10 Comments

I'm really happy people are finally ready to confront how much money we waste on elections and how our approach and messaging simply doesn't work.

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Yes thank you for laying this out so clearly, and for calling out postcarding, for example, as the form of self-care that it is.

The Democrats have committed malpractice for 9 years now. I have heard reports of people who were eager to step in and lead county parties, for example, who were ridiculed and shamed (with attempts to smear their reputation) into deserting the party altogether. This is an old guard who a) thinks they know what they are doing and they DO NOT b) are stuck in high school popularity contests and c) are actively thwarting new, creative energy out of some sense of "how things are done." It is an abomination.

I know that this is just one star in a constellation of problems, but it makes me so very angry precisely because it's so unnecessary, given all that we are actually meant to be dealing with. Everything they do is based on flawed reasoning divorced from even basic intuition about how human beings feel. Frankly, think almost the entire Democratic Party and campaign machinery needs to be fired.

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On target as always. Thanks for this.

1). It always was going to take a miracle for the incumbent party to win. No incumbent party has ever won with wrong track numbers like these (65 percent of voters thought nation on wrong track)...and worldwide the results have been similar in elections. Harris gave it her all but could not defeat the voters feelings on the economy.

2). Liberal elites parachuting into swing states on weekend trips was and is always hubris.

3). GOTV activities (activity vs results) like postcard writing are extremely not important. Mostly they give campaigns (and other folks) something to give volunteers to do to keep them occupied and thinking they are helping.

4). Privacy and interrupting people's lives. I don't know about you but I hate people interrupting my privacy and life with knocking on my door and making my dogs bark.. And waking up the baby. The political industrial complex doesn't give a crap about what voters want and how they want to be communicated to. They have never asked.. It is spam spam spam.

At the end of the day.... Voters wanted change and the dem establishment was not it.

5) it's the economy stupid.

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I can't really speak to the ground game in PA. I'm not shocked that the center-slight-left political party full of career politicians that begs for donations has troubles being inspiring: that just seems like an "of course" to me, not a place for great cynicism, how did we think the world was going to work? It is their careers, they do need to raise that money, there is no magic answer.

I feel like I'm witnessing the lack of oomph farther left from the center of politics. I grew up politically with "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." And we are not. I live in Berkeley amongst self-styled cutting-edge radicals and the biggest contribution I saw — thank you thank you thank you to those who did it — was things like post-carding and a few people making calls. The Bernie Sanders group I was part of spent it's energy in-fighting: I saw just about nothing from my immediate community that was radical AND inspiring. I experienced a huge blue wave of saying "vote blue" and a huge left-wave of criticizing the blue and each other.

No one is stopping us from building a radical movement alongside the Democrats. Of being kind to each other while we do it, and normalizing that. Of making a world where people looked at the career politicians and of course said "meh, responsible but disappointing" and THEN looked at a beautiful and radical alternative on the left and wondered if they could be hopeful enough to risk it —> in this election, the only clear alternative to career politicians being realistic was the hatred and conspiracy thinking from the right. We — my "we" is farther left than Democrats — we failed to create a left-edge to the Overton window that left Biden and Harris as the right-edge of reasonable. Harris and Biden were trying, while my friends were infighting.

It has been said over and over that we need a call-in culture not call-out, and I don't know how to get us there. I don't think that Biden and Harris doing their best was really the weak spot in 2024. What should our movement have looked like?

What three issues should we have focused on that could have both supported and challenged the Democrats, uplifting rather than undercutting their half-measures? Who were our communication experts? The trolls have developed techniques to get people arguing, what communication techniques create solidarity? You and I will never fix the Democratic machine's weak ground game, but we could build a movement that made them look corporate and boring *from the left* so that the right doesn't own rebellion.

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This is spot on.

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Micah -

Of partial relevance... I perhaps should have thought to ask this last year but... did no campaign use any AI chatbots for engagement? e.g.:

https://conorbronsdon.com/blog/how-political-campaigns-can-effectively-use-chatbots-and-ai

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9 hrs ago·edited 9 hrs ago

Before the TV era, political parties were organized around precinct captains (aka district leaders or ward heelers) who were in charge of a precinct and knew their party's voters - and the particular issues each one cared about. It was "relational organizing" 101. Then TV came along and highly-paid media consultants copied Madison Avenue and created ads designed to "persuade." That advertising mentality now includes mailers, social media ads, and doorknock scripts. And instead of actually knowing what each voter cares about based on conversations, data analysts create "models" to guess what they care about. Unfortunately talking "at" voters (advertising) based on issue models cannot compare to genuine relational organizing.

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a reasonable question to ask -- how many precincts have DL's or captains? is there data on turnout with a captain vs not?

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Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB mentions "Trump's uncanny ability to turn the world upside down.". I believe he's referring to Trump's projection, an odious trait which never received sufficient attention.

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yes and also his broad proclamations like "I alone can fix this." He communicates at a level of hubris and bullshit that Democrats would never use - and never figured out how to turn against him.

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