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Lara Putnam Profile picture
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18 Dec, 11 tweets, 4 min read
I feel I need to mention periodically the size of the gap btwn center-to-left political discourse, still debating Dem messaging & activists' slogans... & the reality of our actually-existing public sphere, where a shared FoxNews item re Fauci begging for caution over Xmas elicits
This is from a public, nominally non-political community Fb group in SWPA with over 50,000 members. It's lost cats & plumber recs & holiday charity drives. & this
I'm not cherry-picking replies here. 40+ people commented after the FoxNews item with Fauci urging caution over COVID was posted last night, and it's this all the way down
Seems like there's lots of reason to think the same factors that distorted political polling have been distorting opinion polling about coronavirus response, which is being experienced by so many through an intensely political frame
I worry that well-meaning efforts to analyze eg unexpected differential voter turnout [🙋‍♀️] which don't acknowledge this👇 as the world in which many? most? Pennsylvanians are living in 2020: are like chatter re deckchair positioning with icy water already filling 7/8 of the ship
There was a single brave soul on the thread [name redacted in purple below] trying to push back against explicitly false info: & getting zero traction
Purple-redacted-man is an absolute HERO. Stays calm. Respectful. Keeps engaging. But clearly *totally* ineffective in puncturing the seamless system of authorities/claims/frames that have been pushing & reinforcing COVID-denial & anti-Fauci/Wolf/Levine/Gates vitriol for months
Discussion of "voter fraud", restaurant limits etc looks similar. The partisan asymmetry of dis/misinfo is a huge barrier to beginning address it, in part b/c non-partisan academics & journalists find it hard to state directly the active role of Republican leaders in driving this
& given everything we know about impacts of time spent engaging in such spaces👇, to encourage unpaid & unprotected concerned citizens to try to push back seems beyond unethical. Would an IRB even approve a study that put participants in that position?
I don't have any answers, but writing/tweeting about electoral politics today without continually mentioning this context feels like its own kind of falsehood 🙃
.@Mlsif pointed me to this interesting piece. The combination of tech-scaled sentry monitoring & structured channels to trigger & guide professional response/active intervention makes sense. Can a non-partisan, public defense system be built on that model? organizingupgrade.com/what-the-elect…

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More from @lara_putnam

Lara Putnam Profile picture
20 Nov
I don't know who needs to hear this but: the feeding frenzy currently underway over address lists to send postcards to voters in Georgia is evidence of a progressive volunteer universe that has been deeply misled about the levers of political change.
If you run a national "progressive" organization and are contributing to this, & not-incidentally driving up your engagement stats & goosing your own fundraising, shame on you. Whatever self-serving tale you're telling yourself about the greater good being advanced: inadequate
👇Both! 1)Very likely entire waste of time (v low impact of technique under best circumstances; least effective in cases of onslaught of other political info as will be here; meaningful targetng impossible given locally-ignorant actors generating lists etc
Read 36 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
18 Nov
1) Always read @dhopkins1776 ! 2) something I've been thinking about writing about, in shorthand tweet: the historical trajectory of PA places means it's impossible to disaggregate the impact of fracking fr the other historical processes that have shaped the communities involved
This is fracking in PA. It's shaped by underlying geology. The same geology that shaped where coal was mined and factories built and immigrants arrived from Europe and labor struggled 150-100 years ago Image
Which shaped where unions were formed & men won decent wages & the New Deal Democratic Party core partnership was created & crested in the 1960s. & the beneficiary communities have been losing ground ever since. & the most fortunate w/in the moving away from the party for 40 ys Image
Read 11 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
15 Nov
Coming soon: some thoughts on PA regions & voting trends (mumbled about this earlier with @4st8 but it's really happening now: New Regions👀)
In part I wanted to work with a relatively more equal population distribution...
In part I wanted to capture the ways river towns along the Susquehanna River in central & northern PA—which tend to be home to colleges, medical ctrs, more young people, more professionals—have an evolving progressive ecosystem that shouldn't be split arbitrarily across regions
Read 14 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
15 Nov
Joe Biden gained more than twice as many votes above Hillary Clinton's total in Forest County, PA (pop. 7320, on a good day) than he did in Philadelphia (pop. 1.5 million)
Biden picked up 89 new votes in Forest county. That was a 14% increase from 2016 in total Democratic presidential vote: exactly in line with other rural counties across the state
possibly not irrelevant?
Read 4 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
7 Nov
Beaver County PA—the setting of a good deal of "How will X play with the [implicitly male] white working class in the Rust Belt?" drive-thru reporting since 2016—today.

(You'll notice many celebrating are not white or not men. But apparently live there too and have votes too!)
Joe Biden's margin was one point better than Hilary Clinton's here. Which may not sound impressive until you realized that Dem vote margin had declined here in **every single election since 1988** by 5-10 points every time. So actually, reversing that is a Big Deal! Image
I tweet a lot about Beaver County: like weirdly a lot, for someone not actually employed by the local chamber of commerce. Nested threads (interspersed with election night ranting, sorry) available here if of interest
Read 8 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
6 Nov
In an election that came down to every last vote, incl. every mail-ins, need to notice some huge efforts that ensured things didn't go wrong: incl massive push to spread updated info re changing-because-lawsuits formal requirements. Eg the banner I copied fr @PragmatcRadical
👇
And @bethanyhallam: Single. Handed. Force.
I kept adding to this thread 👇as a public service, but what resulted is a pretty useful census of all the MANY civic groups & actors, new & old, who worked overtime to get accurate voting info out day after day, in constantly shifting terrain
Read 8 tweets

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