Official Bernie Sanders HQ: Not Me, Us!

[afterlife2009]

Yes, I read it and the best part is Grim mentioned the working class realignment that is happening. I talked about it a few pages back if you guys remember. The Josh Hawley post.

The 2010 tea party wave brought more poor and working-class districts into the GOP fold, accelerating the realignment, but it was 2018 that cemented Democrats as the party of people who shop at Whole Foods. In 1960, Democrats represented nearly every district in the bottom fifth of average income, and roughly half of the richest. After the 2018 midterms, they represented 83 percent of the richest districts. They went from a near universal hold on the poorest districts to controlling just about 40 percent. The parties have switched places on the income ladder.

When Republicans represent the rich and Democrats represent the well-educated but not quite as rich, Piketty says, there’s no obvious party home for the working class, and no motivation for the government to do much of anything for that working class.

It’s a global trend, and it’s one that the Sanders campaign is trying to stop and reverse. Instead of crafting a platform to fit a coalition, the campaign is trying to create a coalition to fit his platform.

In 2016, Piketty found, for the first time voters in the top 10 percent of income were more likely to vote Democratic than voters in the bottom 90 percent, making the realignment Sanders wants to force that much more timely. Without it, Democrats could eventually become both the party of the well-educated and also the super rich.

As Piketty observed, when both major parties are catering to the elites, the system can’t deliver material gains for the broad base of people, so the parties fight over the one thing a nation can control: its borders, and correspondingly the definition of citizenship.

Without a party advocating for universal programs of uplift, for a collective effort to confront the seismic challenges facing the planet, the dialogue in the U.S. will dissolve, the way it has already begun to do in Europe, solely into battles over immigration and nationalism, battles that the right is well-positioned to win by exploiting fear, xenophobia, and anti-elite sentiment.

 

[OfTheCross]

adding that to my bag...

shyt ain't happening tho.

Remember...Digital CD's cost the same as Physical.

They gonna keep those savings

 

[storyteller]

That Grim article is fantastic and really explains the difference in campaign strategy and principles. I love the little bit about all of the times the campaign has used its mailing list to support unions and protesters (and that it comes with a cost).

I think it’s also big to stress that Bernie’s approach has been to bring in voters that would otherwise be disenchanted. So often centrists will point to lack of participation from Bernie supporters as if Bernie turned those people against Clinton and cost her. That’s not what happened. Those voters were disillusioned before Bernie showed up and likely wouldn’t have been involved at all if not for his presence in the primary. Keeping those people around after Bernie was unlikely. Bernie isn’t bringing in repeat voters, he’s trying to bring in new voters and the article stresses how much focus they put into encouraging these people to vote at all.

For decades, “turnout” and “persuasion” have been the watchwords of the modern campaign, often viewed in competition with each other, or, at least, as separate animals. In persuasion, a campaign targets people likely to vote and persuades them — through television ads, “earned media,” mail, etc. — to vote for its candidate over other ones. The campaign then does its best to make sure that person does actually turn out to vote, but that’s a lower priority, because their past propensity to vote suggest they’ll do so again this time around.

Focusing on turnout, meanwhile, means focusing less on swing voters and more on identifying and galvanizing the campaign’s base of voters and reminding them relentlessly to vote. The usual assumption is that the voters are already supportive of the candidate’s message, they just need a nudge to get out and vote. For the Sanders campaign, that’s the wrong way to think about it.

“Turnout is persuasion,” Rast said. Nonvoters don’t vote not simply because they’re busy (which they are) or they don’t know where their polling place is (which they often don’t), but because they believe not voting is the rational choice. The system is what it is, politicians are corrupt or in it for themselves, and nothing meaningful is going to change. They might agree with Sanders on the issues — in fact, they probably do. But they don’t agree that there’s any point in trying to make his agenda happen. There’s an emotional satisfaction to not voting, as well. The most satisfying way to react to a system that shows you no respect may well be to show it no respect in return. If you can’t beat it, you can at least protest it by withholding your emotional investment. “A lot of people don’t want to consent to be governed by nonsense, and that’s why they don’t participate in our system,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the Las Vegas rally. What’s needed therefore is persuasion — persuasion that voting matters, that you matter.

“To convince a nonvoter that voting matters, and that all the politicians aren’t just the same, that is a very hard persuasion challenge, and most of them hate Democrats and Republicans alike,” Sandberg said. “I want to do away with the idea that getting nonvoters to vote is just turnout.”

I’d argue the use of super delegates to paint Bernie as impossibly behind even when the poll based delegate counts were somewhat close early on played into the idea that “votes don’t matter” for a chunk of these new voters.

 

[afterlife2009]

Okay I had to re-read the Grim piece because some of the parts are very, very concerning. Especially the details of the distributed organizing part. I'm going to post grafs from it. Can the Bernie Sanders Campaign Alter the Course of the Democratic Party?

1. This put a knot in my stomach. So we're not going crazy on tv/online ads because we're paying for a union that has ridiculous clauses and a distributed organizing experiment that could fail. But hey at least we got the highest Q4 so the campaign could get mad at Neera Tanden online

1.) It creates a hefty burn rate — made more costly by a union contract that is, in line with Sanders’s pro-worker politics, generous relative to other campaigns — which, by December, had contributed to a tight budget heading into Iowa, with the digital campaign putting the squeeze on its small-dollar army, and the campaign tightly restricting spending outside of Iowa. While other campaigns test out gimmicks to get their average donation down to a lower amount, the Sanders campaign is doing everything it can to raise its own average. With an explosive fourth quarter of fundraising — the campaign announced it brought in $34.5 million, with an average donation of $18 — more field staff to work directly with volunteers are on the way.

2.) This is insane lmao okay so I was always wondering why there were so many people at the DC headquarters as a "national field organizer" on twitter. This sounds like Theranos but for social movements. "Yeah our organizing setup is like a pyramid scheme and we're relying on randoms who work at Target but please send us more money. We're unionized and looking forward to doing our experiment on the next overton window Justice Dems progressive in the future. No we won't be producing any TV or online ads for your candidate."

2.) The emphasis on organizing, and the financial dedication to it, hasn’t gone unnoticed by the rest of the campaign. The organizing team takes up a sprawling amount of space in the Washington, D.C., headquarters, a result of the national, distributed strategy requiring, paradoxically, more national staff to coordinate the operation. Volunteers are meant to supplement paid organizers in order to scale the possibilities exponentially, not replace a traditional field program.

3. Look I think some of the polls like Quinnipiac have been garbage but this is the same shyt Owen Jones and the activists from the Labour industrial complex we're saying. "Our ground game is insane!"

3.) Sanders is hoping for a surprise. The path to a victory for him is narrow and requires every ball bouncing his way, but it’s not impossible. “Most pollsters are throwing out anyone in an Iowa poll who says they may not caucus,” Sandberg said. “All of the literature will tell you, you can try to get a young person who’s 18 or in college to vote if they haven’t voted, but if they’re a working-class person, they’ve never voted their entire adult life, they are never going to vote. And so I wouldn’t blame pollsters for saying those people aren’t going to turn out.”

Ryan Grim wrote 10,000 words in this. When Biden wins the primary, Ryan Grim will have a 20,000 word article about "Why The Left Actually Won the Primary". Someone else will write about the importance of the movement. Someone else will write, Beyond Bernie: Why AOCism, Ilhanism, Justice Dems and Sean McElwee can lead our future movement.

Yeah I'm becoming cynical but if these early state polls that come out next week look shaky I'm bout to fire they ass up. We better win Iowa because NH isn't gonna be easy with a four way race + Yang/Tulsi eating into our anti-establishment vote

 

[FAH1223]

Okay I had to re-read the Grim piece because some of the parts are very, very concerning. Especially the details of the distributed organizing part. I'm going to post grafs from it. Can the Bernie Sanders Campaign Alter the Course of the Democratic Party?

1. This put a knot in my stomach. So we're not going crazy on tv/online ads because we're paying for a union that has ridiculous clauses and a distributed organizing experiment that could fail. But hey at least we got the highest Q4 so the campaign could get mad at Neera Tanden online






2.) This is insane lmao okay so I was always wondering why there were so many people at the DC headquarters as a "national field organizer" on twitter. This sounds like Theranos but for social movements. "Yeah our organizing setup is like a pyramid scheme and we're relying on randoms who work at Target but please send us more money. We're unionized and looking forward to doing our experiment on the next overton window Justice Dems progressive in the future. No we won't be producing any TV or online ads for your candidate."



3. Look I think some of the polls like Quinnipiac have been garbage but this is the same shyt Owen Jones and the activists from the Labour industrial complex we're saying. "Our ground game is insane!"




Ryan Grim wrote 10,000 words in this. When Biden wins the primary, Ryan Grim will have a 20,000 word article about "Why The Left Actually Won the Primary". Someone else will write about the importance of the movement. Someone else will write, Beyond Bernie: Why AOCism, Ilhanism, Justice Dems and Sean McElwee can lead our future movement.

Yeah I'm becoming cynical but if these early state polls that come out next week look shaky I'm bout to fire they ass up. We better win Iowa because NH isn't gonna be easy with a four way race + Yang/Tulsi eating into our anti-establishment vote

Yeah I’m getting that Labour Party vibe now too

They admit basically that Bernie can’t win traditional Dem primary voters. So the goal is expand the electorate with non voters.

that’s why this strategy is so risky

 

[afterlife2009]

Yeah I’m getting that Labour Party vibe now too

Here's what our genius distributed organizing team is doing at the DC headquarters when Warren was gaining in the polls -- leaking to the Washington Post and complaining about the use of Amazon
Bernie Sanders staffers rebelled at campaign making purchases from Amazon: report

I know Bernie isn't apart of the DNC machine and that gives Biden/Hillary an advantage but I'm not gonna be happy knowing we lost because the activist industrial complex wanted to line their pockets and do an organizing experiment while everybody else spend the money on tv ads. The Democrats have successfully blocked out lefties for 40 years and we finally get the chance to elect one and we might lose because of the overton window libs/activist industrial complex.

 

[storyteller]

I mentioned it in the last podcast I posted, but I think a BIG aspect of this Bernie campaign is having a more long term strategic perspective. Bringing in new voters, teaching a damned army of activists and organizers, helping people to feel involved and as a part of something...that shyt might not get bernie across the line. But it could mean someone from the Squad or some other progressive in the future does succeed.

The priorities of this campaign stretch to goals that don’t help win right now but could create a really strong coalition that continues to grow. I think the freshest part of that article is seeing the stories of volunteers, interns and newcomers who have already become players working within other organizations. We’re competing with deeply embedded power and interests, changing the game looked like a serious long term strategy. Even at this level, I see the progressive movement as waaaay ahead of where I had thought we’d get up to this point.

 

[FAH1223]

Here's what our genius distributed organizing team is doing at the DC headquarters when Warren was gaining in the polls -- leaking to the Washington Post and complaining about the use of Amazon
Bernie Sanders staffers rebelled at campaign making purchases from Amazon: report

I know Bernie isn't apart of the DNC machine and that gives Biden/Hillary an advantage but I'm not gonna be happy knowing we lost because the activist industrial complex wanted to line their pockets and do an organizing experiment while everybody else spend the money on tv ads. The Democrats have successfully blocked out lefties for 40 years and we finally get the chance to elect one and we might lose because of the overton window libs/activist industrial complex.

Well to be fair they are spending $30M on ads for the early states and California/Super Tuesday.

Bernie is on the airwaves right now in IA and NH since October

 

[afterlife2009]

I mentioned it in the last podcast I posted, but I think a BIG aspect of this Bernie campaign is having a more long term strategic perspective. Bringing in new voters, teaching a damned army of activists and organizers, helping people to feel involved and as a part of something...that shyt might not get bernie across the line. But it could mean someone from the Squad or some other progressive in the future does succeed.

The priorities of this campaign stretch to goals that don’t help win right now but could create a really strong coalition that continues to grow. I think the freshest part of that article is seeing the stories of volunteers, interns and newcomers who have already become players working within other organizations. We’re competing with deeply embedded power and interests, changing the game looked like a serious long term strategy. Even at this level, I see the progressive movement as waaaay ahead of where I had thought we’d get up to this point.

I agree somewhat but here's where I disagree. I think we were always headed down a path of hyper polarized liberalism after Hillary but Bernie re-directed course. We are still dealing with the effects of that bipolar primary where the professional left and working class left teamed up vs Hillary. The activist wing split between Bernie/Hillary because Hillary was so awful.

The activist/professional left journalist crowd prefers Lizard Warren, Kamala and Castro. They might be "left" but they're not working class left. They rank an entirely different set of issues than the people who support Sanders. This upper-middle class group of professionals and activists like Working Families Party put Warren's apparent superiority on issues of "race and identity" as the key difference over Bernie and ironically this is something white people generally care about.

When you see these activists say, "talk about trans healthcare!" Talk about black women's healthcare!" Make your campaign centered around this but be sure to not actually propose doing anything about it. Bernie doesn't pander to them and proposes the correct solution that doesn't specifically target their identity which is why you see pushback from hyper polarized white liberals. Here's an article by Yglesias in Vox about it. I don't take him seriously but he can write about it because he isn't in these circles. White liberals are embracing progressive racial politics and transforming America

What's happening here is the class composition of the professional left are moving as a bloc and they weight issues like corruption and aesthetics much higher than M4A/labor power. Bernie is a pre neo-liberal class based lefty trying to push his vision against the natural progression of 1990's DLC/Clintonism/Triangulation. I'm not as optimistic as you, this progressive wing and all those orgs like Justice Dems/Sunrise will morph into the Dem party or get crushed for not staying in line. Hyper identity neoliberalism 2.0. A coalition between the working poor and professional class activists/journalists/urbanities won't work. Guess whose interests win out in the end.

Like in five years Ryan Grim/Nathan J Robinson will be the new left's Ezra Klein/Matt Yglesias. All these new lefty outlets/progressive orgs will get careers in the party and write about how we're winning and making moves. And while all this is happening, Dan Crenshaw and Tucker Carlson will be leading the Republican party.


If Bernie loses all future movement for worker rights and will move from the Democrats to the Republicans. I don't make the rules, I just report on them

 

[tru_m.a.c]

I don't agree with that at all. Of course traditional Dems favor Biden over Bernie. They ok'd Iraq and Afghanistan. They ok'd financial deregulation. They ok'd the crime bill. They ok'd the housing crisis. They ok'd the evisceration of unions. They ok'd the current healthcare system.

The whole point of voting for Biden is to excuse your past mistakes.

 

[the cac mamba]

Bernie Sanders staffers rebelled at campaign making purchases from Amazon: report

 

[tru_m.a.c]

Secondly, with respect to the primaries there are 3 major voting obstacles Bernie has to overcome:
- Getting general/presidential election only voters out for the primaries
- Getting the 18/25 year old voters to turnout
- Getting nonvoters to turnout

Each one of these groups presents it's own challenge.

But Iowa is different because the actual caucus process is a clusterfukk. Iowans aren't walking into booths and selecting a candidate:

Rather than going to polls and casting ballots, Iowans gather at a set location in each of Iowa's 1,681 precincts. Typically, these meetings occur in schools, churches, public libraries and even individuals' houses.

Each precinct divides its delegate seats among the candidates in proportion to caucus goers' votes. Participants indicate their support for a particular candidate by standing in a designated area of the caucus site (forming a preference group). An area may also be designated for undecided participants. Then, for roughly 30 minutes, participants try to convince their neighbors to support their candidates. Each preference group might informally deputize a few members to recruit supporters from the other groups and, in particular, from among those undecided. Undecided participants might visit each preference group to ask its members about their candidate.

After 30 minutes, the electioneering is temporarily halted and the supporters for each candidate are counted. At this point, the caucus officials determine which candidates are viable. Depending on the number of county delegates to be elected, the viability threshold is 15% of attendees. For a candidate to receive any delegates from a particular precinct, he or she must have the support of at least the percentage of participants required by the viability threshold. Once viability is determined, participants have roughly another 30 minutes to realign: the supporters of inviable candidates may find a viable candidate to support, join together with supporters of another inviable candidate to secure a delegate for one of the two, or choose to abstain. This realignment is a crucial distinction of caucuses in that (unlike a primary) being a voter's second candidate of choice can help a candidate.

When the voting is closed, a final head count is conducted, and each precinct apportions delegates to the county convention. These numbers are reported to the state party, which counts the total number of delegates for each candidate and reports the results to the media.
Iowa caucuses - Wikipedia

The polls in 2016 had Bernie losing by 3-8 points. He lost by .3% in the closest Iowa Caucus in history.

171,517 people participated in the 2016 Iowa Democratic caucuses. 653,669 Iowans voted for Hillary in the 2016 Presidential election.

In the 2018 midterms, no democrat received more than 160,000 in the primaries.

The question is how do you secure the 49.6% that voted for you in 2016 without losing too much to Biden and Warren. Then, how do you capture the 49.8 that voted for Hillary. Then how do you capture the new voters.

In 2008, 239,000 people participated in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses. I doubt we'll hit that number again, but when it reached that record it was due to first time attendees and people under 30.

 

[YaThreadTrashB!]

So when is Warren dropping outta cause Bernie is fukked if she stays in for awhile

 

[Mook]

This is Bernies time to start pounding against the military Industrial complex. Peace is bipartisan. If Iran hits us back it'll backfire though, but if they don't he can easily crush the rest of the field.

 

[storyteller]

I agree somewhat but here's where I disagree. I think we were always headed down a path of hyper polarized liberalism after Hillary but Bernie re-directed course. We are still dealing with the effects of that bipolar primary where the professional left and working class left teamed up vs Hillary. The activist wing split between Bernie/Hillary because Hillary was so awful.

The activist/professional left journalist crowd prefers Lizard Warren, Kamala and Castro. They might be "left" but they're not working class left. They rank an entirely different set of issues than the people who support Sanders. This upper-middle class group of professionals and activists like Working Families Party put Warren's apparent superiority on issues of "race and identity" as the key difference over Bernie and ironically this is something white people generally care about.

When you see these activists say, "talk about trans healthcare!" Talk about black women's healthcare!" Make your campaign centered around this but be sure to not actually propose doing anything about it. Bernie doesn't pander to them and proposes the correct solution that doesn't specifically target their identity which is why you see pushback from hyper polarized white liberals. Here's an article by Yglesias in Vox about it. I don't take him seriously but he can write about it because he isn't in these circles. White liberals are embracing progressive racial politics and transforming America

What's happening here is the class composition of the professional left are moving as a bloc and they weight issues like corruption and aesthetics much higher than M4A/labor power. Bernie is a pre neo-liberal class based lefty trying to push his vision against the natural progression of 1990's DLC/Clintonism/Triangulation. I'm not as optimistic as you, this progressive wing and all those orgs like Justice Dems/Sunrise will morph into the Dem party or get crushed for not staying in line. Hyper identity neoliberalism 2.0. A coalition between the working poor and professional class activists/journalists/urbanities won't work. Guess whose interests win out in the end.

Like in five years Ryan Grim/Nathan J Robinson will be the new left's Ezra Klein/Matt Yglesias. All these new lefty outlets/progressive orgs will get careers in the party and write about how we're winning and making moves. And while all this is happening, Dan Crenshaw and Tucker Carlson will be leading the Republican party.


If Bernie loses all future movement for worker rights and will move from the Democrats to the Republicans. I don't make the rules, I just report on them

I feel you 100% but I'm still pretty optimistic that this ends up giving progressives a foothold in running where they typically wound up pushing activist angles instead. There will definitely be heads that get scooped up by the machine and there are gonna be a lot of grifters in the game. But I think the more important aspect of this is the sheer number of people being involved, trained and learning. You may lose influential heads, but there won't be such a shortage of people ready to try and take their place. Even looking at the primary opponents this time around, the DNC blocked most traditional options but alternatives started to pop up and offer help. I also think this approach will lead to more long term success down ballot (and I'm thinking all the way down to school boards and the like).