FWIW is a "insider" type newsletter that is aimed at campaign staff & other politicos. It usually provides breakdowns of social media trends and campaign spending on all of the major digital platforms.

Today they published this...

Then, last Thursday, the PAC filed a report noting a $247,000 digital advertising spend against Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin’s competitive U.S. Senate race. Some of that has already been spent on Facebook, where the group is running video ads from a bare-bones Facebook page targeting voters under 34 years of age.

Maybe if your candidates weren't supporting a FUCKING GENOCIDE random PACs couldn't run ads attacking you on this?

How many dead Palestinian kids will it take for you to change your vote?

I want to learn more about her/Green Party's theory of change & try to understand if they've learned from past campaigns.

"Bro learned that living things need to work"

Tell that to my 🐈

How do you handle these types of arguments in general?

Intro

Pic related. It's me.

I have to come clean. I'm a lib-for-hire. I need income, and what do you know, it's campaign season and I know how this works... so here I am getting paid to "get out the vote" for this year's elections.

I'm not going to provide details, and I'm not going to say anything that can pinpoint who I work for or where I work, for obvious reasons. I'm also not going to divulge any "trade secrets" or screenshots of things like VAN, again because I need to keep this job...

I'm writing this partly to clear my head, partly to reckon with the lib job I have, and partly to help educate my comrades on some lessons they can learn from this part of electoralism. Some of this will be disjointed because that's how my brain works. If you have any questions about campaigns drop them in the comments and I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Why care about this?

The Democratic (and I assume to a smaller extent, GOP) "industry" makes up a decent chunk of economic activity in a handful of states every two to four years. A huge chunk of groups with millions in funding swoop in, hire up hundreds to thousands of people at a time for temp work, then lets them all go in November.

As leftists, we should understand how this niche within Capitalism exists. This can help explain why some people in this world act the way they do: because their paycheck depends on it. There are material realities behind "having high, high hopes for a living".

These are not GREAT jobs, but for a lot of people they are better jobs than what they have access to during off years. I know of someone who was thankful for their Field Organizer role because it helped them cover the bills in the way their fast food jobs didn't.

There's also a psychological factor at play with these campaign jobs. A lot of Field Organizers are coming into swing states from out of state. They are college-aged, idealistic, and taking a semester off school to do a job that is often 6-7 days per week and stretching to 70+ hours per week when it's time for "GOTV". Imagine being told the thing you just spent your entire October working for is a sham

We act like a c3 during VR, then switch to c4 work for GOTV

Like most industries, the campaign industry comes with it's own unique insider vocabulary.

c3/c4 - This is a legal status for IRS purposes. Long story short, c3 groups can only do non-partisan work, while c4s can do more partisan type campaigning. c3 work might look like issues campaigns, nonpartisan voter registration drives, or general voter education mailings. They can't talk about candidates and can't take stances on issues in a partisan manner. c4s can do those things.

Some big orgs have both c3 and c4 organizations. Planned Parenthood is the one that comes to mind immediately.

VR - Voter Registration. By law some states require this work to be non-partisan, so a lot of orgs tend to do this regardless of their tax status. This typically boils down to running tables in public spaces or walking around with a clipboard in busy areas to find people to fill our a voter registration form. The forms are collected, details are then copied into VAN for contacting these people later, and then they are counted up and sent to the local boards of elections.

GOTV - Get Out The Vote. This is what you're about to see all over the country, but really in just a handful states (PA, WI, MI, NC, GA, NV, AZ). People are going out door-to-door, or making phone calls, or doing "relational organizing", or a few other ways to basically get you to talk to them about "making a plan to vote". There's some studies showing that doing these things increases voter turnout by enough to be worth pouring Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of money into doing every election. Talking to a voter in person and getting them to create a "plan to vote" is considered the most effective form of GOTV and is the one you'll see starting anywhere from 1-3 weeks from now depending on the election calendar in your area.

Note these are NOT persuasion attempts. They don't work. There's some mild talking points that canvassers have to read off, but they're told to move on if there's any resistance to the script. Turns out you can't change someone's ideology based on their life experience by knocking on their door...

It's rant time because depression and racing thoughts are fun.

I've been thinking about all of the more blatant Dem actions lately to push the "left" away from the party as far as possible. Part of me is confused. Why push away a potential voting block? After all, aren't you calling yourselves the "big tent" party?

Part of me wants to think that there is an ideological push from the centrist and Conservative Dems to get us out of their way. That they honestly did a 180 on the border and suddenly love cops, etc.

Maybe part of it is fear? Are Democrats getting enough credible death threats behind the scenes that they are running to the right out of fear?

A material analysis might come up with this: Democrats know how their bread is buttered and want to keep the money flowing. There is a large "industry" or NGOs, 501c3/4 orgs, party organizations, vendors, and other groups that make their money from donations or grants to push for this or that reform. If abortion becomes legal, Planned Parenthood Action Fund doesn't need to exist. If elections stop being close Priorities USA PAC can go away.

Money comes from all of the bullshit PACs like the Lincoln Project getting funded by bazinga-brained dipshits from Silicon Valley that believe in "both sides"/"unity" crap. They have all of the money, so those are the PACs we get. Black Lives Matter doesn't have money, so there are no orgs to sponsor it, which means no staffers needing to cover their asses.

Of course AIPAC is a huge part of this as well.

All the shitty Dem behavior kind of makes sense when you see it as a bunch of career staffers trying to protect their paychecks. They may not even be thinking about things this way, but they sure are acting like it.

What do you think?

Trading stocks only radicalized me more. Lunch at a fast food spot is now over $15. Meanwhile it's possible to make a "trade" that nets more profit than a Popeyes employee earns in a day of work.

This can't last... or can it?

Or do bookstores only stock right wing books? The most "left" book I can find at this Books A Million is the latest from Bernie Sanders 🙃

Adult content 🤔

With ever more Supreme Court fuckery going on I'd like to help comrades in my local org be better secured against potential breaches.

Ideally I'd like to recommend 1-3 options that meet these needs:

• Easy to use
• Can be used on phones as well as mobile devices
• Doesn't retain any network traffic data

Any ideas on what options we have?

I get 1-2 of these per day, paste in my question, and never hear back.

Fascist policy has moved quickly in response to the recent solidarity encampments that sprang up to support Palestine. It seems like every state action right now is geared toward either making sure these camps can never again exist, or they can legally be crushed by any fascist who wishes to do so. I'm NGL, it's a scary time to be an American with left views right now.

What's happening just off the top of my head:

• Camps are being destroyed and dispersed by armed police, attacked by right-wing mobs, and harassed by Zionist propaganda shops.
• Positive coverage of the protests on mainstream media is near-zero. Same thing we saw during BLM protests in 2020.
• Individual protestors are facing consequences ranging from doxxing to harassment, to school suspensions, expulsion, and jail time.

That's all run-of-the-mill, seen that before. What's new:

• A man who was convicted, by a jury, of murdering protestors was just pardoned by the Governor of Texas.
• Protests continue to be attacked by fascists in vehicles.
• The federal government & many states are passing laws changing the definition of antisemitism to include the messages that the students were using at the camps, making it that much easier to legally suppress them.
• At least one state (NC) is about to change it's mask law to prevent protestors from wearing masks to protect themselves from Zionist retaliation.

So... protesting is basically banned, extremely dangerous, and silenced due to media blackout, state oppression, and social media bias. I know showing solidarity is important but I am struggling with seeing the local camp my local org helped support, a group of peaceful students and activists, just utterly crushed. IDK what to say to the people who effectively lost their rights to free speech.

Any ideas on what to do? How to escalate? How to protest in a way that is more effective and safer for the folks involved? I know the state is scared of these movements growing because of the sheer amount of action it is taking to quell these. At the same time I see these tactics working. I am tired of seeing good people dragged into jail. I'm tired of seeing them speared under the false charges of "anti-Semitism". I'm afraid of losing the life I have if I speak out. It feels like literally everyone is against us and it is depressing af.

I originally wanted to post a question about defending against vehicular attacks, but I remembered everything going on and realized there's a lot more stopping protests than that. I don't have the answers but hopefully we can collectively figure out some options.