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This was tried, with great tenacity, during Trump's first term. I was heavily involved in Lancaster Stands Up (mentioned here) and remember the many press features about how it marked a revolution in civic engagement, right up until election day showed it had had zero impact.
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Pete Davis 🪴
@PeteDDavis
An area that is not getting enough attention in the autopsies of 2024 is the civic structure of the Democratic Party: how money, attention, organizing, leadership, and decision-making power flow through the party. My start to an exploration here: thenation.com/article/politi
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David Watson 🥑
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It was extremely good that people tried this. But all their hard work is in vain if we ignore the negative outcome of this grass-roots engagement strategy, in Lancaster and other places, and decide to repeat the experiment because it feels good to participate.
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@Pinboard
This goes for other strategies like various forms of door-knocking where you're supposed to have deep conversations with low-propensity voters, or proselytize to ten of your neighbors. It's been tried by earnest, sincere people and it doesn't work. Negative results are useful!
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@Pinboard
What tends to happen after a political organizing strategy fails is that people decide it was really about the friends they made along the way, or that it somehow laid the foundation for something to come, or some No True Scotsman critique that it wasn't tried the right way.
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@Pinboard
But we're in a highly polarized, internet-mediated political dynamic where even local races have been effectively nationalized. Doing civic engagement types of organizing gives one a sense of agency, but there is no evidence in the past few elections that it works. That's hard!
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@Pinboard
Conversely, there's evidence that other stuff does work. For example, single-issue voter initiatives ("Vote YES on rezoning Area X") seem to genuinely increase turnout, and door-knocking is somewhat effective for those initiatives. It's not all gloom, but you gotta be clear-eyed
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@Pinboard
A remarkable thing about political organizing is that we lack answers to even basic questions. Harris/Biden spent about $1B on this election. How would the outcome have been different with $2B or $500M spent instead? What if none of it went to TV ads, or all of it? No one knows.
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@Pinboard
I wrote a post-mortem for my own two swings at this piñata, but am not aware of anything from LSU
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Elam Bend
@ElamBend
didn't David Shor have some thoughts about why it didn't work re: the engagers being Dem youth who were to the left of the base and, for lack of a better word, annoying?
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