Thread by @AlexandraErin

This is honestly the short thread of the day, as far as I'm concerned. This is it, right here. The answer to Stephens and all the rest.

https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1145148605927493633

And... yeah, this, too.

And the thing is? The Left seems to be very eager to believe that the Democrats are who they should destroy, and then with Democrats out of the way, they'll easily overwhelm the Republicans.

And, this is backwards. 100% backwards

https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1145150181937229824

If we got consistent high turn out and got government representing the actual political and demographic makeup of this country (which is blue), the Republican Party would die. Completely.

And at that point, in most parts of the country, you can run lefty candidates and it's a contest between them and Democrats. Democrats are the right-wing party at that point.

The Republican Party is consolidating power because it sees its own obsolescence, its demographic marginalization, and it knows it's going to be a minority permanent party so it acts to seize permanent minority rule.

And that makes it vulnerable, in a way that the Democratic Party isn't. It's teetering on a precipice. We could shove it over the brink. We could shove it all the way over the edge.

But, no. While the Democrats are convinced to try to reach "three coal miners", as @courtneymilan put it, those to the left are convinced the Democrats are all that stops them from winning on the national stage and must be destroyed.

@courtneymilan It's the same fallacy whereby Bernie Sanders is convinced that even if he can't overcome ordinary politicking in a primary, he would prevail in the way more actually rigged general election.

@courtneymilan "But he's more popular!"

Right.

And so is the Democratic Party.

The Republicans don't win based on popularity. They focus on winning in spite of it.

@courtneymilan Turnout, turnout, turnout. That's how we win. Ground game... okay, I saw someone talking about ground game on here and someone chimed in to say "Is that still true? Trump won without one."

Yeah. Because GOP can't win on turnout.

@courtneymilan President Obama had a broader, bigger, deeper ground game than Hillary Clinton did. And Clinton had a bigger one than Donald, easily

And Trump still wound up taking power.

@courtneymilan This doesn't prove ground game is irrelevant. He would have seized the prize more easily if Clinton hadn't had a ground game, and might have been beaten if she'd had a better one.

@courtneymilan The GOP has a limit to how much their ground game matters because past a certain point, turnout only hurts them. Trump's campaign substituted a data driven ad campaign actually focused on disinformation and suppression.

@courtneymilan Trump's "ground game" wasn't to turn out the vote, it was to counter Democratic efforts to turn out the vote. Because they actually understand this, as Milan pointed out.

@courtneymilan The worst response I see when we talk about GOP dirty tricks is, "So you're telling me it's all rigged but you're also saying I should vote anyway? Pass, what's the point?"

But that's part of it. That right there. That's their plan. You're doing what they want youto.

@courtneymilan They want you to feel like there is no point, like there's no hope, like there's no help. For every vote they physically suppress, there are ten more people who just don't bother. That's a win. A dividend of fear and despair.

@courtneymilan We are not headed for a fair election. Not anything close to one. Probably the worst of my lifetime.

Doesn't mean we can't win it. We definitely won't if we don't try, though, and that's what the GOP counts on.

@courtneymilan Honestly, yeah. Scott Adams explained on his blog, back before the 2016 election, that his plan for helping Trump win consisted not of telling people to vote for him but just loudly expressing how pointless it all seems.

https://twitter.com/dappergander/status/1145167597622779905

@courtneymilan And this is the thing! This thing is the thing. The thing, it is this. For all that Bret Stephens talks about "ordinary people" like they're red state racist rust belters, these guys *know* that this country skews blue and at least likes to think of itself as decent.

@courtneymilan They know that "ordinary people" have some empathy and recoil from raw cruelty (when it's not made palatable to them somehow).

@courtneymilan And so while the digital arm of Trump's campaign of despair does use incredibly sensitive data targeting, the everyday "ops" are far more broadly targeted.

@courtneymilan The fewer people who vote, the more easily they can control the outcome. The fewer people who vote, the more the people they *prevent* from voting count, the more any votes that get changed count, the more their own votes count.

@courtneymilan There is not a solid red state in this country. Whatever state you're thinking of... nope. It's got deep blue pockets and every election it could be a serious battlefield. They use gerrymandering and voter suppression to change that...

@courtneymilan ...and use psychological ops to obscure that this is what they're doing. Call something a red state and half of us are ready to abandon it, even if they're holding onto it by their fingernails. By the skin of their teeth.

@courtneymilan The more people here in the US vote, the more progressive candidates and policies will win.

If we can internalize that, if we can mobilize on that, if we can use that... then we can win so hard the GOP dies.

And then let people choose between different visions of progress.