Democratic (Party) Direction

Just make sure all the voters who got turned away in Wisconsin and similar states ACTUALLY GET TO VOTE. Grassroots registration and turnout people then can funnel back doorstep concerns to candidates, and then message the hell out of the resultant platform.

(An Ellison DNC would be doing this).

I wonder what Gwen Moore, who represents in Congress a Milwaukee district whose low turnout in 2016 was part of the reason Trump scraped by in Wisconsin, is doing? Oh, she's part of the DNC's voting rights commission. The Democratic party is going to fight like hell to keep the GOP from suppressing its votes and that would be just as true if Keith Ellison or anybody else was DNC chair.

I mean, maybe you think the national party, Russ Feingold (LegitPAC), Eric Holder (National Democratic Redistricting Committee) etc. are all just pretending to be interested in protecting the right to vote? But why would that be? It's an existential threat to two-party politics and it's central to everything the party is doing.

Now if you want to know whether the Democrats are funneling back doorstep concerns to candidates, that's a better question. If they did that in Wisconsin, they'd find that a lot of people want Democrats who are friendlier to gun owners. Should the national party message the hell out of that, or not? (This is a serious question, by the way.)

considering the national party message is ignore Wisconsin entirely they would probably do better with any outreach at all

Do you even google, bro?

As a Democrat living in Wisconsin I would say that's ... not the case? Would be shocked if the national party doesn't put a very big shoulder behind Tammy Baldwin in 2018.

The state party here has serious organizational problems, that much is true; and I think that has as much to do with soft showing in 2016 as anything national Democrats did.

if they devoted half the time they spend talking about Donald Trump to promoting a bold progressive agenda it would be a better strategy. scolding people for not digging through the mountain of trash is not a good strategy.

ICYMI

There is an actual fight going on over whether the Democratic Party should change entirely to a system of open primaries or, even more horribly worse, a system of caucuses, to pick its presidential nominee.

Point The First: Who cares in 2017? The house is burning down and you're vetting the firemen.

Point The Second: Don't do this. A political party that conducts open primaries is a political party just begging to be hijacked by the loudest voice in the room and/or ratfcked by any half-witted operative on the other side. Your party's nominating process should be kept within your party. And caucuses are completely worthless, both in terms of practical politics and in terms of the basic function of finding a nominee....

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57208/democratic-unity-commission-problems/

you realize that without caucuses and open primaries hillary would've beaten bernie even more dramatically than she ultimately did?

it's not my party and there's no saving it

also Bernie never had a fucking shot

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/348651-kamala-harris-announces-she-will-co-sponsor-single-payer-health-insurance

An interesting thing I'd like to point out about this is SUCK IT FREDERIK! SUCK IT!

I'm glad she's doing this, and I hope that the constant pestering by health-care activists will motivate more high-profile Dems to do the same

She indicated she was probably going to do this a while ago. It's good to see a few of the 2020 front runners already supporting SP. It makes it more likely that anyone else expecting to lead the party will also have to.

Wisconsin is the birthplace of the open primary and its primaries are open by state law; the DNC back in the 80s took the state to the Supreme Court arguing that their freedom of association was abridged by WI forbidding closed primaries, and they lost.

So open primaries are a treasured Wisconsin tradition. Then again:

a) so is the ability of the governor to veto individual words out of bills;
b) Wisconsin open primaries are the reason David Clarke is a "Democrat" and holds elected office in a heavily Democratic county.

Until today, at least

memo, in character

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dnc-black-lives-matter-memo_us_57c6f80de4b078581f1072ca

whoa a shocking news story from 2016

like i know what year it is!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DI1y7pZW4AAaGF1.jpg

https://www.recode.net/2017/9/3/16250766/hillary-clinton-startup-verrit-cyber-attack

This is embarrassing, but the concept itself is way more embarrassing than the attack.

Yes. Jesus.

Eventually, Daou hopes the site will have a podcast, some analysis, a hub on YouTube and other elements, as he aims to help Clinton backers fight the “bullying from the radical right and fringe left. Asked about funders, Daou said he’s “just beginning the process, actually.”

the guy just does not work on stuff that is good

http://peterdaou.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_FThlNAa-Y

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t35.0-12/21389238_10105244410336589_22201435_o.jpg?oh=c902cc616fd5bf1e4966cc2e81b1b667&oe=59AEA634

"Fringe left" are what they call the majority of Americans, based on the widespread popularity of "fringe left" ideas. That's what we're all going to get with this crew of people. Another load of shit that makes our lives even worse.

Bernie Sanders and the Mainstream Media Helped Put Trump in the White House https://t.co/Pixzgi3E1g

— Verrit (@verrit) August 23, 2017

hey great direction guys!

I supported Bernie, I voted for Hillary Clinton, and she just can't help making me regret it more and more.

i'm sorta barely keeping track of verrit in the background of today, but...it's a social network for clinton supporters to 1) hide from online enemies and/or 2) come up with cool tidbits to attack online enemies with?

what? fuck off world

ok i am loading this url if their logo is not a ferret im gonna be hella let down

I think it's literally just a social network for peter daou

can think of few people i'd more enjoy watching fail

if it's just for him then why is their site so slow, how can he be logged on so many times

It's running on the old Clinton e-mail server?

did you miss the part about the “pretty significant and sophisticated” cyber attack (according to daou) (he was DDOSed by a 12 yo)

I'm not the tech-savviest person but I was under the impression that DDOS attacks were something that stopped working on most legit sites 5 years ago or more. Which only underscores the shittiness of this project I guess.

Oh no, DDoS attacks totally work, but mostly they're used on gaming servers these days. We had a massive one knock a ton of stuff down for a few hours in October last year.

shit it even has its own wiki page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Dyn_cyberattack

i was gonna say DDoS doesn't seem like it'll ever go out of style. is it hard to differentiate between legitimate traffic and that kind of attack?

Nice summary of how the website is emblematic of a lot of Party issues today:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/verrit-shows-everything-wrong-with-clintonism

Stuff like decontextualized facts, weird hyper-complexity, overemphasis on tech, etc

I thought the site wasn't necessarily DDOS'd so much as a bunch of people jumping on at once to make joke posts as quickly as they could churn them out

"decontextualized facts" reminds me a lot of how some of my peers study medicine -- recalling buzzwords and knowing the "answers" to questions without really bothering to understand.

daou is a propagandist, full stop. his goal is to discourage critical thinking and heterodoxy of any sort. his is the sort of thinking that, frankly, is quite widespread across the "activist left" -- he's just dumber and a lot more shameless about it

I thought the "activist left" was the DSA?

Yaaaay, centrism!

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/05/third-way-democrats-jobs-party-242308

lol what gibberish

so, i have been reluctant to embrace DSA/Sanders-style leftist politics, in part out of a sentimental attachment to Obama-style technocratic liberalism (and annoyance at leftists' disdain for the same) -- but this whole Verrit thing has me tempted to go full Chapo.

but i won't, because then i'd have to stop listening to Pod Save America. i already bristle when i see someone like Emmett Rensin make a snarky reference to it.

i am imagining, of course, that Chapo is just wall-to-wall merciless rips on Pod Save America. plus James Adomian doing Sebastian Gorka impressions.

i don't think anyone gives a fuck about pod save america except the people who listen to it

OK if the alternative to think tanks is podcasts, maybe I prefer think tanks

i prefer both to "technocratic liberalism," Christ on a cracker

PSA apparently averages close to 1 million listeners per episode.

not sure how their Patreon is doing tho

"technocratic liberalism,"

I thought this was an odd choice of words. Reeks to me of means testing and charter schools tbf

PSA doesn't have a patreon

Chapo has 18k paid subscribers so I would say it has around 75k listeners (if we're being generous), which is hilariously teensy given how much Daou brainspace it apparently occupies