So how do we get into this game on a profession level?

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Sorry I dropped this OP and then basically walked away. My wife gets every third weekend off (which is always a 3 day weekend, which is nice) and this just happened to be it. That’s why I’m typing this out to everyone at 6:20 in the morning :slight_smile:

So I’ve been thinking about basically nothing but this since the AOC tweet, and some ground level stuff is starting to solidify in my mind. I’ll start with the problem I want to see solved.

All of you are probably familiar with my ‘why won’t the Democrats just do X slightly ruthless thing to win?’ posts. It’s like a genre on this site at this point. I’d love to get @skydiver8’s input on this, but near as I can tell the problem is that the kind of person who becomes an American liberal isn’t the kind of person who wants to get their hands dirty from a moral perspective. That’s why GOP campaigns limits are drawn at ‘what is the absolute most we can get away with legally’ and Democratic campaigns are usually more in the vein of ‘what is the right thing to do’. Even when the Democrats do something a little more grey area, it’s painfully obvious to those of us who make a living on the execution side of things that this is new to them, they are very uncomfortable, and the work is frankly very shoddy.

The end result of that dichotomy in political thought is that the Democrats go into every fight having to not just win, but win fighting fair against someone who will do absolutely everything they legally can (and in the Trump era quite a bit more than that) to beat us. I think that’s an explanation that covers a pretty decent bit of why we manage to lose ~50% of races despite having vastly more popular policies. The other side finds tactics the left finds out of bounds and uses them, to pretty good effect frankly, to win elections.

I want to preface what I’m going to type next by saying that, no matter what, I’m never advocating for actually breaking the law. Republican political operatives know that they will get protection from the politicians they put in office, and obviously our side would never do the same, so breaking the law isn’t a sustainable strategy for us. We could theoretically commit some misdemeanors (the legal code is pretty thick) that carried no real penalty, but beyond that I think being actually guilty of legitimate crimes is a pretty good way for our enemies, of which there will be many, to get a great opportunity to stop us in our tracks.

I want us to start an independent dark money group that does the dark arts stuff for Democratic candidates without being asked. Democratic candidates don’t do oppo research? Totally fine, we’ll do oppo research on all the viable GOP candidates during the primary, find out that Roy Moore is a pedo before the media does, promote him during the primary, and then make sure the story gets out and is heavily promoted on social media to his core voters. Democrats don’t want to do anti turnout facebook ads on q anon followers? That’s fine, we’ll do it for them without being asked and let them keep the ability to deny any knowledge of what is going on. Every unpleasant shit smelling task that these effete ivy league educated legacy brats with absolutely no skin in the game can’t be bothered to do… we do that.

The problem with political tactics on our side isn’t that we don’t have enough resources. We spent an ungodly amount of money every cycle. The problem is that there are what the GOP considers to be important campaign roles that simply go unfilled. We’re like a basketball team that spends all it’s money on 4 players and sends them out like that. It doesn’t matter that our four players are great, it’s a 5v4 and the other team isn’t so bad that we can make that up without running at least decent.

That’s my vision, which I’m sure some of you will absolutely hate. I don’t particularly blame you for that… but I’m not the same guy I was before that AOC tweet about digital. Before I might have donated money to a political campaign, volunteered to text/phone bank, etc. Now I’m pretty convinced all of those things are getting handled past diminishing returns and there’s an entire category of tactics that are at 0% utilization.

Obviously something like this has to have very specific principles it operates by and doesn’t break. If you don’t have these you rapidly end up a corrupting influence on the world instead of a positive one. Here are my initial ideas for our code of ethics:

  1. We take no money with any possible strings attached. Once we’re off the ground I’m hopeful we can be fully self sustaining with just small dollar donations and selling merch to the other team. This principle protects us from being coopted, and it keeps us further below the radar.

  2. We treat the money we get like it’s precious. The people working on this deserve to be paid market rate salaries for what they are doing. I don’t want to get talent poached if/when we get noticed (something I’m actually hoping to delay as long as humanly possible and potentially forever) so we’ll pay everyone what they’re worth… but this is cash we either got from small donors who worked hard for it, or money we worked hard to grift from right wing dipshits. Either way we need to be super efficient and have a very light cost structure. As much of the money raised needs to go right back out the door as possible.

  3. We are not a public facing operation. We’re a dark money group. We will do everything we can to obscure our identities in this role and will have good information security. We will not be talking to the press ever. If what we do is ever documented I hope it’s as a footnote in a poorly distributed history book about the fall of the GOP. This won’t ever look good on your resume unfortunately, but the skills we develop should be mega marketable if we ever shut down.

  4. Don’t break the law. I already covered this earlier so I’m not going any deeper. Happy to discuss it though NBZ lol.

So that brings me to organizational stuff to get off the ground.

As I see it we have different categories of problems:

The first is obviously where do we get money. We are trying to get multiple upper middle class professionals with real skills to work on this at least semi full time. We also need money to fund the first round of ads and get a basic merch store setup to grift the Trumpkins with (the merch will obviously also carry our messaging). Ideally the merch store should be really flexible, and we need to make sure our vendors can supply different kinds of product really quickly as we iterate on it. There is going to be a lot of tech work to do as well I suspect, but I’ll leave all of that to the people who know what they are talking about, which if this website’s setup and our programming thread are any indication we have quite a few of.

The second is getting our organization setup legally. Again we have plenty of lawyers and I’m hopeful they can shed some light on what we should do there. The goal is to minimize reporting requirements and shield the identities of the people doing the work. We are going to piss some fairly scary people off, so we need to take this seriously from the very beginning and never let up. If we act as if someone recently made a credible death threat at us on the first day and make a habit of it every day after that we’ll be very comfortable when the credible death threats start really pouring in. We aren’t allowed to break the law, but the other side has no such problem… so information security is really important. They can’t hurt us if they don’t know who or where we are, anonymity on the internet is toxic af imo… but we’re going to abuse the ever living shit out of it. My personal information is going to be nowhere near any of the documents that incorporate this thing, and we should all be taking our pay through shell companies that aren’t registered to us. I’m not entirely sure how this stuff works, but having a lawyer who can sit down and research whether what we want to do next is legal or not is probably a pretty important role. No more forum lawyering either we’re going to put some money in your pocket and it’ll be actual legal advice.

Thirdly we need to figure out what works. This means testing fb ads, trying to do oppo research on GOP candidates to see how easy/hard it is, etc. Once we find some stuff with a good cost to impact ratio we’ll kick off by doing that as big as we can.

Finally I think we’re going to need to find a place off site to do the actual technical work, the brainstorming, etc on this project. I love UP and I plan to post here constantly for years to come, but this whole thread is getting deleted if we actually follow through with this at all. The instant they figure out what we’re doing, shit is going to get incredibly real. I’m less scared of that than I would be because we are going to be smart and stay multiple steps ahead of them. That’s why you’ve got me saying like five times in this post that we’re going to take security and secrecy insanely seriously from the first action we take up to the last one.

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The main drivers here are liberal centrists so…

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It’s funny you typed this because I absolutely plan to target the living shit out of eDems being primaried by good leftist candidates. Yes I want the Democrats to control the Senate though, and we are where we are.

Honestly dude why do you still post here? You obviously think we’re all scum and like to strawman everything we say so that you can claim moral superiority.

I’m going to be honest with you, I think morally and ethically you’re the worst of us. Your belief in your own superiority is why. You’ve got that in common with a lot of really shitty people. I can’t think of a time I ever saw you have any actual doubt about anything. You, the nazi’s, the 9/11 hijackers, and fundamentalist christians have that in common.

I’m a deeply flawed human being who is capable of some really ugly behavior. I own that and I try to fight the innate tendency inside myself to make moral judgements about other people as a result (the fact that you’re so good at getting under my skin that you get me to respond like this is why I have you on ignore). I think you would be fine if you would just let some uncertainty in. Perhaps what you think isn’t 100% right (I’m sure you’re right about some things that I disagree with you about!) and perhaps you aren’t an avatar of holy light. Just food for thought.

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Nah I’m good. I clicked view hidden reply one time too many already. I don’t dialog with closed minded assholes whose only purpose is to pull people down. You think I think I’m going to convince you of anything? I doubt anyone ever has.

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isn’t there data on this already? Would expect there to be a fair number of academic studies on impact of targeted political strategies. Maybe @skydiver8 can point is in a direction of a resource that identify evidence-based impact practices to take advantage of? Or just mining AOCs twitter as well it’s always another option.

Bring efficient and taking advantage of what is already known will go a long way to the long-term viability of a project like this.

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For sure. But the guy whose playbook I want to copy is Roger Stone not AOC. She’s a good person, and I am not. Time to use that innate trait for good! That has never ever gone wrong!

There are obviously best practices for running disinformation campaigns on the internet which we should steal ASAP.

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Winning the battles that are winable and trying to accomplish as much as possible is a lot different than incrementalism or whatever you are even being accused of anyways.

I have to admit I was infected by this mindset in the primary. Bernie or bust. I was devastated and angry when it didn’t happen. Later I realized although it didn’t happen there were still wins available on the table. Getting rid of Trump, taking back the senate, etc. I’ve also realized that going after moderates or even lefties who aren’t as far left as me as a major mistake and I regret it. The amount of shit skydiver took here, of which I participated some and regret, was frankly ridiculous. If she isn’t in the coalition of people who are “pure” enough or whatever the idea we could ever get to 50% is a complete fantasy.

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Sock puppet type personality page + targeted boosted posts would be effective in my mind. Something like the video game streamers do on there but with political propaganda. No idea the legality of that though.

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I actually agree that this thread shouldn’t be public in the very near future.

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You do pro bono work, get someone’s figurative scalp, and hope the monetary support flows in.

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I don’t agree. I’m not taking the backlash for this work on purpose. We take no credit.

I think we use social media to make the money to do social media. Having that restriction will make us better at the work, harder to corrupt, and greatly expand what we can get away with.

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I agree, but it’s not what we need to really focus on. Like, first and foremost, I think we’re way better off flying under the radar for as long as possible. Second, we’re not trying to get famous or rich off of this, we’re trying to help good candidates win elections.

I agree, but this project isn’t about picking a good cause to donate to, it’s about using our talents/expertise to get in the game and affect change.

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The problem is, for starters, we don’t get to craft Ossoff and Warnock’s policy. So that’s an issue with what you laid out. Second, “take covid very seriously” may not be an election-winning issue for us. The stuff about lining their pockets is good, but we’d need to do research to figure out what the most cost-effective method of reaching voters is.

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I agree broadly, but I think a lot of what’s going undone is positive advertising via microtargeting, and I think we should do that too. I think it should be #1A and the suppression stuff should be #1B/2. I also think our talents/instincts with data/modeling/game theory are immensely valuable.

A few of us accurately called this election in real time off the publicly available data while emotionally invested. With a model? No. With intuitive feel for math/probability and the quick crunching of numbers from immense poker/gambling experience. It was almost like Blink by Gladwell, we honed in on the right data, asked the right questions and moved on it. We nailed COVID, we see the faults of the party strategy.

What could we do with the full/private data?

I’d rather sell merch to our team and I’m also okay with taking money from anyone at first, then telling them to fuck off the first time they ask for something. I’d like us to be behind a firewall from the campaigns.

Agreed, we don’t waste any, but we also spend where it’s highest EV. We respect the strat as poker players.

I agree whole heartedly. In a perfect world nobody figures out we exist until after we’ve succeeded, then we sign a book deal after the fact and laugh out asses off at how we ever flew under the radar.

At least not til we agree it’s in our strategic interest.

I’m willing to work for free 20-40 hours a week til the runoff. I have the freedom to do so right now. After that I’m willing to cut my pay in half to do this.

As for money, amid it’s dark and unlimited we work our contacts in the poker community imo.

I need selling on this. I don’t want to sell anything that may be construed as promoting them.

I concur.

I disagree with this. I want to plug leaks - we need to do digital ads on FB. I want to play aggro - we need attack ads to suppress. I’m willing to go very negative, as well - mainly in general elections. I do not want to be Roger Stone.

How much do we need to have a shot at impacting the runoff?

There are liberal poker players worth a shit load who we can probably use our connections to get on the phone. If we’re doing a structure with no max contribution, we only need a few people to fire away for us.

This should be an open question, I have strong reasons for both sides. Mainly I don’t want to support good candidates, I want to recruit them.

As long as the people we get in office aren’t corrupt, we’re good. Litmus test question: Suppose we get you elected by spending $XXX, then we ask you to do XYZ, what do you say? They answer “Fuck off,” or we move on.

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Good post. The main heuristic I was using to get to ‘we (the left) need our own Roger Stone’ was ‘what apparently important election winning role is straight up not being done?’ I based this on the fact that the narrative I’ve been fed every single election by the Democratic Party, and to be clear I believe this, is that the GOP has successfully used dirty tricks in every election since I was born. To hear Democrats tell it Bush Senior won because of the Willy Horton ad, Bush Jr won the 2000 primary by push polling McCain out of the way in SC and then had Roger Stone lead the Brooks Brothers riot etc, in 2004 they swift boated us, and they’d been doing this shit to Hillary for 20+ years by the time 2016 rolled around… and in 2016 the GOP’s election strategy literally took the dirty tricks to 500% of their normal frequency and then jammed 72o into us, won, and then jammed it into us again 4 years later with an even worse situation and fought us to the turn (only not the river because remember the last 4 days?).

If all of that stuff I just typed is true the Democrats not being willing to fight dirty is a pretty huge problem. That being said I’m totally open to the argument that ‘they cheated!’ is just what eDems say when they lost like Trump whining about the election being stolen from him now. It’s a great way to talk the rest of us into the idea that their absolutely awful center right corporatism isn’t to blame for whatever awful outcome just took place. I’d actually like to buy that narrative because I built the money machine I’m currently operating by being very transparent and above board in a naturally dirty industry.

You guys have to remember I’m the guy who is currently holding the idea that the left needs a Roger Stone AND that the US government really needs to stop lying to its citizens immediately because the math on it has changed a lot in the internet era and it’s basically never worth it. If you can’t tell them something because it’s secret and for good reason tell them that. Don’t lie to them. Every time you lie to them as the government it makes public trust (which most everyone in econ that I’m aware of now agrees is super super important to the health of a society and its attached economy) go down in a meaningful way.

My first idea for merch to sell to Trumpists was a ‘Fighting the elites since XXXX year’ shirt. The campaign that sells it to them is a ‘the elites have stolen your history’ campaign. In eastern KY this campaign would be relatively easy to research, produce, and sell through FB. We need to remind them who their ancestors were. No political messaging at all in this campaign btw. Just a narrow description of how a bunch of crackers like them stood up for their rights as free people and subsequently got slaughtered by Pinkertons with a maxim gun, and how the crooked fake news media of the time didn’t say a word.

Obviously the people who got slaughtered will have been leftists lol. I actually think the anti elite energy in rural America is insanely reasonable and logical. Imagine you were born, raised, and have lived all your life in Whitesburg KY (a real place in eastern KY that is 96% white and 0.62% African American which means that as of the last census there were 9.92 total African Americans living in the town). The median household income for your city is 28275 and the per capita income is 20,202 even though the average household has 4 members. 23% of the population of the city live below the absolutely absurdly low federal poverty line. Hilariously these numbers from the census did not include the people who lived in the cities housting projects or of the local nursing home, which somehow expanded the population by nearly double.

If you live in a place like that you live in a place that’s explicit purpose is to extract everything of value created there and ship it to a city. Have a talented kid? They’re dreaming about the day they can leave Whitesburg and move to the city. Do a job and make a product? The reason that business is located here is because you can hire people to do light industrial work for minimum wage, and the product they produce is going to be on a truck headed for the same city that took your talented kid from you (leaving the less talented one to die of a heroin overdose probably). It doesn’t contribute to the tax base because the company that pays you minimum wage got huge tax breaks to locate itself in Whitesburg.

I know it’s popular to dunk on these people on the left, but when I see people doing that it sure makes me feel gross. These people are the definition of left behind by our society and most liberals think that the reason they don’t trust a primarily urban party that seems to care an awful lot more about LGBTQ people who objectively have it way way way better than them than it does about them is that they are stupid and vote against their own interests. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also not hard to see how someone from that place wouldn’t have much in the way of trust in either political party and could see Trump as a potential savior. Places like this are absolutely fabulous breeding grounds for extremists of all varieties because of the sheer bleakness of life there.

The goal here needs to not be convincing these people to vote for Democrats. The goal here is to turn them against the GOP. Donald Trump got 80% of the vote in Letcher County and Whitesville is the county seat. There is nothing at all about the eDem platform that is going actually happen that will address any of the horrible sucking systemic problems in Whiteville KY. I think a real power to the people anti establishment leftist probably does pretty well there if we first carpet bomb them with a ‘remember your history’ campaign. Half of my DNA runs through eastern KY, and the labor ‘movement’ there was more of a labor war. Lots of bodies were buried on both sides out in those hills. It doesn’t take much effort to make them hate the mining company. Fear of communism catching on with this exact demographic is what caused the first wave of capitalists to come to the negotiating table and give the labor movement all those rights they won in the early 20th century. It wasn’t nice orderly protests that were never violent that made them negotiate… it was the fear that what happened to Nicholas II and his entire family (machine gunned in a basement) could happen to them.

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Nor did I say it should be the main focus. The main benefit to doing it is it potentially increases visibility. Personally I think the biggest problem you guys will have is raising money unless you are planning on putting it up yourselves. Why should anyone donate money to you over the other established options at this point? As a member of UP I understand why but it’s hard to see why a random would do it. Even if you are successful you need to be able to parlay that into something bigger in the future. A podcast may not be the way to do it but in this day and age stuff like that (yt, twitch, podcasting) is the cheapest and easiest way to notoriety. Ultimately you need the notoriety to get the money or influence to make a meaningful difference.

Some examples of that are the Among Us streamers raising voting awareness by playing with AOC/Omar and Chapo turning what was once a cult podcast into a full blown well attended Bernie tour this year.

It’s also possible I don’t exactly understand what you guys are trying to do here.

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I mean we had plenty of dirt on Trump in 2016 and it didn’t seem to matter all that much. I think that the methods to decrease turnout on the left and on the right are different. If Biden was caught on tape saying “grab em by the pussy” he would have no shot at being elected. It didn’t impact Trump’s chances much at all. Given that a lot of what we want to do is going to occur in primaries, we need to focus on turning out and/or not turning out portions of the Democratic base, and persuading portions of the base.

Also from a simple cost-benefit situation, I think doing that kind of oppo is going to tend to be more expensive and time consuming. Like digging through internet searches and social media histories is one thing, but if you’re talking about IRL hiring like private investigators and such, that’s expensive. It’s also something that (I assume) none of us have experience in.

On the other hand, running micro targeted FB ads with A/B tests and pouring over the data to figure out what’s working best to continually improve our results… That’s right up our alley… and we could theoretically have a much bigger impact with much less money. When AOC beat Joe Crowley, she got almost 17K votes. He got 12,880, so the magic number was 12,881. I want us to pick districts where we can win a House seat with 10-15K votes, and find the most cost-effective way to get good people in.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we don’t need to dig through people’s garbage to find out their dirty little personal secrets to attack them with, they’re objectively horrible based on their policy positions and public statements. The eDems are just far to often incompetent when it comes to attacking those things in meaningful ways in terms of turning out our votes or depressing turn out of theirs.

Regarding your Whitesburg example, I do like the idea of running ad campaigns to basically prime voters to the candidate we know we’re going to run there before actually running them. Kind of opening their mind up to considering their own personal AOC-style candidate so that their eyes and ears perk up when they see the first ad. But I think that’s something that we’re a little farther away from at the moment.

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So I’ve done some more soul searching and I’m starting to think that what’s missing is an issue org that advocates for the long term future of the median US household. We refuse to accept the label of being partisan, and we work with anyone who we think will do that. When we work with people we don’t give them money, we just show up and do stuff that works.

Honestly I’m not a fan of the Democratic Party and the #1 thing I do not want to do is end up like them. I’m not talking about policy here, I’m talking about the organization. That thing is insanely dysfunctional, a terrible place to work, and produces truly inferior products and services. The culture is toxic, the people it attracts are mediocre born lucky types, and corruption that looks like waste is happening all over the place.

I also agree cuse that the oppo research part is kind of silly and would be way down the road if it was ever viable. The other stuff is what we’re good at.

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The problem is there’s a lot of strategic value to flying under the radar, although that does obviously make it harder to raise money. Does AOC ever beat Joe Crowley if he knows he’s in a real fight? He didn’t realize until a week or two before the election that he was in a real race.

We’re all good at recognizing inefficiencies and soft games. Poker in the boom, PredictIt now… Well, I see a soft game in politics right now. I see an entire party that is out of touch with a big chunk of its base, ignoring a big chunk of its potential base, and most of all ignoring digital advertising. Like we know how big that is, and I’m not sure we even come close to appreciating how big it is.

This is like 2005 poker level big. This is people stacking off with AT on an A high board for 100bb every single time big. There is a method of advertising which allows you to:

  1. Narrow your target immensely. You can use the power of FB’s data to target extremely selectively. We can serve healthcare ads to subset A, stimulus ads to subset B, $15/hr ads to subset C, etc… Based on their social media usage and available data knowing that they are going to be more open to certain arguments.

  2. Advertise at a much cheaper cost per potential voter reached.

Like, it’s an exponentially more powerful form of advertising that is also cheaper, and the Democratic Party is basically ignoring it. That’s not going to last forever. I think the availability of this allows us to fly under the radar.

My dream would be to find candidates to run for the House, and have their campaign basically just do grassroots organizing for GOTV campaigns. We would be available for consulting at a very low cost to them, and we’d be running ads for them/against their opponent that would not be paid for by them. So we can have campaigns that appear to be low budget shoestring operations on the surface, meanwhile we’re running FB ads like crazy.

We would need to figure out the proper organizational structure to meet filing requirements without giving the game away, but if we can do so legally, I think we can have campaigns where it looks like nunnehi level campaign spending when in reality we’re firing money into social. If they don’t dig into the filings, they won’t even realize it. Like, they’re not going to figure out we’re running micro targeted FB ads for a while - that’s going to fly under the radar I think. Maybe @skydiver8 has some insight into how to pull that off and how likely my theory is to play out that way in reality.

The thing is, the games won’t be this soft forever… and once we tip our hand, the jig is up. Doesn’t mean we can’t still be effective after that, but we won’t have that huge surprise advantage. That’s why I think it’s important to hit them hard in our first opening salvo, which means shooting for the moon.

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I think for next steps it’s important to figure out, first and foremost, who is prepared to jump into this in a big way over the next two months in the runup to the Georgia runoffs, then jump in fully after that if we agree it works. Like 20+ hours a week, maybe full-time - and what our needs/expectations would be financially and otherwise.

Once we have that group defined, we can work through each of our visions for this and make sure that we are in agreement on a path forward that we can all buy in to and believe in - one for the GA runoff and one after that. Then we can start to formulate a strategic plan and our short and long-term roles in it.

I’m in. Who else?

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