lol, that’s sarcasm, right? If not, sorry to burst your bubble, I guess I lean toward the “win then change” side as opposed to the “purity at all costs” side.
No I’m horrified you didn’t have the money and I’m horrified you spent any money on tv before you had pushed it till it stopped generating results.
I’m even further into the win now camp than you probably. Always was.
This is a mirror image of all the stuff about the biden crime bill this cycle.
Of course coming from you is bad. That’s why the right launders it through troll farms pretending to be locals.
Also idk to what extent fear is useful for our side. Fear of literally anything makes people vote more conservative. Although yeah it may depress turnout I guess? Idk. It’s simple enough to a/b all the strategies every cycle and refine a playbook of what works how well for whom.
well, the right isn’t stupid. we drop one anonymous ad/text it might work. Which is why we’d money to first analyze the demographics so we targeted each one correctly.
Planned parenthood to the evangelicals. shady business shit to the die hard capitalists/SB owners. etc. It’s only going to work once, before it backfires, so you would need to be maximally effective right out of the gate.
They do it to us constantly, why wouldn’t it work on them constantly?
I don’t think this is correct. It doesn’t matter if you get caught. You’re not trying to persuade them, you’re trying to manipulate them, to elicit a negative feeling associated with the other candidate. Once that bell has rung, it doesn’t matter much if they know it’s you, the seed is planted.
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They think we stole this election when they actually tried as hard as they could to steal the election. I made a trading in chess metaphor in a different thread. It’s like that. If they accuse you of doing something it’s at least on the table now.
I saw the thread title, got very excited and then wanted to read when I can clear some mental space and think these ideas through. My review of the first day of threads was on the money and now I need to catch up!
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I think you guys disagreement is academic and this is why:
I agree with you entirely that people don’t magically transform into different people when they get elected. I also agree that populist messages sell well and we should try hard to win primaries for populists…
At the same time I agree that what populism looks like should be determined by the local district, that we can’t expect our candidates to be perfectly pure human beings without failings, and that when presented with a binary choice between bad and worse you should fight hard to cut your losses at the merely bad.
I also care a LOT about competence. Without competence it doesn’t matter what your message is, what your policies are, or absolutely anything else. You won’t translate any of it into anything that matters because you’ll be stymied by the more competent people who disagree with you. This is why I’m fine with Pete being in the tent. I know he’s a blatantly careerist politician who pretty exclusively worships at the altar of his own ambition… which is why I’m very confident that he’ll gleefully join the winning team if it looks probable that we will win, which would be a very good thing because if there’s another thing besides his overwhelming ambition I’m sure of about Pete it’s that he’s a good sized outlier competence wise.
The guy is so confident (or overconfident) in his own competence that he probably dropped out and endorsed Biden in exchange for getting to run the VA. The VA is a nightmare scenario that has chewed up and spit out every single person who tried to fix it since the scandals of the early 2000’s. If he fixes that he’s an elite technocrat, and without those people you can’t actually carry out any agenda at all.
If he fixes the VA he’s going to be President some day and I want to be bargaining with him to get his help for my stuff in exchange for getting his help with mine. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate what a huge victory fixing, or even tangibly improving the VA would be. We’re talking really crazy shit there.
Grunching due to extreme excitement about the ideas I’ve read, so asking for patience: What level races are we willing to take on? I have very good line of sight for an upcoming school board election and a PAC already set up to support liberal/progressive candidates. Would there be any interest in me reaching out to the PAC and setting up a sit down? That said, I’m struggling with the commitment right now. Unfortunately, this last round left me knackered and I bought a “bug out” property which I want to develop for gardening, eventual cabins, etc. But as a concept, yeah I’m in.
ETA: While this is a small town, local campaign, we would totally be able to test the ideas presented above. The usual villains are in place and they are more SM savvy than our side. Our side needs help. Our most promising candidate was oppoed out before anyone has even filed. It’s gonna be a knife fight but also with bazookas.
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This is why the current AOC vs. Centrist fight is so tilting to me. AOC is right…but so is Conor Lamb/Abby Spanberger. The real answer isn’t even in the middle, it’s outside of the entire argument. Its a combo of data, policy and messaging.
One thing we haven’t been talking about is the R’s data collection and organization ops that are a million times better than ours. Good data allows the good micro-targeting we’re talking about. Data on AOCs D+20 district and data for CA-50(R+10) are going to show very different messaging and targeting needs. We may have this data, but we haven’t parsed it in a significant way to use it for this purpose.
For example, AOC can run on “Medicare for All” because in her district, Bernie Sanders is not a curse word. In my district, you can’t use the words “Medicare for All” but I bet you can say “single payer” or universal health care" to drill down to the people who want that, but hate “socialism,” which they associate with AOC and Bernie (and Pelosi, because they are stupid).
And of course this is the messaging part of it that we’ve been talking about.
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So obviously we agree that messaging needs to be decided by what works in each district. We have to absorb the current context on the ground in that place and localize the message to what is popular there.
That being said this AOC vs moderates thing isn’t a both sides spot. The moderates started it to deflect blame for underperforming by dropping an op ed in the Washington Post. The correct move for AOC is to ruin these people’s political careers as an example to others, and I think it’s of the utmost importance for the long term health of the party as an organization that this happens so as to render this kind of ridiculous finger pointing obviously nonviable. That’s why I think there aren’t two sides to this argument and think that one side fucked up and the other side has to punish them for the good of the party.
The level one lesson for the party is to not fuck up digital because it’s very nearly the most important thing they have to get right to win. The level two lesson is that if you fuck around with AOC you’re going to find out why you should have been scared of her. She’s probably better at politics than Pete is, and you know I do not say that lightly. You should take her initial advice and when you run into problems you should call her again and ask for advice on how to deal with those problems. Ignoring her and then blaming her is a recipe for your own head on a plate, and she needs to make that very clear immediately.
I don’t actually think she has a choice here either. Just like how she has to respond to every false message about her the GOP pushes at her to prevent ending up a rich man’s Hillary she can’t let people from her own party try to cover their own asses by damaging her image to protect their own. If she allows that every single old moderate democrat that loses a race in a red district is going to blame AOC from now on and the narrative will be that she’s dragging the whole party down. That message isn’t just untrue it’s a pretty large threat which she has to counter in a muscular way. You wouldn’t expect any of the candidates you’re passionate about to turn the other cheek here, and AOC shouldn’t either.
Totally agree about every messaging related point in your post though. It’s all true. And I bet you absolutely anything that if/when AOC shows up to give a speech in a red district you see her messaging shift to find the common working class ground she shares with the people of that place. Because she does the work and isn’t one dimensional.
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The details of their squabble are unimportant. This is a proxy fight in a battle over just how much AOC and people like her should have in crafting the Democratic national messaging. There’s an argument that Dems would be better off overall having the words “Medicare for All” in the national platform even if it hurts Dems in a place like CA-50.
The progressive wing of the party sees messaging as an offensive weapon. The people you excite can outweigh the people you turn off. The centrist wing sees messaging an exercise in defense, trying to find the right words to stave off a Republican attack. Dems need to embrace partisanship and polarization.
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This is great
Yeah we definitely need to learn to attack instead of defend. Aggression is really good in basically every field including politics. Make the other guy react to you and live on the back of his feet. The biggest difference I perceived between the meta for the 2016 campaign vs the 2020 campaign is that the Democrats took the fight to Trump more often. They still turtled way way too much in my opinion and it shouldn’t take a candidate as vulnerable as Donald Trump to convince you to mount an attack, but at least they did attack some.
We need to always be attacking. Not defending ourselves so much as shredding them. It works for the GOP just fine.
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Everything fails in those districts at really high rates. I think you’ll end up being right when we start figuring out what gets good digital engagement in places like that though.
I strongly suspect the correct strategy is to use conservative language to sell the center left policies that pass for far left policies in this country.
Yeah. Appeal to their sense of grievance, fairness. For the evangelicals it was appeals to their sense of morality (w/r/t abortion) that turned them from non voters in 1972 to the backbone of the R electorate today. Everybody has buttons to push, those can be targeted to sell nearly anything to anyone, it’s just a matter at this point of developing enough data.
Yeah that’s a really good point I want to highlight. Social media, it turns out, is not about convincing people rationally. It’s about finding their weaknesses and biases and using them against them. Is it nice? No. We’ve built an entire economy on demand generated from addiction and we’re talking about using one of the main ways it makes sure people stay addicted.
If you haven’t had the experience of growing up poor, getting addicted to soda and fast food, and then fixing your diet and losing weight after you stop being poor… let me tell you that too is radicalizing. I’m in the middle of the process and this is like trying to quit heroin where there are full color ads for heroin on every corner and you can smell it fucking everywhere. It’s absolutely insane.
That’s the world we live in now. Good to keep that in mind as we figure out how to exploit the internal contradictions in other people to turn them inside out.
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