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Democratic Electoral Strategies: What Should They Do For 2012 And Beyond?
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I do agree though, one of the most powerful things we can do is just take all those recordings of Republicans being evil and just displaying them over and over again.
The early bird gets the worm, and all that.
The GOP has been playing the Bully well for the last 20 plus years. When the Bully has no one whom will stand in opposition to them, guess what? The Bully gets what he/she wants. The time when someone punches that bully in the face, the bully and everyone else takes notices and now your have gained their respects. When the Dems Start fighting fire with fire (start slamming the Republicans as bad as they do to them.), then liberals will have actual HOPE. Imagine that.
Until then, might as well throw in the towel. Libs sitting back and allowing the right to scapegoat them as bad as communist have cemented their fate in history.
I'm pretty sure forcing people to vote is unconstitutional. Also a lot of the shit you vote on in those ballots is the sort of shit you don't want idiots voting on. We have all sorts of funding issues on our ballots, and I'm perfectly fine with people who only care about Presidents only voting in those elections.
Actually no, compulsory voting isn't unconstitutional. The requirements to vote has been changed so many times that its a moot point. The only unconstitutional thing is deny the right to vote to eligible people.
The fact that you oppose this is not surprising with your conservative posting history. The GOP survival strategy in many places depends on minorites/poor/young/women staying away from the polling both. Having to face 100% of the electorate instead of 50% would put a serious crimp on conservative election chances.
Yes, actually. If they're going to undermine him he needs to know beforehand so he can deal with it BEFORE the psychos get involved. As it stands, he keeps ending up as the leader of the Obama Party facing off against both of the other parties.
I think we need to take some of the GOP strategy and run with it...in the opposite direction. They've been working for years to create an fanatically devoted ideological coalition to keep electing them to government over and over again. A big part of how that coalition works is through a collusion of interests to cut people off from the truth and cut off their access or ability to trust or process reliable information. Glenn Beck famously told us once not to Google him because Google's a conspiracy run by George Soros. They work by appealing to people's emotions, they find a way to dig into someone's emotional vulnerabilities and then when they've gained their trust they tell them to shut their ears to facts, reason, and debate.
But the same door swings both ways. I think Alan Grayson had the right idea, just the wrong execution. We needed a John Stewart and not an Alan Grayson. The way we can combat Republicans is through comedy. Congress is an old, wooden institution that most decry as devoid of deserving any attention. We need to get people interested and part of doing that I think is giving people a reason to watch congress themselves instead of the talking heads that bob to and fro with their own ideas on interpreting what congress really means.
Remember how we got Grayson's "Republican Healthcare plan is don't get sick, and if you do die quickly." speech, what about the Debt Dragon? Can you remember how many times a member of congress got people even watching anything they said directly at all? Thought so, even though we might've only paid attention to their direct remarks three or four times since Obama's election that's still 3-4 times more in past years. We need to use comedy, use engagement like a weapon. We must viciously but truthfully mock our opponents, we must be funny though and not angry about it. Grayson turned the vitrol up too high and while what he was saying was mostly true he turned people off with Taliban Dan. People already want Stewart himself to get involved in politics because he's one of the few media figures the majority of left leaning people trust as being the most honest and unbiased (regardless of whether or not he actually is, perception is everything here!) person they know.
We need to tap into this. We need to spice up congress and get people interested again. Part of that is through making it fun to watch congress. They need to make people feel a reason to listen to their arguments. You can do this while still being accurate, verbose and truthful. Shakespeare was able to create plays that appealed both to the nobles and commoners so I'm sure if a great artist like that could engage two groups with such disparate desires at once we could both fufill congress' duty for debate, investigation and enacting good policy while making it interesting enough that everyone else will find it entertaining to watch. The goal is we want people thinking critically and doing their own research on the issues. You do this by getting them hooked and by, as I will further elaborate, fostering a culture where intellectualism is a GOOD thing and not a bad one. Just as Republicans have thrived by making it a bad thing to appear smart we must just as much make it a GOOD thing to be smart. I paid a lot of attention to Obama's phrasing during his speeches and a lot of it rested on a kind of parental reverse psychology one might use on a child. He spoke implicitly well and approving of the American people, he painted a picture not necessarily of America as it is in reality but of where America could aspire to be, but in stating that this was how he saw America and not merely that this was a goal to reach he caused us all to want, deep down, to be that vision of America he described. Obama made us as a country want to aspire to these high ideals, to be this great, wise and caring people he talked about in his speeches. I'm almost certain that's what was the cause of the 2008 election's record turnouts. He found a backdoor into our subconscious.
So now, how do we sell a message of intellectualism using this? By applying another common Republican trick. State something your opponent in fact did not say or even imply but technically could be inferred if you stretched their words. To give an example from one of the recent debates Rick Perry couldn't name one climate scientist who supported his position. Regardless of what the moderator asked me next I would break decorum and take that as an immediate opportunity to slam him with something to the tune of "And I'm just flabbergasted that Governor Perry believes the American people are stupid enough to just take him at his word when there's controversy. I have studies from *insert data here* which show there is no clear dissent among climate scientists on the issue. He says there is and can't even provide one source? What sort of rube does he take America for?"
Not in those exact words, someone much better at delivery can figure that out. But can you see the messaging though? Trying to imply instead that it's Perry, not America that's stupid, and at the same time talking up America as Smart and also implying that we believe such individuals would do their research and know (What we already have sources to back up) that he was a misleading goose with his answer. If you subtly drive home a message like that then I think we might have found a strategy to counter the GOP. We need to in effect prey on the same emotional switches they use via language, phrasing and rhetoric but turn those methods on their head to instead of using them to make people angry and shut off from the world, to make them feel empowered, and prod them towards opening themselves up to the world. We need to break decorum, but we shouldn't lie, we need to be severely disruptive, but not filled with bile, we need to be masters of messaging. What we need is in effect the world's greatest marketing campaign. The product we're selling though is simply an interest in the truth.
As is often repeated on these forums, reality has a liberal bias. Thus, the most effective long term strategy against Republicans is merely to educate, enlighten and empower people. We don't need to disenfranchise anyone to win elections, just make sure more people in all start voting and the results will work themselves out automatically.
I'm pinning all my hopes on 2012, if we elect an R to the Presidency I may become too depressed to consider continuing even following politics, but there are always faint rays of hope. Turner won because of Weprin's Gaffes regarding the economy. I think it kind of drives my point home though about what we need. If Weprin was a snarky intellectual who responded with the correct answer to the question regarding how much debt we have, instead of gaffing with a wrong answer, he may have won that seat. We need to create our own meme, some sort of cool, snarky intellectual type who's kind and thoughtful some of the time, but mercilessly unleashes sarcastic comedy on anyone who tries to be disingenuous or just downright crazy (Bachmann, vaccines cause retardation crazy.)
I keep thinking of it because I know I tend to be pretty stubborn and I shut a lot of things out and yet this forum kind of spoke to me. The messaging worked and eventually I listened to the content of the arguments being made even if I was sticking my hands in my ears as a Libertarian at first. I keep seeing these patterns and I think there's something in all of this. But the real question is how can we effectively enact change? A good part of politics is also in coalition building because it's very easy for just one institution to shut you out. I'm beginning to think maybe Penny arcade or like-minded individuals should try and form their own PAC of some kind or somehow try and seriously consider running some candidates in an area.
If Obama can finance a national election with mostly small donations, surely we can perhaps finance a few local ones with small donations? We talk about how if a third party wants to be respected they need to start small, and start local. Why don't we do that and take our own advice? Not as a third party but to try and form a stronger, better progressive caucus within the democrat party based on these ideas? Even if it only started small if we could show that we can both win elections and clear policy hurdles by engaging the public then I'm sure selling this strategy to the larger party would be easy after we had enough local success stories.
Maybe instead of voicing our dissatisfaction here, we need to put our money where our mouths are and actually run someone, even if it's just for Dog Catcher right now. Isn't it time we had a D&D candidate? I am serious when I say this. (even if I am grinning just a little while doing it! ;p)
"Je veux du vin
Donne-moi le fromage"
I got this.
I still promote the Democrats to people, I still do what I can to help get rid of Scott Walker, it's just so hard to still care or not be apathetic, watching everything slide into the abyss and seemingly the majority of Americans praise jesus that it's happening.
Seriously. You have some good ideas ["Get rid of laws that are truly meant to disenfranchise voters once you realize their facade is bullshit"] but then you decide "But you know what, Let's go fuck their voters over YEAH"
It's stupid, it's insulting and it's dangerous in the long term and fucking poisonous to the ideals that we as progressives should be trying to push. We want to make the country better, not fucking dig down into the mud and shit and start hurling it ourselves while our buddies go poison their wells just because they poisoned ours.
In sort:
Rigorous Scholarship
Long term we can't expect to win out with messaging alone and no one group or coalition lasts forever. Long term our goal should be elections reform (mandatory public financing for all offices, preference voting in every election, and compulsory election law similar to Australia where we get Election day as a national holiday) as that will solder shut a lot of the cracks in our system that greed and other goosery find its way in. If we as a group could come together, pool our resources and work over say ten or twenty years I think we could really do it. Once that possible elections reform amendment got passed there would be little we needed.
Doesn't anyone here think we could maybe do it? I mean am I being crazy here or are we just going to bicker and get depressed over the results versus maybe trying to do something ourselves for once?
Here's an even better one, let's form our own coalition to effectively marginalize these people so they can stop messing things up for the rest of us. I'm taking it by the implication that nobody's really responded to my posts that we'd rather just sit here and complain then seriously try and invest ourselves in politics and strategize about how we could, really achieve victory and actually carry it out?
There is one way people can be conservative and want to make everything like the '50s.
Until that all magically changes, the Republicans will be a lock-step political machine, and the Democrats will be a bunch of disunited idiots.
The Democratic strategy for 2016 will be to hope that the Republican overlords have fucked things up enough that the average stupid American will vote for the Democrats out of spite. And then repeat that cycle forever.
It's not exactly a new idea. Hell, it's DailyKos model. The problem is we tend to fracture and get frustrated the second we have some power and unicorns don't sprout from our leaders' asses.
This brings us to the cultural problem. Most people are too busy with their day to day lives to take an interest in politics or they just don't care. It is hard to get an outcry or any sort of impetus to change politics when people just don't know what is going on. Honestly, I don't know how you make people care more. We could try to increase education about government for those still in school and for the adults we could run ads letting people know what the government actually does for them. As some have pointed out the Dems are pretty good at a ground game, but the problem is the ground game is all about getting voters out and spends little if any time informing voters. Government suffers from the same problem as technology, people take it for granted. People ride in elevators, drive cars, use smart phones and don't take much notice until it breaks.
The messaging: The Dem leadership and strategists really need to work on taking the complex solutions we have for the country and turn them into sound bites. Then take the oppositions position and demonize it as much as possible without lying your face off. Republicans aren't for less regulation they are for corporations polluting your drinking water to make a larger profit. They aren't for letting you keep the money you earned, they are for rich people keeping a higher percentage of their income than you.
The above require large groups to give a fuck and to actually do something about it. This of course means they will be really hard to do and will have a slim chance of succeeding. On an individual level you can get involved, but beyond that you would have to resort to voter suppression tactics that Thantos mentioned. Doing voter suppression in an local area doesn't require as many people as it does to actually inform people. Honestly, I don't like this idea.
In conclusion, we are super fucked.
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Pro-tip: European grad schools are cheaper than American ones, and you can get U.S. Federal loans for studying in overseas.
Well maybe we need more research done into the matter then. Hell maybe we need to commission some studies on human psychology/sociology to see if we can figure out what the keys are to motivating liberally minded voters. I mean the GOP is able to now buy elections by promising people a better economy and then pursuing policies shown to slow, stop or even make a bad situation worse. If they've found a flowery language that they can sell a sizable chunk of the electorate on then I think we sure as hell can do the same.
We need to do the research, we need to create a solid coalition and we need to master messaging. I mean lately politics has made me wonder if 2012 really will end up becoming a self-fufilling prophecy because someone tried to exploit the system (to net themselves lots of money) just one more time and finally collapsed it all (world economy) for the rest of us. I'm just as sad and angry at this point as I'm sure Thanatos is. Why the fuck are we all yelling so loudly about this and not doing something for once?
We clamor over politics threads, we dissect and disassemble arguments and we come up with fun-to-read and informative discussions that are infinitely more entertaining than congress and actually able to change entrenched opinions in others, even if the success rate on that isn't perfect. Is there some disqualification I'm missing? Is there some reason we can't do this? Is it that nobody will listen? Is it that people are already really saying the things we say but I'm not seeing it? Because if there's something we can be doing and that nobody else is doing then we sure as hell should be doing it ourselves. We have a large number of dedicated volunteers here, who all campaigned for Obama in 2008 and some may still despite their criticisms support him in 2012
Do we not have the resources? Again, why are we not doing this? How has someone else not already had this idea? Maybe it's just me venting my political frustrations but I'm so tired of stopping at just these armchair discussions, I want things to change and the only way we can guarantee that is if we do it ourselves.
What say Ye, D&D?
I really enjoyed this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Political-Mind-Understand-21st-Century-18th-Century/dp/0670019275
It's written by a cognitive scientist, and cites a lot of research. The basic theme is that liberal voters are mostly motivated by empathy- they feel for other people, and want to help them. Whereas conservative voters are most driven by discipline- they want to enforce obedience. And he claims that logical arguments are basically useless in persuading anyone- they key is just to make them tap into the right kind of emotion.
in particular, what Podly suggests wouldn't work, because "you have a duty to support the military" is channeling the wrong kind of emotion to promote liberal politics.
Oooh, danke! I'll give that a read. Sounds a lot like a TED talk I saw before regarding moral matrices and explained value judgements that people make like that. Although it put it in more neutral terms that it's not so much obedience that these sorts of people were after but rather that they desired loyalty and stability over empathy and so that's why maintaining order was more important specifically to them versus liberally minded people.
I would guess we have a few hundred volunteers, at the most, here on D&D. If we were all located in the same geographical area we might be able to accomplish something easily, but we are all spread across the country. Maybe if we all quit our jobs and start working in politics we could accomplish something, but I doubt many of us are willing to do that.
I have some friends that work on single issue campaigns (mostly clean energy stuff) and they work 10-12 hour days. So we could do this but we would have to be committed to it and it would require even more work since it is a much broader topic. Speaking of that, where would we start? National Popular Vote, educating people, fixing state level gerrymandering, etc.
I don't know about you guys but I already call my congress critters on a semi-regular basis and try and inform all my friends and coworkers about current issues. Beyond that I don't think I have the time or the energy to do much else.
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
I am willing to assist like I did for this one on single issues, even multiple single issues, in the future.
A handful of these videos in the right channels can sway policy and elections.
No, I am not really communist. Yes, it is weird that I use this name.
Early in his presideny, Obama's white house staff managed to drive a wedge between the republican National Committee and Rush. doing so exposed the insanity of the conservatives chain of command, as Steele had to apologize publicly to a man who is really nothing more then a bigot spouting nonsense on an antiquated form of media.
Rigorous Scholarship
Or call your Congressman, in more useful endeavors.
Get 50,000 eyes on an issue that may not have seen it before, then write letters to your congresspeople letting them know you are aware (if you did you job, some of those 50k will do the same).
Right. They got voted out because they were seen to be too cowardly and/or inefficient to push Republican policies through. That is not exactly breaking up the lock-step nature. That is punishing someone for non-compliance.
The teaparty did not bring in any new ideas to the republican party, all they did was to push existing sentiments towards extreme stances.
Well, the tea party antics (which are so loosely defined as is, that it's hard to say just what they actually stand for..) seem to be in direct conflict with the D.C. establishment politics, and yes, it's foolish to define the Republican party of today as anything close to being in lock step. They have a serious problem on their hands with the tea party, a laughable crop of presidential contenders, Steele raided their campaign war chests, and they have no solid leadership from the top. (Shown quite clearly by Cantor usurping Boner at the debt meetings.)
Their message is the same old tired BS that hasn't changed from the 80's, it only works because the voting public are so egregiously under-informed and sold on the idea that they too will one day get rich. I'm not exactly sure what Obama and the Democrats can do though, the entire congress is deeply unpopular and there are now factions in there completely willing to burn the entire place down for a policy win. Obama's only luck in holding on to his presidency is how comically ignorant the republican presidential candidates are. The economy isn't going to recover and the poverty line is at 15% and holding. Liberal democrats are pissed at him, republicans are pissed at him, blue dog democrats undercut him at every opportunity, and the senate majority leader is a sniveling weakling.
I'm not sure what you do with that shit salad. The long term solution seems to be voter education. And I think Obama would be sitting a lot prettier if he had cleaned house on wall st. and rammed down some very stringent rules. (He certainly had the opportunity to do so.) Maybe if he had investigated the Bush admin, but that's a lot riskier for obvious reasons.
We could make a video that has the various clips of Bachmann talking about how HPV vaccines are bad.
then just hammer home medical facts on why she is full of shit.
Then ask why she wants to be responsible for the deaths of many and the ruining of peoples' lives by feigning expertise from her platform of absolute ignorance.
Basically end it by saying Michelle Bachmann, you are not a doctor. Shut the fuck up.
This could be accomplished in 30-45 seconds, if done properly (WITH CITATIONS) could be used as ammo by anyone who ever has to run against her in the future... is negative as all getout (why do you want girls to go barren, Michelle Bachmann?) while staying grounded in facts.
Any time one of these gets a groundswell, write letters to politicians discussing these issues and make their office aware that there are lots of progressives out there counting on them to do the right thing.
Fucking mobilize, and have clear messaging on the issues.
If both parties are ineffective, then what's really going on?
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
When you are a minority party, making the government look useless and ineffective is a very good way to weaken incumbency. The Pubs still want majorities in the Senate and they want the presidency, so by creating gridlock at every turn, people sour to the whole organization, and take it out on the peopl ein power either by Getting Out the Vote, or vote apathy from the majority constituents.
It is an amazingly effective strategy.
In the world of faith, they're right, and in the world of reality, we're right.