If a racist message can convince a racist person to vote for a Democrat who when in power institutes and anti-racist policy, that removes voter suppression, and the vote of that racist person no longer matters as much, then that’s a huge win. Just make sure it’s going to work before you do it.
Sure. I’ve thought about that.
But you realize you’d literally have to make openly violent and racist propaganda to reach them? You’d be making vile racist content.
The thing is, Democrats don’t even need fake news or disingenuous “accomplishments”. The politicians and lefty talking heads just need to confront what the right is saying & doing directly instead of being so terrified of defending the accusations made by right-wing news and politicians. Instead of trying to figure out how to say that infrastructure spending & Build Back Better won’t cause inflation, say that the Republicans don’t care that your roads & bridges are unsafe and failing which will prevent commerce from working efficiently and contribute to shortages in the stores and your packages not being delivered on time. Attack the fact that the Republicans just want things to fail rather than trying to explain the nuance that the bad faith attacks by the right are not exactly accurate.
Say that the Republicans think you are stupid and want you to hate your fellow Americans.
Also bear in mind that ~40% of American voters actively want what the vile right wing wants. These ideas are popular in America, because America is a broken place.
Even if you reach voters, it’s moot. Republicans can hold de facto power with a minority of voters. To change that, you need the consent of those voters, or you need an extra-legal action.
That’s been a media refrain for many years. It doesn’t matter because the people who vote Republican actively seek the failure their elected leaders pursue. These terrifying GOP House and Senate members are popular in their districts/states.
This is why it’s frustrating to argue with you about politics. You don’t know what you’re talking about or how things work, so you make arguments that are completely impossible in real life.
What do you think the most important power a President has? It’s not signing bills into law, it’s a giant megaphone that the President can use to highlight certain causes and certain prerogatives and initiatives. What was Trump amazing at doing? Communicating with his base through Twitter and Right Wing Media.
So, to use your own example, if the Democrats and Biden fight for everything, then it’s a cacophony of noise and nothing gets through. By focusing on fewer issues, realistic goals, it brings them to prominence, it shines a spotlight on them, and creates a political movement (public support) to get them passed. By fighting for everything, you’re essentially fighting for nothing in the real world because it’s all just a jumble. There can only be one headline on the New York Times and Washington Post.
Again, you don’t understand how things work so your argument isn’t effective. Trump tried multiple times to get the Muslim Ban passed. Every time he did, it was stopped by the courts and enjoined. It took years, and the Supreme Court, for the third/fourth (I forget which) version of the Muslim Ban to be passed.
If Biden tried to cancel student debt, just like the Muslim Ban, some court would enjoin it and it would never go into effect. No one’s payments would be held up for even a month. It would be in legal limbo until it was ruled upon, and that process would take years before the Supreme Court would probably find it unconstitutional.
Whether voters would care that Biden tried to cancel student debt and failed is something I honestly don’t know. Personally, I don’t think they would care as much as Republicans cared about the Muslim Ban. To Republicans, just the idea of the Muslim Ban was probably enough for them. To Liberals, it’s not just enough to try to cancel student debt, you have to actually do it.
If Biden tried and failed to cancel student debt, I doubt many people would be thanking him. He would be criticized and shat on by the media and Liberal pundits.
Biden and the Democrats literally just passed the biggest infrastructure package in SEVENTY FUCKING YEARS! But reading the news and hearing the discussions, you’d thing his administration is an abject failure.
So no, I don’t think that attempting unsuccessfully to cancel student debt would benefit Biden and the Democrats that much.
The key is that these voters have demonstrated that they are easily manipulated. It’s just that only Republicans are actively trying their best to manipulate them.
You say that those 40% of American voters want the vile things. But you are making the assumption that these desires are somehow inherited at birth and unchanging. The way I see things is that those vile desires were instilled. Just like people weren’t born preferring SUVs. TV commercials made them want SUVs. We have the propaganda technology to make racist people change their minds and not be racist. USE IT.
I am increasingly of the mind that they are only manipulated by ideas that they already favor. Vile racist propaganda works on them because, deep down, they are vile racists.
Hardly. That’s how these adult voters behave today. Regardless of how they got there, this is demographically and statistically how they vote as a class. Nothing has changed that in decades. The interventions that could work require their consent to be enacted.
Some are, definitely. Don’t try to win those people over because it is wasted effort. But there are a lot of voters who go back and forth. Who, like you said earlier, think some Democratic ideas sound good but then get fearful and vote Republican next time. Win those people over with frank talk about what the Republicans are doing and consign the racists to their racist representatives.
They weren’t born that way. They were made that way. They can be unmade, or at least taken advantage of. They can be tricked into eating horse paste, they can be tricked into voting for a Democrat.
1 Like
If you believe that, then walk us through one propaganda campaign that could move the needle on one GOP House or Senate seat. It can be anything, but it can not rely on passing any law through congress or changing any state or municipal laws.
e.g., it is easy to scare someone who’s already scared of the vaccine with anti-vaccine propaganda. But it’s almost impossible to scare that same person into getting the vaccine. We know for a fact that even the deaths of close friends and family don’t move that needle at all.
Fearmongering is like a ratchet. It’s easy to use to crank to the right, but almost impossible to use in the opposite direction.
Remember Al Gore and climate change? That fearmongering (which was correct and we should be afraid) was not just ignored by the right: it was actively refuted as “fearmongering” despite being accurate.
Pick someone from a state where a sport is very important. Louisana LSU could work, but the vote margin is probably too large to overcome. Utah basketball? Mitch and Kentucky basketball could almost work. There’s definitely some Republican states where the college football program is big enough to swing the election.
Anyway, you do whatever it takes to make the representative look like they secretly hate the football program. Maybe the story is they were secretly a fan of the rival team since they were young. There’s a deepfake recording of them complaining that they have to pretend to like the other team to woo voters. Maybe you also deepfake them concocting a plan to hurt the team and blame it on Democrats. Bribe/threaten/coerce some childhood friends or family into joining the lie. Photoshopped childhood photo of them rooting for the other team also good.
You can have some democrats in the state legislature write a bill that would cut funding to the team. People will search for the bill, and there it is right on the state legislature web site! If they get asked they can put on an acting job and say yes, the republican representative helped them with it on the premise it would be secret, but they can’t keep it secret anymore.
Hire a bunch of actor protestors, just like Republicans do, to protest outside the sporting events. Astroturf the social media sites for the team to make it look like a lot of other Republicans believe the allegations. This will make real people also say they believe via groupthink.
The rep will have to spend a lot of their energy disputing and confronting these allegations. It will be especially good if you can convince any of their major donors. Merely making the donors skeptical might be enough. You could even deepfake the representative saying bad things about Trump and Trump voters, or have them saying good things about BLM or LGBTQ+ people. Just don’t accidentally trick Democrats into voting Republican.
You have to do this after the primary, otherwise a different Republican further to the right will just come in. Also check the deadline so there’s no way someone can come in with a write-in campaign.
The Democratic opponent in the election should be a progressive who will act like AOC once they are in office. However, during their campaign they need to lie and act as if they are as far right as Manchin. Sadly, probably a white guy. The racists need to be able to stomach voting for them.
1 Like
Not bad. Now we have something specific to talk about.
Do you earnestly think that could move the needle by 19 points in a statewide election? (That’s how much Mitch just won re-election by).
McConnel had a 39% approval rating during that election. He’s already not well liked even by Republicans. Yet he won overwhelmingly. Personal scandals, even big or anti-conservative-doctrine ones, rarely change GOP voter behavior. Why is this different? The net result of the “football ploy” gaining +15 points among Republicans in the state would still mean an easy McConnell re-election.
The bill wouldn’t appear without the Democrat sponsors being named in it. The GOP response would literally just be “the Democrats are going to destroy football in our great state, but I will fight them!”
You’d also have Snopes and the like actively debunking you. Republican voters constantly yell about how Snopes is fake and biased, but they will literally cite it if it agrees with them (as we saw with Kyle Rittenhouse trial, where right wing circles were actively linking to Snopes articles about the incident).
We also have data from when actual sports were lost to a state with voters like this.
Did that move the political needle at all? Did even one person vote differently because of that consequence?
We can look at exit polls in Kentucky from when McConnell won.
The top issue voters cared about on the day they actually voted was “the coronavirus pandemic.” 39% of voters said it was the most important issue to them.
89% of Republican voters polled agreed with this statement regarding what the federal government’s higher priority should be: “Limiting additional damage to the economy, even if it increases the spread of the coronavirus.”
Do you honestly think a non-COVID message would move the needle in an election like that? Could it reach the 11% of Republican voters who didn’t believe that nonsense, enough that they would change their vote?
Even if it did, McConnell still wins re-election by 8 points.
So let’s say we agree that COVID-19 is a top issue for these voters, and that the ones you are trying to reach/trick are opposed to vaccination, masking, and social distancing measures.
What would propaganda around their most important issue look like? What lines are you willing to cross?
This is another problem. That could easily happen. Imagine the kind of person who “decides” near election day which party to vote for. What are they thinking? What motivates them at the polls?
College football and basketball is different than the location of the MLB All-Star game. In NYC we have many sports, and multiple teams for each. Imagine if there were just one sport and one team for all of NYC and the surrounding tri-state area. Every single sports fan in the area was united as a fan of that one team in one sport. On top of that, the team was run by the state, via the only major public university, and the coach was the highest paid state employee by orders of magnitude. The coach is also perhaps more influential than the governor. Suddenly elections matter for the team and fans are swayed to vote in ways that they believe will benefit the team. That’s how the college sports are in these states. Being a Boston Red Sox fan didn’t stop DeBlasio from getting elected, but an Alabama fan is unlikely to get elected anywhere in LSU country under any circumstances, and vice versa.
I don’t think this idea alone could flip the whole election if it wasn’t already close enough. But you need to do a lot of these, and enough of these, everywhere, all the time. You build a machine that does this constantly to oppose the existing machine that is already doing this constantly for the other side.
I’d love for there to be another option besides “play as dirty as the Republicans.” Using distasteful means is not something I want to be supporting. It’s a last resort. I just can’t personally imagine another option. Doing nothing at all isn’t going to work. Maintaining the status quo and existing strategy doesn’t appear to be working. The methods the Republicans have been using are clearly proven to be effective. If there’s some other proven effective method that is less evil, I’m all for it.
Can anyone offer any reason to be hopeful that maintaining the status quo strategy is going to save us? Can anyone offer any other strategy that will save us that doesn’t involve any evil means?
I just don’t see any. The only good path I can imagine is a world in which we use the evil means, as little as possible, to take power. And then once in power we eliminate the evil means once and for all with campaign finance reform and such.
Side note. This is one of the good things about New York State. We don’t have one of those big college sports teams dominating us. Even Connecticut has it.
There might not be any way to save America from this. The structure of the senate and electoral college themselves are permanent blockers to progress via legal means.
You keep talking about playing dirty to win, but reaching for these strange examples of sports and similar targets.
The hate, the ability to synch up is the desire to blame someone. The people voting want someone to blame, and the people in charge want to blame the least powerful, because it’s always been easy to punch down and blame the people on the edges.
You’re talking about offering fluff cultural victories.
There is a target that Democrats could use, the monied classes, the local aristos, the people who play with money and abuse their power over people’s lives. I know it’s a bit “no war but class war,” but many of the other demonizations might be able to join over the shared stand against the Oligarchy.
At least two problems with that, though. Most politicians are swimming in the sea of the 1% for so long they lose track of what it feels like to stand with the powerless. Same for most media.
The other is the bullet with your name on it from the FBI, but hey…
1 Like
If this is to be believed, then the only option is to at least try every single last resort option. Again, it’s not the losing that’s the problem, it’s the resignation. Better to fight and lose than to just go quietly.
That machine would have to expand beyond sports, and probably be very VERY racist in presentation. It would have to spread literal and vile lies.
I also think you heavily over-represent the actual effect of these sports on state politics and voting behavior. I would be honestly and absolutely shocked that anything related to sports like this, which was literally fabricated from nothing, could survive even the most minimal scrutiny let alone affect even a close election.
I don’t think this kind of conspiracy theory nonsense is anything to worry about.
1 Like