OK, here are some notes after reading through the thread:
Very few people here have experience running campaigns, and maybe no one has experience running the digital side of a campaign. We should look for some mentors or more experienced people to point out obvious mistakes. Some resources mentioned ITT and others that I know of:
Daily Kos “Nuts and Bolts” campaign series
skydiver
Swing Left, Sister District, MoveOn, Indivisible, Run for Something, One Vote at a Time, Flippable, sam wang’s redistricting moneyball
There are two general classes of targets, with both being more plentiful at the lower levels: margins and so-called white space
margin: lightest red districts in lightest red states (or maybe lightest blue states, because down-ballot outperformed Trump in 2020). SwingLeft and Sister District are already identifying the races, so joining one of those as a digital/dark money team would allow us to focus our resources in the right places. Con: need to support conservadems.
margin: purple states that are turning blue: GA, AZ, NC, TX
white space: Safe blue districts with no Republican running. e.g., MA-01 (Neal), TX-28 (Cuellar), and I’m sure tons at the state level. Run a primary challenger, and nominate the same person for the Squad/Progressive Democratic Party. If we lose the primary, we still have the main event. Con: Repubs can pressure our candidate to drop out of the main by fielding a candidate.
white space: Red(dish) districts where no Democrat is running. Run someone, as skydiver advocates
Scaling: there is a different target audience, and potentially multiple different target audiences per district. Identifying districts and audiences is not going to be scalable beyond a few districts/candidates. This will require building models and crunching lots of data on a regular basis.
Model feedback: someone mentioned that we can easily get a/b test results or other feedback to see what’s working. What does this look like? Do we have a link back to an archive of videos or commentary for that race? If we don’t want to tip our hand from race to race, we might need to create a new 501c4 for each race. That gets expensive (like $500-$1000+ per corp for the first year).
Encourage people to move: 10 activists from a deep blue district to a target district (could be interstate or intrastate). They become a force multiplier to flip the district. We move on to the next election. Start with VA in 2021, and continue with NC, PA, MI, GA, WI in 2022.
I like the idea of trying to convert Qs back to Christians. Just give them a hit of Jesus’ socialism every 5 Facebook posts. With appropriate flag and Jesus imagery of course. Eye of a needle, money changers, etc.
I’d still like to get this going, seems like getting legal advice is a big sticking point for us. I struck out there.
I’ll be reachable for now at @the_ghost_of_cuse but would love to see us get a group chat on Signal going. @boredsocial has my contact info now as well and we’re in touch.
My limited knowledge on election law attorneys is they all work for big law firms with enormous hourly rates. They have to get in on the grift after all. I would be very surprised if you could find some small practice attorney who actually knew what they were doing to bill you less than $300/hr or something.
Again my knowledge in this field is very limited so that may not be correct but both election law attorneys I know clerked for federal judges and then went the big law route.
I don’t think you’re necessarily looking for an election law attorney. You might be looking more for a lawyer whose specialty is non-profit organizations in general. It may also be that what you really need is the help of an accountant who understands IRS rules regarding 501c organizations.
If I was running a PAC on the cheap, I might be willing to compromise on that and hope that any punishment is a slap on the wrist. I suspect that a lot of leftist political initiatives get started without worrying too much about the technicalities of law.
Technically, you just need to submit a form to the IRS to create a 501c, I believe.
The biggest problem I see is not having someone with a personal connection to Georgia, if the goal is to affect those races, especially given the timeframe. Is there someone like that to run point? If you want to be effective, you need to have the advantage of knowledge/skills that the traditional consultant class doesn’t have. One way to do that is to have personal knowledge of the area you wish to affect. Otherwise, you come off as a bunch of carpetbaggers trying to exploit the locals.
If I were going to try to influence the Georgia election, I would look towards the idea of micro-targeting a specific ethnic community the way the Republicans targeted Cubans in Georgia. That would require some research on the demographics of Georgia.
I don’t know that Georgia needs our help. They outperformed – Biden won, runoffs forced, and legislative gains made. This writer says let locals lead:
They did this by listening to their communities and by finding better ways to communicate with them. Their stuff works — they have proven that. Because their stuff works, they don’t need saviors. They don’t need new policies, they don’t need new messages, they don’t need new people. On the contrary, these might actually more harm than good.
They have a bunch of donation links, including to county party committees, which could be a good use of funds. Another source said that the local groups are putting ads on gospel stations, because a lot of the target audience doesn’t have internet. The opposition has the talk radio advantage there.
We do have the demographic info, including age, last party voted, race, gender, legislative district, voting precinct, and mailing address.
I would say amplifying the anti-Loeffler and -Perdue sentiment with Republican voters would be the easiest to decide and implement.
Maybe if we don’t have a lawyer by Friday, we should just figure out the 501c4 filing stuff ourselves on Monday and just color well within the lines. Like we are smart enough to figure out suppression ads that come nowhere near getting us in trouble.
I do still think it’s important that we pick some Dem voters to target with positive ads. Given that we don’t want to overlap and risk messing anything up, I’m thinking registered Dem voters who did not vote in the general who’s email we can find to target them directly on Facebook. That’s gotta be such a microtargeting of such a low propensity group that our net efforts can only help. We can then compare turnout to a sample of registered Dems who didn’t vote in the general who’s email we couldn’t find, who we confirmed are alive and living in GA.
That may need a little refining.
In terms of collecting data it seems important to do both positive ads for our side and suppression against the other. Agree we should focus mostly on the suppression in this spot, though.
Unless you get a lawyer who has experience forming 501c4’s, a random lawyer won’t be able to give you any real help. Forming a 501c4 is likely not hard, but it is a pain and time consuming as there are federal and state technical rules you have to follow. It also is not the type of thing where general legal knowledge is going to help that much. I had to incorporate a NY charitable organization once, and I don’t think being a lawyer helped me in any way.
For things like articles of incorporate/By-Laws you should be able to find basic templates on-line and just fill in some sections. Just make sure you get ones for the right state you want to incorporate in.
I would point you to the following article which may be relevant regarding concerns about not doing everything 100% right.
Probably nothing but wouldn’t push it at that point, lol.
Jeez, conservatives push for deregulation has been complete and total scorched Earth victory. No wonder they are morphing into the conspiracy theory party, their reason for existing has been completed.
This is the nature of social movements. They come into existence because there’s something happening that pissed a lot of people off… and they continue more or less in their original form until they accomplish all of the reasonable goals they started with.
Of course by then there are hundreds to thousands of people who have 10+ years of their career (often their whole career full stop) invested in the social movement. What follows is those career activists presiding over a now pointless institution whose only purpose is to preserve the power they acquired in the name of fighting whatever was pissing people off.
The GOP started off this political meta standing against all of the broken stuff from the New Deal era of union dominance (like all political era’s it was pretty sickly when it ended… kind of like this one is now). They had accomplished everything reasonable they ever wanted by the time Clinton got elected. They accomplished everything their non crazy people could have dreamed of by the time Obama got elected. Everything since is just Mitch filibustering the country moving in a new direction to remain powerful.