We’re going around in circles.
Changing someone’s racist or xenophobic attitude is going to be a complicated, difficult strategy to win a political race. Those attitudes change on a generation timescale. But there are still ways to make those people feel like the Democrats take their concerns into consideration and will address the issues in a way that makes them feel comfortable.
For instance, Democrats should be much stronger on illegal immigration. They tend to talk about immigration in flowery terms about how much good it does for the country. While that’s true, they say that stuff in interviews after videos are shown of crowds of people entering the country outside of border checkpoints. The message it sends is that Democrats don’t really care how someone comes into the country. That rubs some people the wrong way. The way to address that is to be strongly pro-legal immigration and strongly anti-illegal immigration at the same time. They should be coming up with plans for tightening up border security just like the Republicans do. Those kinds of actions make a xenophobic person feel safer by knowing that the immigrants that are here are here legally. They may still be xenophobic, but at least they’ll feel more secure knowing that the immigrants here have been vetted somehow.
No, you didn’t reply to that part of my post. If you didn’t get it, I can flesh it out with fake numbers to make it clearer?
Whatever degree of racism there is in America, it didn’t stop Obama getting elected twice, and I really doubt Americans have become significantly more racist since them. It should not be an insurmountable problem for the Democrats.
Yes, this is a good suggestion. But it can’t just be massaging, you have to commit to enforcing it. if you say illegal immigration is bad and a problem, and still fail to stop it, voters will be much angrier than if you didn’t say those things in the first place.
It would also be sensible to slant immigration policy more towards the sort of people who will benefit America by coming - educated young adults, the elite of the world - rather than low skilled workers who compete with the already struggling working classes for jobs and housing.
I don’t think that’ll be necessary at this point.
As much as I hated the simplistic saying, “It’s the economy, stupid” by James Carville - it really is true today. Today, an enormous number of Americans are being pinched really hard by inflation, the tremendous difficulty of getting a job (nowadays you can be 100% qualified with a decade of experience in identical roles and still not be hired,) rising housing cost, health insurance companies that are as predatory as ever, etc.
Democrats kept touting Biden’s economy in macro-terms (the stock market’s doing great!) but it’s really all about the micro. Voters don’t care how well the Nasdaq is doing; they care about whether a week’s cart of groceries costs them $100 or $185. And right now, inflation and the overall economic hardship is the issue affecting the widest swath of voters across the widest geographic range and widest political spectrum. Fix this, and Democrats could pick up many votes from left to right in all 50 states.
I’ll do it anyway, since I don’t think you understood.
Let’s say Slowtown has 10,000 residents and averages 10 muggings per year, 1 per 1000 people. Meanwhile, Fast Metro has 100,000 residents and 500 muggings per year, 5 per 1000 people. Average crime rate for these two places is 4.6 muggings per 1000 people.
Now 2000 immigrants move to Slowtown. They commit an average of 5 muggings per year, giving a rate of 2.5 per 1000. Great, that’s much lower than the average of 4.6 for native-born Americans. They must be lowering the crime rate! Except that in Slowtown, muggings have gone up by 50%, while the population only increased by 20%. And the crime rate there genuinely has increased: there are now 1.25 muggings per 1000 people.
I don’t know for sure this is happening, but I do know crime rates tend to vary greatly between cities and more rural areas, and even between different areas within a city. It really depends on the exact numbers involved, and where exactly the new arrivals are living.
Looks like some Dem donors agree with @iiandyiiii:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/politics/democrats-influencers-trump.html
I’m sceptical that this kind of popularity can be astroturfed, but I guess we’re going to find out.
(I didn’t think it was a particularly crushing defeat. Is any time the GOP wins the popular vote considered crushing now?)
This is explicitly contrary to what I recommended in my OP.
So it is. I had forgotten exactly what you wrote:
(My bold.)
Does that mean you think this plan is a bad idea? A waste of money?
I don’t know. I doubt it will work, but while I think my ideas are best, I’m generally in favor of a kitchen sink approach - let people try a thousand new ideas and hopefully a few of them will work and catch on.
This perfectly describes how Fox News came about. Whether it will work on the left is another question, but there is no question that political support can be successfully bootstrapped by Astroturf.
Fox news is traditional media, not social media. No one can start a cable news network without funding, but anyone can start a podcast or make videos for Tiktok. Maybe funding can get an influencer noticed, but they’ll still have to compete for viewers in a very crowded market.
To be clear, Fox News was an example where conservatives decided to “spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of [conservative, on-TV] influencers.” So it’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty freaking close: when they did it, “influencers” were called “pundits,” and there was no streaming media, so they did it on the airwaves, which was the best media technology of the day.
The problem is that all of the influencers on the right are always punching down, they wallow in conspiracies and grifting is second nature to them. The left doesn’t work like that, nor should we want to. Making fun of people, being hateful towards the “other” and sowing division gets the clicks. I don’t know how decent people can combat that.
And also just making stuff up is a lot easier than doing anything approximating journalism. And you can tailor the story to provoke the intended outrage.
It’s why a lot of pundits in American media switch from left to right – it’s so much easier. As well as of course paying much better.
And honestly I don’t know the solution. Trying to have principles doesn’t seem to be helping the left at all, but “all media is equally bad and you can’t trust anyone” is just the kind of cynicism that professional bullshitters have tried to foster for years.
So in summary, it’s all hopeless.
Yes. The point is that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work the same way in social media. In traditional media there is a high barrier for entry, and limited choice. This means there can be demand - in this case for conservative-slanted news - which goes unmet until someone spends that money (and creates Fox News). And also, people have limited options for cable TV. Was it Sinclair that was taking over other channels in America and giving them a conservative slant? You don’t need demand for your product if you have a captive audience.
But social media is different. Since the barrier to entry is so much lower, it’s easy to create a podcast or Tiktok channel with a left-wing slant. And left-wing influencers do exist. If they aren’t more popular, it’s most likely that the issue is lack of demand rather than something money could help with, like lack of availability or publicity. If anything, it might be more effective to bribe the social media companies to tweak their algorithms to push left-wing content.
The other way traditional media could sell political content was by bundling it with something people do want, in a newspaper or cable package. Good reporting, or sports channels, can induce people to buy the package. That also doesn’t apply to social media. About the best you could do is take a podcast or channel that’s popular for other reasons and pay them to add some political content. This would risk turning off viewers, though.
It sounds funny when Trump is in the White House, but the problem is that the left is still too mainstream. When CNN and MSNBC are on your side, there is no need for podcasts. When major corporations are talking about diversity and celebrating Pride month, no one needs to seek out that content. The Bernie-left isn’t mainstream, and they do a lot better in this space.
Not just America. I was thinking about Russell Brand, how he started off pretty far left, and followed the conspiracy theories across to the right.
It’s audience demand. To sell political content in social media, you have to find a gap in the market by differentiating yourself from the establishment, and that is much easier on the right. It was a truism on Twitter that big accounts drift further from the centre over time due to audience capture, and this usually meant rightwards.
It’s unlikely, but if Trump succeeds in making the establishment more conservative again, we’ll probably see a surge in left-wing social media content.
Back when the left was on Twitter, they were not shy about doing this to Maga and conservatives generally. Tankies and other extremists do well in such environments; there were some notably unpleasant people. Left-wing influencers who do succeed in this market might not be what you want to support anyway.
@TeroSunbear posted Bluesky message from Maxwell Frost’s account that called out (re-tweeted?) Acyn’s account. Acyn is part of the Meidas Touch “family”, which is still small but seems to be very gradually accumulating mass.
Anyway, Acyn and Meidas Touch seem to be one of the more vigorous saplings in the left’s social-media universe right now. Still, the struggle against right-wing messaging will be a formidable one.
As far as the left lagging in influencers or podcasters I think it’s a larger problem. I think the “woke mob” mentality is a reality and that left-aligned spokespeople are wary of deviating too far off script. So a lot of circular talk, clapter, “we’re the smartest people”, “we’re the angels” and on and on. And this has seeped into campaigning as well. I think Biden/Harris had no ability to allow for any dissent. So what happened is that people who had sympathies with Palestine couldn’t get a voice within the mainstream Dem tent and walked away because that was the only place they had a voice. The mainstream Dem tent was too focused on circulating the same messages again and again.
Any podcaster has to have an alternate, unique take. Even with Trump as POTUS, Trump contradicts himself, doesn’t do things he says he will, so there’s plenty of room to criticize Trump while still supporting some things that he does. This just isn’t the dynamic that the left has right now, so those voices aren’t going to be there.
There’s an easy political opportunity from the new war - every Democrat should be repeating the following:
“Obama made a deal with Iran and kept them from nuclear development for 3 years. Trump tore that deal up and dragged us into a war that now is putting American lives at risk.”
We’ve had years of Republicans claiming that the nuclear deal helped Iran build nukes, and that we sent them “barrels of cash” and other nonsense.
So I think it’s better to just focus on the whole bringing america back into a middle-east war. No matter how badly misinformed people might be on the situation, the history, and America’s part in it, they will likely feel the dread / fear of yet another ME quagmire (giggidy). We can try to deprogram them later.