I don't know how you can win a campaign against this. The information environment has created completely different realities and no amount of messaging can break through.
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We are living in a post truth world. Part of me wants to say we should just make up whatever lies we want about Elon Trump and the rest, but they ARE capital and as such their ability to spread misinfo is far greater than ours so.
The problem is coming up with lies that would make fascists and Republicans hate Musk/Trump/RFK Jr, etc get into some weird stuff as the conservatives are okay with pedarasty and pedophilia by their own (example youth pastors).
As in Mark Robinson only fell because of black trans porn and being a pro-slavery black man and only lost 20% of the GOP voters (getting 40% instead of 50% like Trump).
I'm genuinely convinced the death of shared forums and the insane speed at which echo chambers are created are what won Trump both elections. There's no way 70 million people with any actual understanding of the man would vote for him, right? Or is the US genuinely that fucked?
Not to mention he's being backed by the person who runs one of the largest social media platforms... I knew it was bad when that happened. I just didn't know HOW bad. Most people get their news from there. The owner BRAGS about that.
There was a survey last week of voters in NC and not an insignificant number of respondents had never heard of either candidate for governor, even tho the race was making national headlines.
100% accurate. What is scary is that facts don'[t matter to the MAGA. You can show them 10 proven articles and they don't believe it because Fred on Facebook said the opposite. Anything that doesn't support their belief is "Fake News."
There was a recent Twitter discussion over a SCOTUS ruling & a MAGA didn't believe it: "Where'd you see that, CNN?" The OP posted the link to the SC Docket where all the decisions are posted, they didn't believe that was real either.
Mainstream media should be consigned to the dustbin of the past it's no longer a voice of the people but of the ruling class design to hide the horrors from that's that would vote against it.
Simple, bitter meds: stop pointing at the ignorance of others & acknowledge Dem ignorance of what it takes to win.
Yes, part of Dem loss is hate. But failing to plainly reflect emotion of 1/2 the country? We backed up horse to cart, & ran off with no hitch. To DO better, we must UNDERSTAND better.
I would believe it's fake except I just watched this where an audience member says she voted Trump because she's Jewish and he's pro Israel?????? https://youtu.be/BmXzzu8YwtM?si=MfI_D6S9st0eju0c
thinking always of the guy on the bus in 2016 who was telling his buddy how surprised he was when trump won, bc he thought hillary was running against bernie
It's more infuriating because the average voter doesn't understand inflation...it was a hangover from the covid dislocations in the economy...not from Biden. And the economy was doing very well under Biden.
I still believe the worst ones are the people who know this stuff and just don’t care. They know he’s a felon, a rapist, some even know about the Epstein connections and they just write it off cause they think he’ll make them all rich, even after he caused the worst job loss since the depression
I think you really just need better policies? Put out a message of change for a better future. Isn't that how Obama had that massive blowout in 08? We need to message things that would immediately obviously make peoples lives better. Free healthcare, decriminalization, childcare etc.
But the messaging is totally reliant on election year ads and coverage by the Times/Post/CNN/etc, right? Even in a better media environment, party media is critical, I think. All the more so now, however long it takes to build and however many efforts fail. Agree with: https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-07-time-for-democrats-abandon-mainstream-media/
I'm fast reaching a point where I question the merits of social media use at all. It's proving useless for sense-making, AI slop means what you see & hear is often fake. I'm at a loss.
Reality is that you can't. A lot of people wanna put blame on the dems and Kamala, but she could have run a perfect campaign, and boneheads like this would not have cared.
Republican messaging breaks through all the time, I think it's a mistake to assume that win, Dems just need to seriously get their act together and start fighting for control over the media landscape the way Republicans have been
Thing is they HAVE to know AT LEAST 1 of the disqualifying facts. You can't know 0 of
—Wants to deport everyone
—Responsible for overturning Roe
—Day 1 dictator
—Supports Putin
—Rapist
—2x impeached
—Mishandled covid
—Mishandled classified docs
—34 felonies
—Jan 6
—100% tariffs
They ignore SOMETHING
We can talk about people being surprised that tariffs aren't paid by the foreign company or they didn't know he was convicted, but they heard grab em by the pussy in 2016 and voted for him 1-3x anyway. They lived through covid. They heard him say mass deportations.
the worst part to me is just how many of these people voted for Trump thinking he'd bring the price of gas and eggs down, and are now going around insisting that he didn't actually mean all the things he said about immigrants and trans people
my own mother, multiple times I've shown her direct evidence of him and his sycophants saying he will deport millions, make trans existence illegal, etc, she just says "but if Kamala wins, we'll be homeless!" and "too many people would fight back, he won't do anything"
and even multiple times after I brought up how I could lose access to necessary healthcare, she just shrugs it off and talks about losing access to treatment herself, as though to say I'm a necessary sacrifice for her own comfort
so many people voted for Trump not knowing what his plans were, and just as many knew he was targetting vulnerable people, and decided that their precious gas and eggs were more important than millions of peoples' lives and wellbeing
This is why my big takeaway from this election is that well-meaning democrats with loads of cash need to start buying major media companies. Between Fox, Facebook, and Twitter, we’re in a lot of trouble unless we can learn to counter-program.
I believe we need to regulate social media companies, since they are the new sources of “truth”. They are in fact publishers curating and editing content (in totally new ways).
Same exact experience yesterday with a 50 year old white woman coworker who voted for Trump when I asked her how she could vote for a man held liable for rape … she didn’t know… not sure how to fight against that
Right here on Bluesky I saw a post from someone who didn’t know a Judge had clarified that yes, Trump is indeed a rapist and another post from someone who DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT JANUARY 6th
It's that plus people not understanding how inflation works, having majorities who say they are doing well economically but the economy is bade, etc. Democracy doesn't work if you just go through the motions of voting but the electorate doesn't have the information do make good choices.
Maybe it's 'cos a) I used to be a journalist so felt obliged to be plugged into the news and b) I'm VERY ONLINE anyway, but I just don't understand how people can be that willfully ignorant when the most basic information is right there and not hard to find. 🥲
Because they don’t watch/read news. They don’t get push alerts from actual media sources. News gets filtered through social media and conversations, and there is no fact checking or sources cited.
You can be very online and still be like this if you stay in certain places on the internet.
This one actually makes a lot of sense to me; people are reasoning backwards from consequences. Under normal circumstances if someone is convicted of 34 felonies you expect them to be in prison. Trump is not in prison. If a candidate for office is a felon, you’d expect it to be all over the news.
It wasn’t. Ergo, for someone who doesn’t follow politics closely why would they even suspect that he was convicted? What signs are there that that happened?
Mainstream media hammered "Biden is too old" (a subjective opinion) for months, and that message got through to people. Trump was convicted of felonies (an objective fact) and they didn't give that story as much sustained attention.
Tbf, I'm also puzzled why Dems didn't talk about this all the time
The fact that so many people voted for a compulsive liar reveals to me they just straight up don't care about truth or reality. That they elected someone who thinks kids are being "transed" in school and migrants are eating pets... I don't know how to get people to care about truth.
Most people are too stupid for democracy to be a viable form of government in the internet age. The quicker we realize democracy has failed and move to replace it with competent rulers the better we will be.
Is it possible when people are tired and want to come home and just watch tiktok with that algorithm? I mean, I blame them, but I also don't. I also know how many rich f*cks voted for him and have plenty of time and energy to learn, compared to those folks working 3x jobs and have a family.
They are idiots and assholes just like him. I swear half the country are psychopaths. It is going to be a big grift run by the 3 stooges. Those latinos that voted for him will they get deported. Oh, I know, he doesn't mean that.
There were no ads I saw in a swing state about January 6, Jeffrey Epstein, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, his old age and mental slips; ads were entirely abortion or Harris economic agenda. Trump ads 75% transgender
Its true. The dems infuriatingly stuck to the "we go high" approach, staying positive at all costs despite the candidate they were up against. People respond to anger, more voters should have been angrier about Trump.
weird how all the pundits think Dems should be more like the GOP on social issues if they want to win but basically none are saying Dems should be rude & confrontational like the GOP to win... Since most ppl aren't paying attention to content anyway, maybe the style of the message matters more?
The Dems beg places like The NY Times to save them and right fair and more accurate articles articles. Republicans say ny times is trash and ignore and browbeat them
My gay n' jewish best friend will never vote for a Democrat in his life no matter what, and complained for the last four years that we were constantly entering a recession
He graduated with a four year degree and no debt in 2022 and got a consultant job immediately that pays $80k in Florida. Joever
How do you get people to vote for you when the objective reality is that you cannot make their lives demonstrably better by any simple stroke of the pen? You seemingly just can't admit it to people, anymore.
"Democrats have nothing to offer me" = My brain literally cannot comprehend concepts or ideas grander than surface level misnomers that I fully misunderstand anyways
Nah the mention of FL and that he graduated debt free almost guarantees he grew up in Florida. I say that because FL has the sunshine scholars program which if you get sufficiently good grades and a certain number of work or volunteer hours, the state pays for some portion up to 100% of your degree.
Yeah it's actually a pretty decent program despite its issues. The main hurdle students face with getting it is knowing it exists as a way for them to afford college when they start high school so that they can put in the effort to meet the criteria.
There's probably a 50/50 split on people who voted for Trump because they are ultra-low-information voters who get one weird idea into their heads and assume that's all they have to know and people who voted for him because they fully buy into him - but who'll respond with clichés when asked why.
And we're not going to know who is who. Is somebody who says 'I voted for Trump because he believes in America' just deploying a thought-terminating cliché just too busy to think about politics or are they into weird Discords and podcasts and still too scared to openly Deus Vult? We'll never know.
It's almost like the right has a multi-media propaganda empire and the left is fecklessly counting on the Washington Post and CNN to get their message out.
This is the sort of conversation that the company should have had with them before the election. But unfortunately, as a society, we've somewhat agreed that talking about money, politics, and religion is forbidden in polite company, but those 3 things are what most people base their decisions on.
its easy to win against it, and thats to do what the democrats didnt do, dont push partisan politics and result in slogan calling but present facts and champion them, they speak for themselves, dont use things like „trump is a sexist!“ just put his quotes up
How could American citizens with the right to vote do not know trump is a convicted felon, when most people in Europe know? And mind you I'm in Greece where freedom of press is laughable.
Did a bunch of poll greeting for Dems during early voting & on Election Day & talked a lot w/ Repub volunteers and voters. Some of the stuff they believe to be true is WILDLY and categorically untrue, fully untethered from reality.
The first thing you do is call a lie a lie, loudly. When he stands on a debate stage and says x - shout out that he is lying, and prove it. Clear, simple, cutting.
Too many words, too much nuance, too much politeness - NO. He's a flat out liar.
That's the problem with your country. Too many right-wing idiots who base their votes on feelings rather than logic. But I get a kick out of seeing Trump supporters being cut off by their own families.
It would have helped if the amount of messaging was more than zero. I can't recall the Harris campaign bringing up Trump's convicted felon status at all in the past couple of months.
it's also seeped into every information channel that people pay attention to
the more alternate reality sources exist, the more alternate reality becomes true for people. whether it's hearing rogan, reading X, watching twitch steamers, the only world that exists is the one they learn about 💯 online
But also, loads of the Trumpers who do know about the felonies simply dismiss them as political persecution or "lawfare". They don't care what he does, he's "their guy".
Basically all this happened because to many thought that freedom of the internet meant it was also necessary to allow misinformation & snake oil... now that's all we're going to get.
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Same with tariffs,ask MAGA supporters about that,there are 1000000's of examples of that,I don't think they dumb but sometimes I question that
Yes, part of Dem loss is hate. But failing to plainly reflect emotion of 1/2 the country? We backed up horse to cart, & ran off with no hitch. To DO better, we must UNDERSTAND better.
Too bad many others will be hurt as well.
—Wants to deport everyone
—Responsible for overturning Roe
—Day 1 dictator
—Supports Putin
—Rapist
—2x impeached
—Mishandled covid
—Mishandled classified docs
—34 felonies
—Jan 6
—100% tariffs
They ignore SOMETHING
They WANT those things
You can be very online and still be like this if you stay in certain places on the internet.
Tbf, I'm also puzzled why Dems didn't talk about this all the time
Pain is an excellent teacher.
#GoldenAgeOfFraud
That is probably the single biggest miss of the campaign, seeing as its proven to end a President.
We lost on Unity, Peace, and Love. We need to actually be real, blunt, people.
He graduated with a four year degree and no debt in 2022 and got a consultant job immediately that pays $80k in Florida. Joever
Truth that does not motivate people to dedicate their time and money to you doesn't matter anymore.
How do you get people to vote for you when the objective reality is that you cannot make their lives demonstrably better by any simple stroke of the pen? You seemingly just can't admit it to people, anymore.
I said EPA & FDA fight commercial interests & deregulation everyday. Essentially offering: clean air/water & safe food/medicine.
Person preferred Trump’s propaganda & “comforting lies” about “helping regular folks” & his “telling it like it is.”
the dems absolutely threw the campaign
Too many words, too much nuance, too much politeness - NO. He's a flat out liar.
https://x.com/DarAlderson/status/1855633439833141754
the more alternate reality sources exist, the more alternate reality becomes true for people. whether it's hearing rogan, reading X, watching twitch steamers, the only world that exists is the one they learn about 💯 online