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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Lol I am obviously in. I have to do about 10 hours a week to tread water with my business, but literally every extra second and all my free time is onboard. I’ve basically never been so motivated to do something in my life.
I hope you know I am rooting for you guys and completely agree with your assessment. I am not at all trying to rain on your parade just brainstorm along with you guys. The only thing holding me back is I can’t commit to 20+ hours a week right now. My wife is getting ready to do travel nursing in a covid ward and I have to first and foremost try and alleviate the rest of the stress for her. I also have a dipshit dog who just compound fractured their leg Monday and requires constant attention. I still have to keep the wheels on at work also.
That being said I will help you guys anyway I can.