This would be like venture capitalism. Invest in a bunch of cheap, smaller races and hope you get in on the ground floor of someone who goes on to bigger and better things, with them dragging you along with them so that you have influence when your most successful horses attain higher office.
I’d look for a state legislature that can be flipped in 4-10 years.
not sure if this has been suggested yet, but since local print media is dwindling and getting overwhelmed with fake news on facebook, perhaps supporting independent local reporting is a necessity. like imagine if 10% of what was spent on harrison senate race went to provide a salary for 10 journalists with a platform to print/post/vlog.
So towards what the main messaging should be in GA for these runoffs, it’s very clearly this: “If Democrats take these two seats in Georgia, the first thing we are going to do is pass a new covid stimulus package which will put $1500 dollars in the bank account of every person in Georgia. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans will never pass a stimulus like that because they already gave themselves and their billionaire pals all the stimulus they could ever want”, needs work but the sense is there. Micro target on healthcare, voting rights, etc… but for the love of God don’t mention ackingpay the ourtscay.
The first thing we need to do is get a legit twitter going. Between all of us, we come up with some gold, multiple times per day. And, on occasion, we settle into a groove on something that everyone is getting wrong. COVID in March and the election since 7PM Tuesday were great examples.
We have two big advantages:
(1) 24 hour coverage and the ability to crowdsource. We can crowdsource content (important) and crowdsource review (equally important) and have minimal curating and management.
(2) Our members can retweet the content, which will help a lot in the beginning.
We could have something similar to BestOf, except recommending it for twitter. Either it gets reposted in a twitter thread for a quick discussion, or we have a likes threshold where a nominated post will get tweeted if it is met within a certain period of time.
We would need strict rules about how everything you post HAS to be your own content, or you’re taking a serious time out. Especially re: memes. Someone also needs to actually manage the twitter account.
We obviously also need to share a more concrete vision and philosophy of messaging. However, this seems like Step 1a to making real shit happen. It ain’t gonna be possible by Jan 5 though.
Thinking of non standard targeted ads, can anyone get photos of Loefler or Perdue hanging out with Bill Belichick? Cut an ad about them being a diehard Pateiots fan. Hell, just photoshop something together and lie, it’s what the Republicans would do.
I once did some math on this before, local newspaper advertising is incredibly expensive per impression. Like 20x that of tv.
So I like all of this and think it should be done, but there’s not a shortage of witty leftists on twitter. I think making this place into a more powerful content engine is good, but it’s also not where I see the major roles that aren’t being filled in by the Democratic Party.
I completely agree that podcasts are super over saturated but one about getting this off the ground might not suck.
As someone who sits in an office for 8 hours a day while only working for 1 of those… there is plenty of space for another podcast.
i’m not really thinking about local newspaper ads. i think local reporting is an important function of democracy and it needs patreon-like support.
Rude bro… rude.
I volunteer to mukbang
Sorry Vic, this is the thread for people that actually want to make a difference. You must have made a wrong turn while looking for the thread dedicated to being an aggressive dick to people who aren’t 100% perfect liberal specimens. Take your shit elsewhere.
We are middle-aged white guys, it’s sort of weird we don’t have a podcast.
That’s actually quite tame compared to some of the things he’s said directly to me. Not as laugh-inducing or ban-worthy, though.
I was thinking a little more sinister, like painting them as New York socialites who hang in questionable circles. Show Epstein while saying it, and call her a fraud who’s not on our side. Basically you’re saying she’s fake Q.
This. I want to take 5, 10, 15 of us and start a full time operation. Like that’s how Justice Dems and Brand New Congress started. Some people got together and decided to do it.
I think you take what’s there in the record. They lied about covid while they lined their pockets with the spoils of illegal stock trading based on classified information. They abused their power and broke the public trust. Now, when Americans need urgent relief, during the worst wave of the pandemic they lied about, they’re asking to be returned to Washington, so they can team up with Cocaine Mitch to deny the workers of Georgia the stimulus payments it desperately needs. With your vote for D1 and D2, you can help chart a fundamentally different course: we take covid very seriously and we realize some people are working less and some can’t work all, so our plan is to provide $1500 stimulus to every Georgian, no questions asked.
Mexico are paying for the wall, China will pay for the stimulus.
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 
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The main drivers here are liberal centrists so…