Slender Threads (and Worries) As We Approach E-Day
Will the rising youth vote save Democrats from doom? Are they over-relying on digital organizing? And why life isn't tweet anymore.
If young voters turn out at the same rate they did in 2018, which is what a big national survey released late last week from Harvard’s Institute of Politics projects, then Democrats may do better than expected in lots of close races across the country, because pollsters are probably under-estimating their share of the likely electorate, as I discussed in last week’s Connector. Maybe the last-minute visit to the White House that the DNC organized for a group of eight TikTok stars who have a combined following of more than 67 million fans will help. Maybe the digital advertising edge that Kyle Sharp of FWIW spells out here will help. (More on the Harvard poll and the prospects of the youth vote here in my latest piece for Medium.)
On the other hand, I’m worried that for the last two years Democrats and affiliated groups (many of which are still in a defensive pandemic posture) have been relying far too heavily on digital means of reaching voters rather than face-to-face methods. Maybe we’re finally coming of the COVID crouch, but my strong impression is that we’ve slid harder into digital because it’s relatively cheap and easier to organize, it delivers measurable participation numbers, and because it seems more inclusive than holding mass meetings that some large percentage of people will avoid because they are afraid, perhaps too afraid, of catching the virus. Don’t forget, Democratic grassroots volunteers are typically more well-off and educated: the kinds of people who are most attentive to the news, but also more fearful of COVID exposure than the average person.
So while our half of the physical public square is emptier, we’re all crowding into the digital public square (such as it is) more. This means the churn-and-burn effect, which trades positive short-term metrics (money raised, texts opened) for long-term negative effects (lower open rates, more pissed-off grassroots donors), is only being worsened. I have no inside window into exactly how much big Democratic donors are giving to fund things like mass-texting, but I can see the results in my own in-box and on my phone, as can you.
One additional drawback to the doubling down on digital: Spamming people with heavily scripted messages or getting volunteers to hit send on the same reduces the human aspect of political organizing too much. Thinking that someone rated as a “1” is a sure vote for your candidate or party because of a perfunctory conversation or text exchange strikes me as dangerously naïve about how people actually make up their minds (and how much they can be changed by personal interactions and environments). Just in the last few weeks in my own experience, I found myself making calls to upstate NY Democrats with a script that literally only mentioned two attributes about the candidate I was calling for: his pro-choice stance and the fact that he had cut taxes as a county executive. Maybe message testing already shows that these two buzzwords are enough to trigger the right spot in a listener’s amygdala to get the right response, but I’m very dubious. Doing a mass-texting run also aimed at NYers who the Working Families Party had targeted, I was also surprised by the vehemence of many of the people who responded with heated attacks on Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul as a “baby-killer” or worse for her pro-abortion efforts. Intensity is not something captured well by numeric metrics.
If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that more political professionals are speaking up to condemn where churn-and-burn digital outreach is driving the whole ecosystem:
Here’s the campaign manager for a state senate race tweeting about her “immense frustration at the large, well-funded campaigns that have abused fairly inexpensive voter-outreach tools (email, text, phone-banking) so much that they’re now essentially unusable.” She adds, “Down-ballot races are just as important as large Congressional races & now it is so much harder to contact voters because they’re constantly being ambushed by campaigns who bought lists from somewhere and will relentlessly send emails 14x a day.”
Here’s Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight decrying the spam artists who keep using his name without his permission in their email subject lines: “my advice is not to donate to any campaign that engages in this sort of misinformation.”
Here’s Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, writing their list apologetically about the problem and urging activists to unsubscribe from spammy lists. (Having received oodles of spammy text messages from Indivisible National it’s nice to see them trying to fix a problem they contributed to.)
But on the third hand, the silver lining doesn’t hide this dark cloud: the never-ending barrage of emails from campaigns and other groups is crowding out essential messages from election officials, as this tweet suggests: “I’ve Received 86 democratic fundraising emails today. Only during me counting them out did I notice the email I had received from my Secretary of State with important voting information.”
In this vein, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a Nancy Pelosi protégé who is expected to make a leadership bid after the dust clears on the battle to control the US House, is one of the worst offenders. He’s doing a lot of local events to help more endangered colleagues, but he’s also fundraising like mad around defending the Democratic House majority with emails that actually just pull money into his own campaign’s pockets. More on this here from Jeff Burdick of SactoPolitics.
After this election is over, I’m hoping for a reckoning and a reset. The folks at EthicalEmail.org, who are tracking this problem closely, are a good place to start.
Network Defects
Lots of people are weighing in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, so I’ll be brief. First, what’s truly bad about this is how Musk and his minions (like VC David Sacks, a Peter Thiel acolyte) will further enable hate speech and organizing on the platform, especially the normalization of a whole range of fascist tendencies. Second, this is going to create lots of turbulence, for corporate advertisers and for ordinary users, though the former group hasn’t shown much spine to date and without concerted organizing of users and consumers, that won’t change.
Finally, if you’re looking for an alternative platform, right now lots of the cool kids of tech and academia are heading to the Mastodon fediverse (the federated universe of decentralized Mastodon servers), which while it remains small will give all of us a little bit of refuge and a sense of what Twitter was like in the early days. But good luck with that as a lasting solution; as a decentralized network Mastodon is far more confusing to use than Twitter and has almost none of the terms-of-service guard-rails that Twitter tried to offer users. I’m over on Mastodon.social (@msifry@mastodon.social) but good luck signing up there; my sense is right now many Mastodon instances are just plain overwhelmed by surging interest.
If you want to read more on the topic, here are three useful takes: Cory Doctorow on the collective action problem of trying to move with your community off a dying social media platform (it’s like the Jews of Anatekva fleeing the Czar, he says!); Eli Pariser on why Musk’s Twitter will not be the town square we need (with a nice shout-out to Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, which is an island in the storm); and Caroline Sinders on why she isn’t giving up on Twitter yet.
Odds and Ends
—The great Kate Kaye digs deep for Protocol on how former Google chairman Eric Schmidt (the Democrats’ Peter Thiel?) is mixing his business investments in artificial intelligence with his deep lobbying urging the US government to beef up its AI investments in direct response to the “threat” from China. It’s a tangled mess, as Schmidt’s VC firm has put hundreds of millions into AI military contractors that have received big government deals, while he served on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Plus he's a big donor to Democratic campaign arms, his foundation funds several top staff positions at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the chief of the DOD’s new Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office came there straight from Schmidt Futures. It may all be wise and benevolent, but as Nathan Myhrvold, one of the founders of Microsoft Research, told Kaye, “I’m totally in favor of U.S. support for this stuff, but the problem is when you obtain that by scaring people with warmongering and fear and the language of conflict, you have this real problem that you might shoot yourself in the foot.”
—Speaking of the revolving door, the Tech Transparency Project has a new report out that reveals “an explosion of recent ‘revolving door’ traffic between federal institutions and the cryptocurrency sector, with nearly 240 examples of officials with key positions in the White House, Congress, federal regulatory agencies, and national political campaigns moving to and from the industry.” The most transactional people include: Jay Clayton, who served as the chair of the SEC during the Trump administration, who is with crypto platform Fireblocks and One River Asset Management, a startup cryptocurrency fund manager; Arthur Levitt, SEC chair during the Clinton administration, who is advising at least three crypto startups; former Obama Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who now advises Blockchain.com; Larry Summers, former Clinton Treasury secretary and Obama National Economic Council (NEC) director, who serves as an adviser to three crypto companies; Max Baucus (D-MT), former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who advises crypto exchange Binance on regulatory issues; and former Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) who is advising One River Digital Asset Management.
—Federal aid for subsidized broadband access is one of those issues that still seems to get bipartisan support, but as Tony Romm shows in great detail in the Washington Post, billions are being harvested by a mix of big telcos and smaller grifters who are adept at gaming the system. He reports that “telecom giants including AT&T, Charter Communications and Verizon forced customers to accept price increases or slower connection speeds if they wanted to apply federally funded discounts to their bills, according to complaints filed with the FCC and later obtained by The Washington Post under federal open-records laws.” He also writes that “lesser-known internet providers started showing up at Americans’ doors unannounced, pushing subpar service on unsuspecting families and potentially signing up others without their knowledge or permission. Others who received aid through another low-cost T-Mobile brand, Metro by T-Mobile, reported additional incidents — including months-long delays that left them on the hook for bills they could not afford.” Democrats can’t brag about expanding broadband access if they can’t make sure the actual programs they legislate genuinely help the people they’re intended for.
—Attend: The 2022 Nonprofit Software Development Summit is November 16-18 in Oakland.
End Times
—I really like the collective message and imagery of this #ProtectOurFreedoms closing ad from Way to Win. But doing “everything we could” has to be more than just one-off, just-in-time, far-away voter contacting. The sandcastles these tactics keep building are not up to the storm we face.