Democrats have no winning strategy against the tactics of the right

[John_DiFool]

I have been in the process of deleting various social media accounts, including this one. These people had been telling me things which obviously weren’t true: “Oh, the female wave will carry the day!” “See all those early votes by Repubs? Turns out TONS of them are voting for Kamala!” “Voter registration has never been higher, and the resulting turnout will be stupendous!” “Dem canvassing has never been stronger or more widespread!” “Dem enthusiasm is higher than GoP enthusiasm!”

I don’t know if they were pollyanna optimists, trolls, or what, nor where they got their obviously bogus figures from, but at this point it seems there are no longer ANY media outlets, be they any of the major ones or the small fry, that I can trust in the slightest.

Including here. So far seen several mentions here that she had to show how she would deal with inflation, and show her support for the low wage earners. Free clue, inflation has been beaten. But if she says that quiet part out loud, she’ll get excoriated for her alleged insensitivity, as some network somewhere will drag out people out of somewhere who are just barely making ends meet who are now pissed at her. So on another site someone was saying that she had to promise that prices would go lower. Free Clue #2, that would be DEflation, typically a Very Bad Thing.

Already I have regretted coming back and lurking this morning. One of the big things has been ye olde “messaging” meme: “Dems have to be much better at getting their message out!” and such and so on.

So where, pray tell, do you propose they send their message to? Someone out there has to disseminate it. Fox News? [laugh] CBS/CNN et al.? Podunk Radio WXYZ? Some YT blogger?

On another site people saying she should have broadcast her plans for a Green New Deal and a New Improved ACA. Welp, you know what would have happened then. “The Dems want to go full socialist on your ass!” is all you would have heard, screamed from every major news studio in the nation.

So steronz is right, the messaging war has been lost, because pretty much every major news organization has bee compromised (along with a huge majority of the smaller outlets), the vast majority of the population has thus been gaslighted into believing certain things, deeper currents and not just surface facts which are flat-out dead wrong. This gaslighting is what caused the projected Dem turnout to collapse, for people to think this was just another election and Trump just another normal GoP candidate. The well has now been thoroughly poisoned.

I had optimism that if she ran a reasonably fuckup-free campaign that she would carry the day, thinking that yeah Dems have to be virtually perfect in every thought, word, and deed to compete with the RW Lie Machine and the Double Standard Module, where Repubs can do or say the most horrendous crap imaginable, but if she did she’d pull it out.

But it’s gotten so bad now that Dems will still lose even if they are perfect, and Repubs will win no matter how badly they fuck up. DFT can call an entire island of people that it, and they by association, are garbage, but a substantial proportion of them will still vote for him.

This is almost certainly my last post here, and it’s been fun, but it’s time for me to go. Sayonara.

[joebuck20]

@survinga

Trump and his party lie about everything all the time. They are prolific and pernicious liars, and they welcome the support of the 4-chan community, not only as voters but also as speech-writers. But they OWN an alternative information/media ecosystem that feeds millions with their bullshit. The left doesn’t have a similar thing, and the so-called mainstream media is not on the side of the Dems, in spite of what many think.

As I said in one of the other threads, the left has little idea of the tide of bullshit they’re up against. On Fox News, they never say anything bad about Trump. If you watch Fox News, you’re probably aware of the legal cases pending against him, but you’re led to believe they’re just part of some yuge witchhunt, and you won’t hear any real details about them. You’re not going to hear about the former administration officials who’ve called him a fascist, other than maybe that they’re embittered losers. You’re not going to see him performing oral sex on a microphone or doing any of the other embarrassing things that 20 years ago would have destroyed a political candidacy 10 times over. But you will hear over and over again that Biden is a doddering old fool and that Kamala is a crazy, word-salad spewing socialist.

And Fox News is really only a small part of the right-wing media machine. You have talk radio, which is a whole other form of nuttery. You have the bro podcasters like Joe Rogan, who, sadly, is actually among the more civilized of that cohort. You have OANN and Newsmax which make Fox look sane by comparison. You have X and other social media platforms which are rife with misinformation, and now that misinformation is also being distributed in Spanish.

I really wish I had a clue on how to fight this, but as the saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." And the left, these days, even has trouble finding its shoes.

[Buck_Godot]

@Velocity

Inflation? Then talk endlessly about inflation and how the Ds will do everything in their limited power to bring it down. Low wages? Then talk endlessly about how you plan to bring them up. But in this past election, the Ds barely even addressed the topic.

There are two problems with that strategy. The first is that economics is boring so talking about what steps you are going to take to solve the problem isn’t going to generate clicks and so largely won’t get out. Second and more importantly the followup question is “so if this is the plan why haven’t you done this already!”. This is why Trumps message of “I will solve everything with my magic wand tariffs and kicking out illegals” resonated better. Its simple and he doesn’t have to defend it.

[wguy123]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Then draw that contrast. Who do you trust to address the needs of the working class: billionaires, or members of the working class?

One ticket had two Ivy League educated business leader candidates, one a billionaire, the other a multi-millionaire (they also had the richest man in the world bouncing around the stage with them). The other ticket did have one multi-millionaire, but the other candidate is as blue collar as it gets with no stocks or bonds and doesn’t even own a house. I don’t think this matters. The right loves their billionaires.

[asterion]

@survinga

They don’t read economic papers that compare our performance post-pandemic to the rest of the world.

Or even if they do, that’s still macroeconomics. If my company continues to insist on 2% raises when inflation still continues at 3%, or even 2%, I’m still either at best holding steady or falling behind. I don’t care that the US economy was better on those metrics than somewhere in Europe. I’m not in Europe.