State house, you mean. Right?
Cheaper races with arguably more effect on people’s daily lives. And it helps build our bench.
I know AOC is the hotness. And while I love her, she should not be our model.
Danica Roem should be the model.
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I could argue either side of this, but the main reasons I mean the US House is that I don’t want the games to dry up before we get to the higher stakes. I think we have a limited window to take advantage of. I’m also very concerned about the window of time that remains to prevent the further solidification of the GOP’s power to rule from the minority across all levels, but particularly at the federal level. I think it’s critical to get the Dems at the federal level to start playing GTO asap.
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This is fb. You can run thousands of campaigns. Do them all. Skydiver is right about local mattering. First race support is a huge hole right now.
You’re right cuse. The games are incredible. We should play max tables.
Xander here discusses efforts that he would like to see lefty youtube personalities make to make inroads into non-political content channels and help turn the bolts to move their audiences to be more left leaning. It’s quite interesting. AOC embracing VG trends and using the platform of gamers on twitch is a great way to appeal to the under 30 crowd.
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I think Hasan is probably one of the best leftists when it comes to attracting younger audiences. He has an immense following (a lotttt of younger people too) and streams on twitch almost every single day
https://twitter.com/hasanthehun/status/1325341183095136257?s=21
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I agree about doing both, for sure! What do you mean by “first race support”?
Yes to max tables, but also no to spreading ourselves too thin. The fact that we get to play around with this runoff should be a great learning experience for us.
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One thing I’ve wanted to do for a couple years is basically start a left wing version of Prager University on YT. Robert Reich does some good stuff, and he’s great and all, but I want to push that stuff out to more people and I don’t want an old white guy narrating every video.
One thing I’m curious about is whether we can dabble in efforts like this and the behind the scenes stuff while keeping them separated enough on paper to not draw attention to the big plan, while also keeping everything legal.
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I should add, something like a left wing Prager University might bring some revenue in IF we are able to serve ads on the videos. YT’s policy on that with regard to politics is dicey last I checked.
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Oh, also when I told my buddy more about our plan in depth last night around the fire pit (he’s interested in throwing us a few bucks and chipping in some time where he can, but not getting involved to the degree we all will), I basically said it might be some version of a left wing Lincoln Project.
His reply was, “Kennedy Project.”
I like it, it should go on the list of potential names, although I’m not sure it’s the best. I also think some sort of structure where we have various social media brands might work well. Like Kennedy Project can reach certain types and more Fuck the 1% type names might work better for others. Shit, we could do a Reagan Project quite effectively to move people from far right to center on immigration.
In before someone says “But the Kennedy’s are the embodiment of the liberal elite establishment.” Yup, don’t care, the name works for a subset of Dem voters and we can get them to vote for us.
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It’s a great name to fundraise from upper middle class liberals for sure.
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My dudes we flipped votes to Ammar by claiming to be a Kennedy democrat. That name not only works for eDems, it works on disgusted Rs as well.
It’s like a gateway drug. Pulls them in then we get to work on making them more progressive.
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If you’ve already tested Kennedy Democrat and it works on a subset of Republicans I think that’s the defacto name.
I will say though that I think names are kind of silly and with this being about social media there’s absolutely no downside to running a bunch of different branding at the same time. One of the things dark money groups do exceptionally well is morph into ‘concerned citizens for a better tomorrow’ or whatever sounds good. They don’t seem to care at all about the name, and I don’t think we should either.
The big org name we raise money under matters, but each campaign could have a different org name on it for all I care.
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I mean that when you run your first race as a Democratic candidate the DCCC does absolutely nothing to help you. I mean no one from the Democratic establishment does anything to help you. The problem is so transparently bad that someone is already trying to solve it aggressively: https://runforsomething.net/
If we showed up and ran a ton of dark money social media supporting some small candidate nobody has ever heard of it could have an absolutely massive impact for very little outlay. I have a sneaking suspicion you can tip over statehouse races for 50k spent on fb and nextdoor correctly. For primarying safe feeling incumbents this goes 400x.
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FYI, that specific name is taken. Unless you guys already created a website…
I’m not surprised, it’s a good name. I don’t know how the naming stuff works I come from logistics where some dumbass no doubt has called his company Mickey Mouse Trucking and even the mouse doesn’t care.
Exactly what I’ve been saying. State house and senate races are cheaper on an absolute level, but they are proportionally more expensive because advertising/campaigning costs the same amount no matter which race you’re running, and while the congressional campaigns raise millions, no one donates to candidates in the Assembly District 71 race or whatever it is.
Also, state legislatures control redistricting, which we just saw is now fucked for another 10 years unless we get miracle court rulings…pushed by legislative pressure.
As to HOW to win these races? Shut the fuck up about party and pick one or two hyper local issues that affects literally everyone in the district, and knock on every single door and talk about what you’re gonna do to fix it. Like I said: Danica Roem.
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I’m not going to have the free time to contribute meaningfully to this, and I’m grunching a bit, but there a couple things on my mind that I’m pretty sure the Dems currently suck at.
- Micro-targeting based on level of political engagement, education, and reading ability.
- Generally adapting to the new age of five-second attention spans.
We keep idealistically assuming that we can win people over with paragraph-long rationales about why we’ll make their lives better, but that’s genuinely not true for a huge portion of the population. I think part of the reason Trump exists is because Republicans and associated misinformation specialists have figured out how to evoke strong emotion (fear/anger/disgust) with memes that only require two seconds of attention, whereas Dem messaging often requires some actual effort/engagement/critical thinking skills. So in a competition of “how quickly can you make me have a reaction to something,” we’re losing pretty badly. Especially with under-educated and low-info groups.
Sure, let’s send our policy proposals to law graduates, but that’s not going to work with random white dude #130581 in rural West Virginia. He’s probably a good dude, but was failed by the education system and now just wants to know how we’ll help him in as simple a format as possible. HIT THAT MOTHERFUCKER WITH A GRAPHIC. Where are our two-panel memes, microtargeted to low-education voters that show “this is you now,” and “this is you after spending your $1200 stimulus check”?
We’re outsmarting ourselves, and it drives me crazy.
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Yeah we send the policy proposals to the politicans like ransom letters lol. The social media campaigns are 100% about what works and nothing else. We have goals and we go in and hit them.
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Yeah you’re one of three sources I have on that. I’m sold on it. One is an anecdote and maybe you got the wrong point of contact or something. Three different campaigns? Get the fuck out of here.
Caesar did some borderline magical shit, against the best troops in the world, against very elite generals.
Off topic but dude was a top 5 politician all time, super elite general, great writer. We need a Ceasar minus the whole genocidal sociopaths desire for power. Was a progressive politically though.
I think the recent political climate will attract a lot more talent into politics. Younger generations really want to get in there and make a difference, especially with shit like climate change. AOC is just the beginning. Hopefully we still have a democracy by the time they grow.