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Posted
On 10/23/2025 at 10:01 PM, wildcat09 said:

If you think a guy who had an SS tattoo until literally yesterday has a chance in hell of beating Susan Collins you’re out of your mind.

Coming back to this- are you giving points? I may want action on this. 

11 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Lots of interesting data to pore through that I’m still digesting. 
 

 

“Deciding to Win,” wow. Joins other great works of self-examination like “working for money,” and “farting in the shower.”

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Posted
34 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

“farting in the shower.”

Aside from the toilet, a shower is the only other place to trust a fart. Worst case, the solution is a wafflestomp away. 

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Posted
11 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

And student loan forgiveness lmao...less popular but still popular

I hate everything

For better or worse, I think they're saying "distance yourselves from things that can be labeled socialism."  That, or don't piss off our bank and health industry donors.

Posted
31 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

For better or worse, I think they're saying "distance yourselves from things that can be labeled socialism."  That, or don't piss off our bank and health industry donors.

Problem is - even the most milquetoast criticisms of the very real problems in our current system are met with "whell thas cuz yer SOCIALIST!!!". That kind of thinking is playing a game you can't win, because it wasn't designed for you to win.

Dems should stop playing appeasement fuck fuck games with the fascists. They aren't earnest criticisms - just a cudgel to rhetorically beat people who aren't in your tribe

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Problem is - even the most milquetoast criticisms of the very real problems in our current system are met with "whell thas cuz yer SOCIALIST!!!". That kind of thinking is playing a game you can't win, because it wasn't designed for you to win.

Dems should stop playing appeasement fuck fuck games with the fascists. They aren't earnest criticisms - just a cudgel to rhetorically beat people who aren't in your tribe

Hence the "for better or worse."  I do think, though, that as helpful and right as student loan forgiveness may be, it is perceived by many working class folks as a sop to educated elites that puts the burden on them.  They buy the "pay your debts, loser" part.

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Posted
10 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Coming back to this- are you giving points? I may want action on this. 

He just lost his second campaign manager in as many weeks and several additional reports have come out making it clear he's lying about the tattoo. You really want to bet on this guy?

Posted

“I’m not a secret nazi” is more or less the same as “I am not a witch” in the context of electoral politics. Mills could be 99 and still get the nod over Platner next June.

Posted
17 minutes ago, softlynow said:

“I’m not a secret nazi” is more or less the same as “I am not a witch” in the context of electoral politics. Mills could be 99 and still get the nod over Platner next June.

If anything, he's handling this issue much much worse than Christine O'Donnell handled "I am not a witch." E.g.

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He handled the reddit posts much better and much more in line with the type of response that would appeal to Democratic primary voters. This whiny shit here? This is what works in the Republican party. 

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Posted
2 minutes ago, bluto said:

Pretty well sums it up, esp when compared to the messaging machine that is the gopIMG_9150.thumb.png.371ba166563a1d24297e26fd2460cb46.png

this is a pretty dumb way to measure priorities. if you applied the exact same algorithm to the republicans the trans panic built into their platform probably would have a thousand percent increase if not more.

For one moment, I wish these people would stop and think about why the term "hate" was seen as more necessary to use in 2024 compared to 2012.

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Posted
14 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

He handled the reddit posts much better and much more in line with the type of response that would appeal to Democratic primary voters. This whiny shit here? This is what works in the Republican party


So he’s a man of the people. A uniter!

Posted
54 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

If only we knew why the second campaign manager quit

Because most of the people here will not bother to look into it, and assume the worst, his second campaign manager is expecting a baby and can't handle the long hours that the job would require. He definitely would miss Junior Day with the flu.

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Posted

G. Elliott Morris has a good breakdown of that report:

Quote

I was going to write today’s post about social media, attention, and politics — specifically, why I think the increasing use of AI algorithmic recommenders on the major platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and soon, Twitter, makes them less useful for political analysts, journalists, and users alike, and why they’re bound to further increase polarization and destabilize politics. As a former Twitter addict and data journalist, I feel I have something useful to say on the subject.

Then, when I was writing, someone sent me a new report about Democrats’ losses in 2024, written by the centrist Democratic group WelcomePAC, that consumed my attention for the rest of the day (go figure). So I will return to social media and attention another time.

The report, which deserves credit for its breadth of data and the depth of its empirical investigation (I reckon it was more work than some PhD dissertations), makes the argument that Democrats lost the presidency in 2024 because they embraced too many progressive policy ideas. The authors conclude that for 2028:

Democrats should pick a nominee who understands what it takes to win elections in difficult terrain—and is willing to run on positions that majorities of Americans support, even if this sometimes requires breaking with the unpopular demands of progressive advocacy organizations, corporate interests, or the Democratic donor class.

I have some criticisms of the way the authors come to their conclusions. For one thing, while making prescriptions for the future of the party, the authors are surprisingly ignorant of current data that shows the Democrats rebounding with voters who care about the economy, and Republicans doing as poorly as or worse than Democrats on issue focus. The report also spends little time discussing the role of inflation in Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024, and frames the economy as an exclusively Democrat vs Republican problem instead of acknowledging an incumbent vs opposition dynamic at play last year — a big mistake that I have covered before.

The group also reads too much into unadjusted, uncertain differences in the electoral performance of “moderate” and “progressive” congressional candidates — the same mistakes plenty of other people are making recently. The issue is not just that these patterns are highly subject to the way a person defines “moderate” or “progressive,” but that past data is not a good predictor of future results. The individual skill of a member of Congress, in my research, changes significantly from cycle to cycle (in the WelcomePAC’s own data, overperformance by a candidate in one year predicts just 25% of future overperformance by that candidate. Ideally, that number would be 100%).

But my biggest problem with the report is with the conclusion itself. The report suffers from something I’m going to call the “Strategist’s Fallacy” in politics — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters. They implicitly assume all voters make choices and select candidates the same way elites do. This is wrong for several reasons, which I will explain.

The report also uses some pretty comically inaccurate data to make its case — for example, saying it was part of the Democratic policy agenda in 2024 to abolish prisons, make DC a state, and pass Medicare for All. I touch on this after diving deeper into the Strategist’s Fallacy:

The Strategist’s Fallacy, simply put, is the incorrect belief that voters think like strategists — i.e., that they hold concrete issue positions and ideological labels and match them up to candidates, like a customer picking an entree off a dinner menu — so the way to win is for a candidate to tweak their individual positions on policy. This mental model does not hold in reality, leading individuals to provide poor assessments of voters’ decisions and organizations to give candidates poor advice.

Imagine, for a moment, the world that the average Democratic strategist lives in. Most are college-educated (many to most by elite institutions), live in dense urban cities, experience the world through a hyper-polarized digital simulacra of politics through traditional and social media, and live and breathe politics all day. They are intensely exposed to political information from all over the political spectrum (and the world) and hold information about candidates, parties, and issues in their heads all at once. The strategist is constantly consuming news and sorting politicians into buckets based on their positions and comments.

This is not how the average person experiences politics, to put it mildly. Most are unaware of the minutiae of everyday political news, and many don’t know basic facts about the political system. Almost half of voters aren’t engaged in the process at all. According to Gallup, just 32% of adults pay very close attention to national political news. In 2015, a third of U.S. adults did not know there were three branches of the federal government. Nearly 40% of voting-eligible Americans in 2024 didn’t even vote.

The strategist’s mental model of the way average voters make their decisions is often equally divorced from the reality of the average voter. This is evidenced by the hyper-focus on policy positions in the WelcomePAC report. The report makes no mention of identity, social networks, or even media diets in analyzing why Democrats lost in 2024.

The voter decides who to vote for based on a variety of inputs. The strategist, on the other hand, formulates a mechanical model of politics where voters make decisions to minimize their ideological distance from their representatives, where “ideological distance” is determined entirely by (a) the policy preferences of the voter and (b) the policy positions of the candidate. In doing so, they create a hammer that hits a very narrow and specific nail in American politics.

But if the only tool you have is a hammer (marked “policy positions”), you’re going to see everything as a nail (a policy selection problem). The median strategist today (especially the Democratic quant) ignores external factors, media narratives, and the social aspect of politics in favor of the narrow thing they think they can do something about. The strategist ignores the big, complex, over-determined mess that is human political psychology in favor of one neat variable: the distance between an individual's policy positions and the parties’.

Yet most voters do not share this model of politics. As I wrote in my Sunday post, empirical studies show that upwards of just 10% of voters have a coherent mental model of where the parties stand on most issues. The vast majority of the public has no sense of political ideologies, are “group-interested,” or are “nature of the times” voters, to use Philip Converse’s old categories. Simply put, most voters cast their ballots based on pre-conceived preferences and identity, on information from their friends, or as a reaction to how the economy is doing.

Additionally, much political science finds that when it comes to their attitudes on the issues, voters are very fickle. People change their policy preferences based on input from party leaders, and also seemingly at random across surveys. The mass public is not as ideological as the people who read The New York Times — or, frankly, this Substack. Additionally, moderates in the electorate have a mix of liberal and conservative views (sometimes very extreme ones) across issue domains, not moderate issues across all of them.

The strategist devises a way to win the 10% of voters who see the world as they see it. It is not a strategy that meets most voters where they are.

Below, I have included four screenshots from the “Deciding To Win” report that form the empirical heart of its authors’ conclusions. The authors polled supposed Democratic and Republican policies and lined them up according to what voters did and did not favor.

From the Democratic side, voters favored things like expanded government negotiation of prescription drug prices, preventing any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, increasing Social Security benefits for low-income seniors, and raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour. And voters opposed “Democratic” policies such as abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, expanding the Supreme Court to 13 members, and banning fracking.

On the Republican side, voters favored prohibiting transgender women from competing in women’s sports, eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, and lowering the gas tax by 10 cents per gallon. Voters rejected Trump launching a Trump-branded cryptocurrency, extending the Trump 2017 tax cut for high earners, cutting the top rate of federal taxes on corporate profits, cutting Medicaid/letting the ACA tax credits expire, and pardoning January 6th participants.

Do you notice the asymmetry in these lists?

The list of unpopular Republican policies is full of examples of things that Trump has already done as president, or which he or his cabinet have raised as potential priorities for the second Trump administration, whereas the list of Democratic policies is full of examples of things no national Democratic candidate supported in 2024.

By my count, 12 to 13 of the policies on that “Unpopular Republican policies” list are things Trump has already achieved, and most of the rest of possible in the future. In contrast, the official Democratic Party platform for 2024 mentions at best 5 of the 26 items on this list of supposed “Unpopular Democratic policies,” and even those are a stretch. The most prominent “Democratic policies” are things that, at best, a handful of Democratic elected officials voiced support for in the years before 2024.

This is, at best, poorly explained by WelcomePAC, or at worst, an example of how the organization is basing its analysis of the Democrats’ left flank on the type of biased arguments popular with Republicans and in echo-chambers online, particularly on Elon Musk’s X. Frankly, if I didn’t know anything else about this group, I’d think this research were coming from a pro-Trump Super PAC.

The WelcomePAC will likely say, by way of counterargument, that they have included these policies as Democratic proposals for the purposes of demonstration; If some voters believed these were the party’s beliefs, surely they factored into their decisions and should be explored as real positions, right?

I have two responses to this. First, I think this is actually a classic example of how anti-progressive/pro-moderation organizations do the Republican Party’s public relations work for them. Endless Democratic infighting and finger-pointing at the left contribute to the public’s view that the party is dominated by the left, even if/when it’s not! The pages of national media outlets today are filled with journalists citing this report as evidence that the Democratic Party has moved too far left, based on policy examples that aren’t actually part of the party’s agenda. This forms the public’s image of the party regardless. If you’re a Democratic organization, this is extremely counterproductive.

Second, this argument undercuts their proposed solution, which is for Democrats to talk only about the most popular parts of their agenda. Remember, Biden actually accomplished much on the following list of popular Democratic policies in his first term — including several in the top ten! — and the party had proposed many of the rest.

This did little good for Kamala Harris, though, because the perceptions of the party as a vehicle for far-left ideology had already been set. There was nothing she could say — indeed, because she tried saying it — that could differentiate herself from the negative party brand. And on the other side of the aisle, Donald Trump’s many negative policy proposals did not sink him.

Why should we expect different results for the Democrats if they try this same strategy in the future?

If the question we are asking is why the Democrats had/have a bad brand, regardless of their popular issue positions, I think a relevant explanation is that right-wing media and information networks are incredibly efficient at shaping the public’s collective stereotype of the Democratic Party as a far-left progressive party. There are many potential explanations for why that is — and I think that should be part of any autopsy on the 2024 election, instead of just focusing on policy positioning. That’s how a Strategist, not a voter, would think.

WelcomePAC is trying to solve a perception problem with policy proposals.

If the Strategist’s Fallacy is over-indexing on policy menus, the practical antidote is to fix the Democratic Party’s perception problem. And it can’t do that without effective, trustworthy messengers.

Most voters don’t update their beliefs off white papers and interviews with candidates that they never see. Instead, they update off people they already trust — their friends and family, other customers at local businesses, the union steward at the local factory, the Spanish-language morning host, the neighbor who coaches the youth soccer team, etc. In that environment, a party with weak, irregular, or internally contradicted messages will lose arguments even when its individual policies poll well.

For Democrats, that means the binding constraint on persuasion isn’t the left–right placement of every single policy — it’s a chronic shortage of durable, credible narrators who can message on behalf of the party. Republicans benefit from a dense, year-round ecosystem (talk radio, partisan local outlets, church networks, sheriffs, school-board figures) that repeats a simple story about what their party stands for and what the other side threatens. By and large, these marching orders come from Fox News and associated outlets.

You can’t beat the right-wing messaging apparatus with a six-week digital ad program and a tidy “popular positions only” stump speech. Harris’s 2024 election proves that even the best-funded, rigorously optimized ad-testing platform that highlights only the most popular part of the Democratic agenda, to individual voters most likely to be moved by those messages! — cannot save a bad messenger in a bad environment.

The lesson from 2024 is not “say fewer unpopular things” (since no Democrat in 2024 was saying we should abolish all prisons). Instead, it should be “build a more powerful and popular messaging apparatus.” If I had ten million dollars, I’d invest it in some mix of the following, as a way to build credibility with voters and undercut the influence of the Republican Party’s allies in the news and social media.

1. Recruiting and training community-rooted candidates and validators, especially outside the metro core

2. Making local Democratic officials a consistent presence in local media (especially small-market TV) between elections

3. Investing in civic infrastructure that isn’t obviously partisan (service projects, clinics, consumer-protection help desks, buying old movie theaters to show films), so the party shows up as a neighbor first and a nationalized brand second

4. Supporting left-wing blogs, content creators, and podcasts that go on the offensive against Republicans to shape perceptions of the GOP as extreme and out of touch

None of these is cheap or easy. But the point is that winning elections is not as easy as changing the policy proposals that leaders cite in speeches. Rewriting a platform is easy. Rebuilding trust with voters is the hard part — and it’s the part that makes the policy menu matter at all.

In summary, don’t be fooled into thinking that just because someone has a lot of polling data or nice charts, that means they’ve uncovered the truth of politics.

The truth is that politics and voter psychology are very complex. You should thus be very wary of people selling simple solutions to any party’s or candidate’s woes. Often, these simple solutions are the best way to get donors involved or to get Congresspeople to take a meeting with you. But simple and slick is often an inverse indicator of predictiveness.

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

He just lost his second campaign manager in as many weeks and several additional reports have come out making it clear he's lying about the tattoo. You really want to bet on this guy?

I think he’s handling this in a stupid way but it depends on what kind of points you are giving. 

Posted
Just now, Bozo_Casanova said:

I think he’s handling this in a stupid way but it depends on what kind of points you are giving. 

Depends on how my trip to Vegas this weekend goes. I'll let you know. 

Posted (edited)
7 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

But my biggest problem with the report is with the conclusion itself. The report suffers from something I’m going to call the “Strategist’s Fallacy” in politics — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters. They implicitly assume all voters make choices and select candidates the same way elites do

This is extremely well said and is not only a great summarization of whats wrong with the entire mindset of the report and the party in general.

The entire idea, for example, that “Medicare for All” as a policy proposal cost Democrats votes in the aggregate is fucking retarded.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova
Posted

It all boils down to nerds trying to make themselves seem useful so they can get positions of influence within campaigns and the party apparatus (to the extent that exists) to ensure lucrative careers. In a properly-functioning party these people would be treated the way Ryan Gosling treats his quant in The Big Short (but without the racism).

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Posted
55 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

The report suffers from something I’m going to call the “Strategist’s Fallacy” in politics — the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters. They implicitly assume all voters make choices and select candidates the same way elites do. This is wrong for several reasons, which I will explain.

The Office Thank You GIF

Posted
1 hour ago, chainsaw said:

Because most of the people here will not bother to look into it, and assume the worst, his second campaign manager is expecting a baby and can't handle the long hours that the job would require. He definitely would miss Junior Day with the flu.

This guy is cooked if that's his friend's excuse. 

Posted
55 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Is this guy gonna be on the ballot in June or what?

Platner? I don't see him dropping out unless a major scandal comes out. The Reddit stuff didn't hurt him at all, and Tattoogate seems not to have any traction in Maine even if it has damped the support he'd had from small-amount donors from out of state.

His candidacy and the "scandals" have been fascinating because it's rare when the most annoying tankies (people who if they vote at all vote Green Party) and the most annoying BlueSky libs (mostly Zionists) are trying to achieve the same thing but for different reasons.

Posted
1 minute ago, Da Fino said:

This guy is cooked if that's his friend's excuse. 

He doesn't have an axe to grind the way the first manager does, and hasn't exactly thrown him under the bus, renounced his friendship, or withdrawn his support for Platner's candidacy. There will be plenty of qualified options a week from now after this election cycle concludes. The dude is still packing venues all over Maine.



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