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1. I love @billscher but the fact of the matter is- the reason that Ds got caught w their pants down again is bc they got dominated in the digital space.
Me in May 2019: (Note, 2019)
Parscale is using digital to target young Black & Latino men & that shit will work bc Ds are https://twitter.com/billscher/status/1335584367196983296
Me in May 2019: (Note, 2019)
Parscale is using digital to target young Black & Latino men & that shit will work bc Ds are https://twitter.com/billscher/status/1335584367196983296
2. completely absent when it comes to talking to their own coalition- a major mistake. Their electioneering approach is founded on a couple of broad or founding assumptions that are flawed. Which is why, at the micro (race) level- they end up w sub-par outcomes. The 1st of these
3. is that they work w this underlying assumption that the electorate is smarter (and please, understand, what I mean is CIVICALLY smart. Doesn't matter if you are IQ smart if you don't know anything about your own gov. Who your senators are. Who the gov is. How a law gets made.
4. Beyond the Schoolhouse Rock fundamentals, the people you pass in the grocery store, or sit next to (in normal times) at your kid's school concert, they don't read news like you do. They don't know who Kelly Loeffler is. They don't know the details of the Russia investigation.
5. The news that breaks through to them is stuff like a mass school shooting, or a tornado that destroys the whole town. When the blackface scandal in VA happened w our Gov all the national polling outlets jumped into the state to poll it- all of them making the same mistake in
6. in their poll which was to assume the registered voters they called all knew about the scandal. And you know what- 20 yrs ago, they probably would have bc as I pointed out in an earlier thread, everyone had shared information spaces & thus even non-news people came across news
7. by accident. But not now! My students? I knew if I walked out to the Great Lawn of CNU's campus and started asking students at random about it, not all students would know about it (that ratio would have been MUCH lower for a different type of scandal- say a pay to play or the
8. stocks scandal Perdue faces). So when I ran my poll on it, first I asked voters if they'd "seen, read, or heard any news about Gov Northam in the past couple of weeks" before asking their opinion on what he should do based on the yearbook photo (and those who indicated they'd
9. not heard any news about the gov were not asked the Q so that the poll was not "teaching" the respondent, something good survey research should endeavor not to do- ESP when it is negative info about a politician. And guess what I revealed? Nearly 25% of VA voters reported
10. that they'd not heard anything about the gov recently. That's a quarter! And in all the other surveys these voters had simply been assumed to of course know the biggest scandal in the world was consuming their state's governor bc we, humans, have a tendency to view the world
11. through our own perspective, and this has led, over time, to a perspective among people on the Left (AND the center & center left) that the electorate is more sophisticated than it is AND that is has a working base knowledge of current events & political actors that it just
12. doesn't have. So the D's communication strategies are far too micro, and don't set a broad narrative. For example, this fall the Ds should have set a narrative that because they've become so extreme, the GOP was using their control of the senate to withhold economic aid from
13. Americans, that if Americans want a return to normal order so that the gov't can respond to COVID, so that individuals and businesses aren't left to flounder the effects of a massive recession on their own, then voters everywhere need to show up, & they need to cast ballots.
14. for Democrats. On the other side, the GOP is keenly aware that the electorate is a blank slate that they can set the narrative for. Sure, some fundamentals set a basis- but we just saw an election cycle where Rs gained House seats & kept the senate majority under terrible
15. fundamentals and the reason is, they got great turnout and likely (again, I won't be able to quantify this until the voter file gets updated, but we talk about it on @davidplouffe & @SteveSchmidtSES's new pod Battleground which will come out soon- about the new political math
16. % Rs relative to % Ds and my assumption that the House incumbents that lost, lost this equation badly. Ds were skeptical about the efficacy of Parscale's digital effort but I knew it was going to work bc for these voters, they're seeing ad after ad on youtube, reddit, tiktok
17. highlighting Biden's crime bill vote & how it jailed so many Black Americans & helped created our prison industrial complex. The goal isn't to make voters like Trump, its to disqualify Biden, to make Biden unattractive & you start to hear this narrative build that was esp
18. strong among younger Black voters about mainstream or Establishment Ds- particularly Biden, and how he sucks. I know bc I was hearing it out on the stump at my own events & among these same voters, when I'd tell them that Sanders also voted for the crime bill they'd react in
19. shock (as some as you reading this are, no doubt bc no one dropped 20 million in digital ads to tell you that!) And of course, upon realizing that Sanders- who is by far the #1 vote choice among Black voters under 25- also voted yes on the crime bill, Biden is forgiven for it
20. bc now its something that must have been hard to avoid, or super tricky, or no one could have seen as being bad at the time. But these young Black & Latino voters targeted by the Trump campaign, in general, weren't targeted by the Biden campaign. Which, I argued back in 2019,
21. was precisely why we might expect Parscale's effort to pay off. BC when we look at research on the effects of voter targeting, one of the reasons for ineffectiveness is that the benefits of your effort get offset by the other sides. When you only have 1 side messaging though
22. then you have a potential problem, and I think we also see that in the in-person field program in 2020, which also only happened on one side this cycle. D's have long neglected the importance of communicating to their own electorate- of energizing it, and the digital space is
23 imperative to reaching people in 2020. As you'll hear @davidplouffe say in the pod- "you gotta do it all!" And you've gotta tell voters a story, a narrative that indicts the opposition party and makes your party the solution to their problems.
