Lexicus
Deity
I do see the Constitutional system as inherently flawed, but the electoral system specifically has delivered real change in the past and it may be able to again.
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The 2024 US Presidential Election
- Thread starter Gori the Grey
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I do see the Constitutional system as inherently flawed, but the electoral system specifically has delivered real change in the past and it may be able to again.
Gori the Grey
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So I might make a new thread, since I'm interested enough in that part of this. PSL does say they want a new constitution. But they give very little about what that new constitution might look like. They start giving the results that it will yield (e.g. housing for everyone at no more than 10% of income) in place of the mechanisms by which they would achieve those results, and in so doing, they give the impression that the results will just be imposed but they're very cagey about who will do that imposing, aside from "workers." The existing Constitution lays out a set of rules, so everybody (whom it allows to be part of the process; I know all those problems) can start looking at how they might use those rules to achieve their own desired results.
I say "might" because I'm not sure I myself will have sufficient time to participate in such a thread.
Edit: Actually, if you know of a place where anyone has made a serious attempt to work out what a socialist constitution would look like, that might be all I would need.
I say "might" because I'm not sure I myself will have sufficient time to participate in such a thread.
Edit: Actually, if you know of a place where anyone has made a serious attempt to work out what a socialist constitution would look like, that might be all I would need.
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So my first few thoughts on this got all bogged down in the semantics, the pedantic tit-for-tat. I didn't see a way forward constructively, so I'm trying something different.
Please ignore what you think are mischaracterisations, I'll reframe my argument, and we'll try a soft reset. Is that fair?
To me, your position is "the Democrats don't get credit for what they do". This doesn't match up with me being a leftist, knowing other leftists (anecdotally), and so on. The ACA got credit. Still does. It's also proven harder to dislodge than the NHS has over here in the UK (our conservatives have pretty successfully gutted various parts of it). This again is a plus.
The problem is you seem to throw this out to any criticism of the Democrats. Am I being fair? How do we move forward with constructive criticism, if someone like me (or anyone) has serious issues with the party despite not wanting to support the opposition?
And do you understand that any equivalence with "the Democrats have problems" with "well I guess you want the Republicans to win" is juvenile to the point of being insulting? I don't think this is you, but there are a few things going on at the same time in this thread and we're all only human - emotions transfer between posts regardless of who made them.
My bad. They compromised with the pro-life element in their own party. And even then, some Democrats voted against it. I remember the compromise, but not who it was with.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
I can tell you who both of them were, one was a decent governor in the nineties and the other one was a road apple for Democrats.
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Felon
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Something I just saw and decided to tag:
www.ft.com
American politics is undergoing a racial realignment
Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken
www.ft.com
Joij21
🔥Deny, Defend, Depose!🔥
Vote for Trump folks to stick it to the libs once more!
Remember we can't expect God to do all the work!
Remember we can't expect God to do all the work!
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
i can't read this. paywall.Something I just saw and decided to tag:
American politics is undergoing a racial realignment
Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken
generally in cases like these, it's not because reps have compelling policies for these groups (mostly. latins are very scared of "communism" and have often conservative values, and sometimes bite the bullet of the sheer xenophobia of reps to push that through). it's because the dems aren't delivering well enough for what the groups want. like, trust me. blacks don't have an issue with affirmative action. sometimes voter shift happens because of value policy, cultural preferences and such. lots of culturally conservative black voters that are economically, well, quite left.
and, uh, a big part of this failure is because of rep obstruction.
The New Rules Of Online Campaigning
Donald Trump’s 2016 victory rewrote the social media playbook by relying on supporter networks. Democrats are still scrambling to catch up.
BY SASHA ISSENBERG
Over the past quarter-century, data from field experiments and insights from the behavioral sciences have taught politicians the unique value of personal contact in campaigns. The gold standard of campaign contact today is a volunteer visiting someone from her own community to have an open-ended conversation about politics. But online campaigning has been slow to catch up. Since the emergence of the Internet a generation ago, campaigns have generally treated it as a venue for taking in donations and pushing out ads. They seldom enlisted volunteers to connect one-on-one with voters on social media; they communicated instead via alarmist fundraising emails and text messages that treat supporters like ATMs.
This transactional approach to online campaigning not only created weak ties to candidates; it also left a void in which lies and conspiracy theories have flourished. Barack Obama assembled a massive contact list, but QAnon has proven a much stronger and deeper community than anything his supporters created. A younger generation of political operatives have concluded that the best way to prevent disinformation narratives from taking hold is for campaigns to focus on building strong digital ties of their own, by entrusting supporters to cultivate relationships and use them to engage peers on the candidate’s behalf. The 2016 election forced political professionals to rethink much of what they believed about how to win votes online. Donald Trump made clear that he considered his supporters’ personalized posts on social media a valuable contribution to his campaign. He rewarded those who responded by amplifying their quips and memes, even when they might have distracted from the campaign’s preferred messaging. Those running for office had to contend with an opposition that included not just rival candidates or parties but individuals who could be anonymous or even citizens of other countries.
Democrats have struggled to adjust to a newly asymmetric environment. Many focused on developing tools to identify online content that violated the policies of social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Others tried to hire successful online creators, who knew that the Internet often responds better to crude and funny political messages than to slick, well-tested ones. One influential voice in these post-2016 Democratic debates is Jiore Craig, a young political consultant from Illinois whose campaign experience came in Moldova, Gabon and Panama. In those countries and many others, paid advertising and small-dollar fundraising have never been central to electoral politics the way they are in the U.S. Candidates don’t see the Internet as a place to raise or spend money but as a way to connect with supporters and have them spread the campaign’s message through their own networks.
“People were using social media for every type of thing,” says Craig, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit dedicated to combating political extremism and disinformation. Working at the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner in the late 2010s, Craig became the first full-time counter-disinformation operative in American politics. She outlined two parallel tasks for her clients, which included Democratic candidates, party organizations and outside groups. They had to be able to react to online attacks, which required equipping campaigns to track online content and distinguish real danger from mere nuisance. Craig helped to create a system for monitoring online content whose findings could be legally shared with other institutions on the left. Funding came through the Strategic Victory Fund, a consortium of donors formed in 2019 that raised $43 million that year.
At the same time, Craig emphasized the need for clients to communicate proactively online. In a 2017 marketing pitch, she and Jeremy Rosner, a partner at the firm, wrote: “Our digital approach to U.S. campaigns encourages teams to move from GOTV [Get Out the Vote] programs to G.O.V.T. (Grow Online Voter Trust) programs,” which means “giving voters more meaningful ways to engage with a campaign.” Even as “digital organizing” became a new buzzword, Craig found few clients interested in truly applying the logic of personal organizing to the Internet. Most existing consultancies specialized in placing advertising, but political professionals haven’t found a way to make a profit by cultivating networks of supporters online. “There is no real digital-organizing profession on the left,” observes Democratic consultant William Cyrus Garrett.
For President Biden’s 2020 campaign, strategists relied on survey research to anticipate which attacks on Biden were likely to be effective with voters and used it to guide positive communications responses that would address voters’ anxieties without amplifying the original claim. Voters susceptible to attacks related to Biden’s age weren’t concerned with his health as much as the perception he would not be the “author of his presidency,” as a campaign pollster put it. The response was not to present them footage of the candidate jogging but speaking forcefully about his values. But the Biden campaign chose to rely on digital ads to deliver these counter-messages instead of equipping supporters with them. “It would have been a much more dynamic way to think of volunteerism because what is rewarded online is scale, the same message online over and over and over and over. If you own a phone, you can be a digital organizer. Right? That’s literally what it takes,” says Garrett, who oversaw the Biden campaign’s operations in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.
[/URL]
TAYLOR CALLERY
Since 2020, the Internet has become an even more hospitable place for lies and disinformation. Operatives like Craig now think less about responding to discrete untruths than all-embracing conspiracy theories. That has inspired major players, especially on the left, to finally embrace a more capacious view of communicating online.
John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign for Senate in Pennsylvania set up a Slack channel for volunteers to swap messaging ideas with one another. The Democratic National Committee is currently training supporters to use Reach, an app that grew out of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign, as a tool to start conversations online. “We’re building an organizing program around a simple principle: that YOU are the best advocate with the people in your life,” the committee’s training materials inform supporters.
Campaign officials are alert to the risk involved. After all, they will spend tens of millions of dollars this year to refine their message for optimal impact and narrowly target the most receptive voters. At the same time, they will encourage supporters to build and maintain their own communications networks and speak freely across them. This shift in control will be hard to undo, but campaigns hope the benefits make it worthwhile.
“The Obama administration was focused on content,” then-White House digital strategy director Rob Flaherty told a Georgetown University audience last year, before taking a job as deputy campaign manager for Biden’s re-election. “We maximize for reach and getting our message to as many people as possible.” This essay is adapted from Sasha Issenberg’s new book, “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Play-book for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age,” which will be published March 12 by Columbia Global Reports.
‘There is no real digital-organizing profession on the left.’
WILLIAM CYRUS GARRETT
Democratic consultant
Donald Trump’s 2016 victory rewrote the social media playbook by relying on supporter networks. Democrats are still scrambling to catch up.
BY SASHA ISSENBERG
Over the past quarter-century, data from field experiments and insights from the behavioral sciences have taught politicians the unique value of personal contact in campaigns. The gold standard of campaign contact today is a volunteer visiting someone from her own community to have an open-ended conversation about politics. But online campaigning has been slow to catch up. Since the emergence of the Internet a generation ago, campaigns have generally treated it as a venue for taking in donations and pushing out ads. They seldom enlisted volunteers to connect one-on-one with voters on social media; they communicated instead via alarmist fundraising emails and text messages that treat supporters like ATMs.
This transactional approach to online campaigning not only created weak ties to candidates; it also left a void in which lies and conspiracy theories have flourished. Barack Obama assembled a massive contact list, but QAnon has proven a much stronger and deeper community than anything his supporters created. A younger generation of political operatives have concluded that the best way to prevent disinformation narratives from taking hold is for campaigns to focus on building strong digital ties of their own, by entrusting supporters to cultivate relationships and use them to engage peers on the candidate’s behalf. The 2016 election forced political professionals to rethink much of what they believed about how to win votes online. Donald Trump made clear that he considered his supporters’ personalized posts on social media a valuable contribution to his campaign. He rewarded those who responded by amplifying their quips and memes, even when they might have distracted from the campaign’s preferred messaging. Those running for office had to contend with an opposition that included not just rival candidates or parties but individuals who could be anonymous or even citizens of other countries.
Democrats have struggled to adjust to a newly asymmetric environment. Many focused on developing tools to identify online content that violated the policies of social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Others tried to hire successful online creators, who knew that the Internet often responds better to crude and funny political messages than to slick, well-tested ones. One influential voice in these post-2016 Democratic debates is Jiore Craig, a young political consultant from Illinois whose campaign experience came in Moldova, Gabon and Panama. In those countries and many others, paid advertising and small-dollar fundraising have never been central to electoral politics the way they are in the U.S. Candidates don’t see the Internet as a place to raise or spend money but as a way to connect with supporters and have them spread the campaign’s message through their own networks.
“People were using social media for every type of thing,” says Craig, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit dedicated to combating political extremism and disinformation. Working at the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner in the late 2010s, Craig became the first full-time counter-disinformation operative in American politics. She outlined two parallel tasks for her clients, which included Democratic candidates, party organizations and outside groups. They had to be able to react to online attacks, which required equipping campaigns to track online content and distinguish real danger from mere nuisance. Craig helped to create a system for monitoring online content whose findings could be legally shared with other institutions on the left. Funding came through the Strategic Victory Fund, a consortium of donors formed in 2019 that raised $43 million that year.
At the same time, Craig emphasized the need for clients to communicate proactively online. In a 2017 marketing pitch, she and Jeremy Rosner, a partner at the firm, wrote: “Our digital approach to U.S. campaigns encourages teams to move from GOTV [Get Out the Vote] programs to G.O.V.T. (Grow Online Voter Trust) programs,” which means “giving voters more meaningful ways to engage with a campaign.” Even as “digital organizing” became a new buzzword, Craig found few clients interested in truly applying the logic of personal organizing to the Internet. Most existing consultancies specialized in placing advertising, but political professionals haven’t found a way to make a profit by cultivating networks of supporters online. “There is no real digital-organizing profession on the left,” observes Democratic consultant William Cyrus Garrett.
For President Biden’s 2020 campaign, strategists relied on survey research to anticipate which attacks on Biden were likely to be effective with voters and used it to guide positive communications responses that would address voters’ anxieties without amplifying the original claim. Voters susceptible to attacks related to Biden’s age weren’t concerned with his health as much as the perception he would not be the “author of his presidency,” as a campaign pollster put it. The response was not to present them footage of the candidate jogging but speaking forcefully about his values. But the Biden campaign chose to rely on digital ads to deliver these counter-messages instead of equipping supporters with them. “It would have been a much more dynamic way to think of volunteerism because what is rewarded online is scale, the same message online over and over and over and over. If you own a phone, you can be a digital organizer. Right? That’s literally what it takes,” says Garrett, who oversaw the Biden campaign’s operations in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.
TAYLOR CALLERY
Since 2020, the Internet has become an even more hospitable place for lies and disinformation. Operatives like Craig now think less about responding to discrete untruths than all-embracing conspiracy theories. That has inspired major players, especially on the left, to finally embrace a more capacious view of communicating online.
John Fetterman’s 2022 campaign for Senate in Pennsylvania set up a Slack channel for volunteers to swap messaging ideas with one another. The Democratic National Committee is currently training supporters to use Reach, an app that grew out of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign, as a tool to start conversations online. “We’re building an organizing program around a simple principle: that YOU are the best advocate with the people in your life,” the committee’s training materials inform supporters.
Campaign officials are alert to the risk involved. After all, they will spend tens of millions of dollars this year to refine their message for optimal impact and narrowly target the most receptive voters. At the same time, they will encourage supporters to build and maintain their own communications networks and speak freely across them. This shift in control will be hard to undo, but campaigns hope the benefits make it worthwhile.
“The Obama administration was focused on content,” then-White House digital strategy director Rob Flaherty told a Georgetown University audience last year, before taking a job as deputy campaign manager for Biden’s re-election. “We maximize for reach and getting our message to as many people as possible.” This essay is adapted from Sasha Issenberg’s new book, “The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Play-book for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age,” which will be published March 12 by Columbia Global Reports.
‘There is no real digital-organizing profession on the left.’
WILLIAM CYRUS GARRETT
Democratic consultant
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
At the risk of sounding like a dummy, I think we reflectively look back (like the Entente militaries after WWI) at “the last war” and infer outcomes that aren’t necessarily going to hold true for the next cycle. Especially so if everyone has already cottoned on to the game, that’s when the game shifts again to something else. If the Democrats are going to pin their victory strategy on 2016, I don’t think that’s wise for them to do.
edit: then again I don’t have a book to sell and no one is going to buy Hey, If I Could Predict the Future I’d go to Wall Street
edit: then again I don’t have a book to sell and no one is going to buy Hey, If I Could Predict the Future I’d go to Wall Street
Joij21
🔥Deny, Defend, Depose!🔥
Well for sure, every Palestinian killed by this administration is about a few hundred progressives less who will come out to vote or throw it away via the Greens.
If I were Donnie I'd say keep it up Ole Joe!
If I were Donnie I'd say keep it up Ole Joe!
Gori the Grey
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Ross Douthat has a good piece on this phenomenon in today's NYT, building to this framing of the matter:Something I just saw and decided to tag:
American politics is undergoing a racial realignment
Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken
Core Imposter
Felon
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No Labels is in, without a candidate yet. I am too old to giggle, which is the only reason No Labels evokes from me no giggles.
Battleground States
Arizona: Trump +5.5
Nevada: Trump +7.7
Georgia: Trump +6.5
These polls are a bit old but I really don't think those spreads are close enough to consider them a battle. Time will tell.
North Carolina: Trump +5.7
Some people insist on including NC, doesn't feel right to me at the moment.
Pennsylvania: Biden +0.8
Michigan: Trump +3.6
Wisconsin: Trump +1.0
The Great Lakes states are where Trump wants the fight settled.
Minnesota: Trump +3.0
I am tossing in this neighbor state for good measure.
I will update this when new polls come out, probably, if I am still standing.
Battleground States
Arizona: Trump +5.5
Nevada: Trump +7.7
Georgia: Trump +6.5
These polls are a bit old but I really don't think those spreads are close enough to consider them a battle. Time will tell.
North Carolina: Trump +5.7
Some people insist on including NC, doesn't feel right to me at the moment.
Pennsylvania: Biden +0.8
Michigan: Trump +3.6
Wisconsin: Trump +1.0
The Great Lakes states are where Trump wants the fight settled.
Minnesota: Trump +3.0
I am tossing in this neighbor state for good measure.
I will update this when new polls come out, probably, if I am still standing.
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Gori the Grey
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"In" how? On the ballot in all states?
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Comrade Ceasefire
Simmer slowly
"We" might need to recruit other gods to share the load.
The one with the elephant head looks like a strong dude.
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Felon
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It only matters if they get on the ballot in the battlegrounds. Probably not a lot anyway. It will be interesting to see how the 3 or 4 third party candidates affect the vote in those states.
One bit of interesting polling by Emerson shows Biden +2 heads up with Trump but -2 in a 5-way race. This without the further complication of a No Labels entry.
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Gori the Grey
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I'm just asking what you mean by "No Labels is in"?
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Felon
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The third-party organization No Labels held a virtual 800-person delegate meeting Friday, where the members voted to move forward with the process of forming a presidential ticket to run in the 2024 election against President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
Gori the Grey
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Got it. Thank you. They're going to run someone.
I actually didn't know they hadn't decided on that. I thought they were determined to.
I actually didn't know they hadn't decided on that. I thought they were determined to.
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Core Imposter
Felon
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One thing to note as we watch the polls develop. The number of undecideds is an important metric that I could/should track. Trump is leading North Carolina 49-43.3. With only 7.7% undecideds he has a lead of 5.7%. That's firm. In Pennsylvania Biden is not only up by just 0.8%, but there are also 10.8% undecideds. That pretty much the definition of a toss-up.
Gori the Grey
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No Labels could conceivably make it altogether unpredictable. For both major-party candidates there are plenty of people whose view is "Someone else, please." Well, here's a someone else. How many of each party will, in the end, actually go for that? Who could possibly guess?
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