I don’t think that tweet is saying it’s the democrat’s fault, but that we have to give more attention to this fact.
I mean Matt McDermott is a democratic strategist himself.
IMO, partial blame on the Democratic Party for not successfully countering rightwing propaganda techniques and for executing some flawed policies; partial blame on citizens who chose not to vote or chose to protest vote against them; and mega huge absolute blame on the Republican Party for promulgating bigotry and lies and on their voters for not critically examining this disinfo, not having the heart to care about their fellow persons, believing that they must adhere to their in-group, and for also repeating the aforementioned disinfo and bigotry.
Each of these is a point of failure and must be remedied if we want to actually have a decent society to live in.
I’ve heard so many contradictory explanations today. And thought more still. I guess the idea that Kamala and/or Biden and/or Democrats in general didn’t engage enough with media (didn’t sit to be interviewed by Joe Rogan or whatever) is as good a theory as any. But I don’t think anyone knows WTF just happened.
But Kamala went on The View and played the opening act for a Beyonce concert! She did everything right
I genuinely beleive that Joe Rogan alone will be responsible for at least a million votes getting mobilized
I am 35.
My entire lifetime, the way Dems run presidential campaigns, the way they push the message is heavily, heavily reliant on mainstream legacy media outfits talking about and repeating their announcements and rallies.
Meanwhile, the Republicans do the same… but they also control the vast majority of talk radio stations, and since the internet came into wide use, the number of popular internet figures with overt right wing tendencies just vastly, vaaaastly outstrips similar figures on the left, in terms of viewership and funding.
Basically, the Dems still think that dying legacy media, with fewer and fewer readers/viewers, that increasingly has to sell out by running more bombastic, shocking news, and/or cowtowing to the whims of their corpo owners…
… they still think that this nearly dead legacy media will give them the same treatment as in the 70s, when there were only 3 fucking TV news channels and newspapers op eds were far more influential.
They should have learned that they needed a real way of pushing their message after 2015/16.
Trump dominated the media without paying anything for it simply by being bombastic and saying insane shit.
That should have set off a whole bunch of alarm bells that … Dems can’t rely on news stations giving roughly equal air time to them.
But it did not.
The Republicans, through their various think tanks and foundations, funded the hell out of every one willing to repeat their message on any medium for 35 years.
Dems have never had anything like this, even though the average Republican thinks George Soros is doing something like that.
Now, combine all of the above with another trend the Republicans have manifested into reality over 35 years:
Public Education has been decimated. The average American now has critical reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th grader.
So even if huge numbers of people were still reading Op-Eds in papers… they would not understand any moderately complex discussions of policies, or history, or economics or anything anyway.
… And this is all just a critique of how the Democrats have been at distributing their messages.
The actual content of those messages is an entirely different failure.
So what’s the solution? What should the Democrats have done? Pay Mark Zuckerberg to run left wing propaganda? Prop up a bunch of am radio talk shows?
I don’t have answers, but it’s hard to imagine what specifically they did wrong. This might have been inevitable, maybe they screwed this country up to the point where there is no winning move.
I mean… basically yes?
They could prop up AM radio talk shows.
Thom (sp?) Hartmann and Sam Seder are … basically the only two left wing, ‘big name’ radio talk shows that still even exist post the 00’s.
They exist almost entirely off of small individual donations…
Do the same thing for left wing youtubers/twitch streamers.
Almost all left wing people like that with any name recognition are doing it without any big name donors, as opposed to the Republicans who have a myriad network of wealthy donors basically bankrolling them.
… and that would just be mirroring the Republican strategy.
Maybe they could actually innovate too?
But yeah, this would be like … 30 years too late.
What did the Dems do wrong?
Be unimaginably complacent by placing their faith in the integrity of norms and institutions that the Republicans have very obviously been trying to destroy for about 20 years.
Its the primary problem of being a liberal.
You just assume the rules and norms you follow apply to everyone.
It is not part if their worldview that those rules and norms can be destroyed by cleverly manipulating them against themselves.
What should they do now?
Pff, I dunno, its too late, we have now arrived at fascism.
I’ve been saying this (along with actually shift your platform to the left instead of to the right) to every mainline, Obama will save us all and everything is fixed now, standard liberal Democrat for almost 20 years.
They have all acted like I am a hyperbolic delusional nutjob when I explain that the status quo trajectory will sooner than later lead the country further and further to the right untill we end up with corporate theocratic fascism.
Well now we have that.
Its… kinda like the climate, or preventative medicine and a base healthy lifestyle vs checking into the ER as an overweight smoker who broke their leg from the pain of trying to pass a kidney stone.
Fixing the mess is orders of magnitude more costly and difficult than preventing it.
A major problem is also that progressive messages are complex, and don’t offer easy answers. They require that people engage, and put in a great deal of effort… that will mostly not bear fruit for them, or their children, or their children’s children… but will help over time.
But people are exhausted. And sick of waiting for things to get better… so they fall prey to the easy answers. Which is what the far-right offers. Easy answers and excuses for why everyone else is at fault.
Part of the problem is that people only want the easy answers. Which is not an easy fix. It requires convincing them of the lie of easy answers.
Even if she did she would have gave the same pre planned long form answers she gave on her fox interview.
The social media clips of her telling off the interviewer for interrupting never included the question she was asked for a reason.
She gave dodgy politician answers and expected republicans and third party voters to go for that.
I was also very confused why they thought they could scold people into voting for her too. Barrack and his wife did it, and so did kamala. Insulting people who might have issues voting for you seems like the opposite way to gain their vote.
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain the strategy there.
If only they had compromised more and reached across the aisle harder. That will surely fix it next time.
It’s obvious that Liz Cheney wasn’t enough. Next time we must revive Henry Kissenger to get his endorsement. Surely that’ll win the moderates
“meet me in the middle”, says the unjust man.
you take a step towards him. he takes a step back.
“meet me in the middle”, says the unjust man.
Practically speaking, what is supposed to be done about it? It’s all protected by the first amendment. Even if they were to somehow pass a new kind of “fairness” legislation in a future blue wave, the stacked SCOTUS will strike it down.
Fight fire with fire.
Dive into social media and be shameless. Get dirty. Lie. Pay influencers. Promote conspiracies. Push meme policies.
What are Republicans gonna do? Demonize Democrats more? That will just get them more eyeballs, which is exactly how Trump won.
The actual answer is that the world should have banned targeted advertising/engagement optimization so assholes don’t trend so much, but we are way past that.
If there’s one thing I’d hope that Democrats would learn from Trump’s successes, it’s that playing the part of the staid, respectable, traditional politician is not a winning strategy. I don’t think it’s reasonable to suppose that adopting better policies will, in and of itself win elections; Trump has either terrible policies or none whatsoever, and voters still eat him up. He’s a carnival clown, and that’s what the majority wants.
Get out there and start screaming. Throw tantrums. Take credit for things (preferably good things that you did, but again, Trump proves that all you really need to do is take credit, period, and let reality try and catch up with you). Democracy is a shared hallucination, and Trump has proven that if you employ sufficient pressure, you can change the nature of the dream, policies and reality be damned. If Democrats don’t accept that public perception is reality and adjust their strategies accordingly, they and we are going to continue to get fucked for the foreseeable future.
They could at least try to end corporate personhood… make it so that corporations are not protected by the 1st amendment and don’t get free speech… Anything they blast out needs to be scrutinized and any misinformation needs to have heavy penalties… Sure the actual person saying the thing is protected, but the corporations pushing it out or allowing it to go out through them get crushed under fines… This would require a party that is not working for the oligarchy/donors though
They could at least try to end corporate personhood… make it so that corporations are not protected by the 1st amendment and don’t get free speech…
You’d need a supermajority to amend the constitution, and that is completely unrealistic.
Maybe it’s time to start focusing on reasons to vote for a candidate instead of against one. Trump got less votes than 2020 and won.
Just because the election is called does not mean we are done counting votes.
The largest state (California) only has 50% counted.
Trump will likely surpass his 2020 total.
I have to second this one.
Most of the people I hang with tend towards 3rd party. All of them proudly touted their votes for the democratic candidate in this/the last election, but each was also very clear they were only voting that way as a way to vote against Trump.
They all hate Biden and Harris.