you. And I totally get where you’re coming from with your kid being trans. I hope you realize that I have zero interest in compromising anything of substance. We need to pitch the right choices better, instead of the typical Democrat move where they water down the substance so that it appeals to swing voters better.
I want to change the minds of so called moderates on things the way that Fox News turned right leaners into crazy people. That’s the power of good messaging.
I used to believe that I was too smart for advertising to work on me… as I drank my sugar water and ate junk food. Good messaging really is mind control.
I’m only for shutting up about stuff I don’t have a viable plan to sell. Trans rights is one of those things, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want something done to protect your kid. And there’s a lot of reasons to hope someone figures out how to sell trans issues if the Dems start really working on messaging as a discipline.
So we are clear LFS, I am not advocating shutting up about rights and safety or setting aside agendas that are unpaletable to certain segments of the population. What I am saying is I don’t mind Democrats gaining a few votes by being a bit circumspect at certain times and then listening to those voters whine about not getting what they thought they might when the Dems have power. It’s better than listening to them whine about not getting what they thought they might and blaming it on the do nothing dems or whomever Fox has designated that weeks scapegoat whilst the GOP happily rigs the game because they currently have power.
I’m quietly optimistic that if we can fade a second term here then that’s basically the end of the GOP (in its present form) as a viable entity. And although maybe abyss looking into is generally not a good idea I think its a chance worth taking this time.
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A great video on the messaging of “They go low, we go high” that will likely make you reboil with rage about the end of 2015.
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Btw if you havent you should watch that entire series. Its long but its very well done.
I can’t recall who first brought AOC into the conversation but it may have been me. Anyways, I still stand by this post which I’ll pull over from the other thread:
To expand on the last argument, National Polling numbers are informative but shouldn’t be the sole basis for messaging decisions. Even if polling showed that SJW-style messaging was underwater, social justice is still a legitimate issue in this country and advocating for it is the morally correct position. The comparison to the civil rights era was apt–the messaging may result in short-term pushback, but it is the best way to achieve long-term change.
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Despite all the #Berniewouldhavewon sentiment, we don’t actually know if he would have beaten Trump in 2016 or if he would beat him in 2020. I think the best anyone can credibly say is that some combination of pure anti-Trump voters and pro-Bernie voters gives him a good shot, but it would be close.
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Even if Bernie could win, can we acknowledge that his policies might play differently with different audiences when being proposed by a Jewish man in his 70’s than a young Latina woman?
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I wasn’t necessarily trying to say that Dems shouldn’t adopt her messaging. I just get the feeling that everyone here assumes that AOC [or at least her general politics] is (or would be) universally popular if only more people knew about them, and I just don’t think that’s the case.
Can’t really do anything but lol at this point. All lives matter yang gang guy isn’t in the tent nor does he want to be. He wants to fart into the tent as much as possible before voting Trump.
Most lefties are so much more god damn dumb than the alt right that I’m embarrassed by association at this point.
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Yeah, I posted three sets of numbers over in the Trump thread. One was early in her term, so maybe Amazon + original GND proposal time. Another was from around the time when Trump started beefing with Ilhan and “the Squad” (and Pelosi came in off the top rope too against the Squad around that time as well). Third was also from a few month ago, so thanks for updated #s from yougov.
Just stumbled across an article that captures some of what we’ve been talking about. I don’t know enough about AZ politics to know if it has a realistic chance of passage, but some of the provisions (middle school and younger, the community input requirements, etc) seem kinda custom designed to make a good campaign ad against anyone who votes against it.
"A Republican senator wants to bar schools from teaching sex education before seventh grade.
The bill from Sen. Sylvia Allen, R-Snowflake, also deletes “homosexuality” from acts constituting “sexual conduct” in a section of the statutes, a move that appears to ban any discussion of homosexuality during sex ed courses.
Allen has already scheduled the measure for a Jan. 14 hearing in the Senate Education Committee, which she chairs, making it the first 2020 salvo in an conflict that’s been brewing since last spring, when lawmakers repealed a decades-old law that forbade the promotion of a “homosexual lifestyle.”
On the other side, Democratic Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley wants to require schools to teach comprehensive and “medically accurate” sex education on an opt-out basis. Senate Democrats plan to introduce similar legislation in their chamber.
Democrats, who hope to build on their success in repealing the state’s “no promo homo” law, accused their Republican colleagues of using a furor over sex education to rally parents wary of children getting exposed to sexually explicit material in classrooms. "
"Sex education, like all other curricula in Arizona, is primarily handled at the school district level. But Allen’s bill would require all districts and charter schools to revise their existing sex education courses to comply with her bill.
Under the bill, all coursework would have to be developed during publicly noticed meetings, and curricula would be available for public comment for at least 60 days before a school board could adopt the educational guidelines. The bill says schools would not be required to provide sex education, and attempts to get around new public notice requirements by providing it after school hours would not be allowed."
What’s the optimal line here? If you want to oppose the bill, are you ready to defend why you think “the government should be teaching 5 year olds about sex?” If you decide to support the bill, how do you plan to respond to the folks who tell you that age appropriate sex ed increases safe sex and that talking about homosexuality might reduce bullying and create a safer environment for gay kids? My initial instinct is to vote against the house bill, support comprehensive sex ed, and then go HAM on the pointing out that there are about a billion more important things that the education committee should be working on, but that’s just me…
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This can never work because of FPTP
I just want to accuse Republicans of being closet pedos who want their prey to be ignorant, then bring up as many Republican sex scandals as possible, ending by suggesting they want to enable the next Jeffrey Epstein who, if he gets to be a problem, can always not kill himself.