This. I'll add that I am getting increasingly frustrated with some Democrats constantly criticizing other Democrats in their "Why didn't we win?" analyses without once questioning if maybe the fact that constant criticism of Democrats might be part of the answer.

https://twitter.com/treeaston/status/1863723187759874474

95% of Dems on this site spent 2021-2024 criticizing Biden for Lofty Reasons & arguing with one another. No one is asking for absolute fealty, but if 95% of the people who are supposed to be Pro-Dem can't find anything but negativity for Dems, maybe we will recruit no new voters

I think we are look at "mass deportation" incorrectly. There are two possibilities:
1. They are committed to this policy due to racism/ideology; do not understand the consequences
2. They are committed to this policy for the above reasons & welcome the consequences It's an important distinction. In the case of #1, perhaps Trump's narcissism or some other factor could win out. In the case of #2, they will truly be trying to break America. Not just the economy, but the military, etc. Perhaps the deportations serve a greater purpose.

I wish this wasn't happening to The New Yorker.

https://twitter.com/emmaogreen/status/1856014004423962685

I really don't like criticizing the New Yorker. I take negative pleasure in it. But I don't know how you get from Jane Meyer's extensive investigations into dark money & right-wing politics & come out w/ "People are on the left think X is happening! But here's Kevin Roberts!"

This analysis is bad & we should generally ignore this type of thing. We've been through it before & we know it's wrong, cf. 2019-2020. Congrats to @agraybee, though for being so influential his twitter name is now a qualifier for a subtype of liberal. If we engage too much as liberals in this type of argument it will become a bigger thing. Do we think this argument is worth having again? If yes, then engage. If you're as fatigued & bored & irritated w/ it as I am, I'd say we should direct our energies elsewhere.

Kamala Harris's campaign made me feel patriotic in a way that I have never felt before. Not blind patriotism. Not nationalism. But a different kind of patriotism. This feeling that there is beauty in our country. I won't let the fact we were out-voted take that away from me. I used to be primarily "America-critical." I'm not anymore. I have seen our coalition. How hard it fights. I have seen so much, including Republicans fighting w/ Harris & demanding nothing in return. We do not lose these things just b/c we were out-voted.

This is just a fact that folks should consider in their counter-factuals: Do you think that KHIVE & other Biden-backers just switched, seamlessly, over night, w/out coordination? No, everyone coordinated. People decided to swallow their grief over Biden & give Joy to Kamala. We all privately made the decision with each other. We didn't talk about it much in public. We didn't share our extreme grief over the treatment of Joe Biden. We shared it in quiet & dedicated ourselves to electing Kamala Harris.

You know what, Ken? That money worked. Where she campaigned, she broke through the misinfo. Where Harris did not campaign, like in DC or NYC, where you're stationed, she did worse. Because she was not there to teach people. What does that tell you about your job performance?

https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/1854965009098351043

Those influencers you mock did the work, @kenvogel & @nytimes. They did the work you didn't do. While you're talking about money, maybe consider that none of you were able to educate the American public about the fact that electing Trump will make them much more poor.

I agree w/ Alex. There are no data to suggest an effect, there. I will say, though, that the conflict provided an extraordinary gateway for manipulating Americans, spreading doom, & weakening the anti-fascist coalition. 10/7 was a gift to Putin.

https://twitter.com/JewishWonk/status/1854156418368069695

I'm not saying he planned it; I'm saying 10/7 provided an opportunity; one Putin has exploited across the globe. If you tweet about Israel/Palestine now, I think you will find a different "atmosphere;" it's b/c the bots that exploited it are gone, now.

In 2016, data-analysts pointed out that there were patterns in district-level polling that indicated weakness for HRC than were anticipated. For ex, NY would never be competitive & the polled districts wouldn't necessarily be either. But there was systematic softness, there The smart analysts, at the time, argued we shouldn't just look at national or even state polling. If national data is +/-3 MOE & more micro-data indicates unexpectedly "small" margins in certain districts, perhaps the micro data should drive us to think of the /-3 aspect of MOE.

I read through the Selzer poll this morning & I wanted to share a few thoughts. First, we won't know whether these estimates are accurate until we have the real outcomes in hand. That said: The data are exceptionally clean. The kind of data you would want to present to colleagues

https://twitter.com/jaselzer/status/1852849040070734157

What do I mean by this? I'm not a political pollster or trained specifically in polling method or analysis. I do, however, have extensive training in research design & analysis w/in my previous discipline: Hearing & Speech Science. Here is what I mean by "the data are clean. ."

Indeed. I'll add that we know, from multiple investigations into Russian interference, that they target democratic societies that have significant "potential for protest." Authoritarians use all that is good about us, against us.

https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1851683815359422875

They also use everything bad about us--like American racism--against us too. You want to divide anti-fascists? Get them to argue with one another over their best instincts for solving America's worst problems. American racism is real & it is horrible. We will fight it as Americans; Not per Putin's "divide & conquer" framework.

The PsychOps on here sometimes shift the intensity of their focus, but the purpose of the focus remains the same: divide Democrats; depress the vote. A major focus of the Ops this week is American Jews. There are trolls claiming to be Jewish shaming Jews for voting for Kamala. A focus on Jews is not new. There have been accounts pretending to be Jewish and/or Israeli on here for months. Leftist, liberal, moderate, conservative. Jewish Americans have frequently been the target of these bots, as have Black Americans.

I can't speak about ground game at this point but, in in broader terms, Kamala Harris is running a strategically masterful campaign, one that I believe is of historical importance. The coalition is diverse, both politically & socially, yet it is also incredibly *cohesive.* Lyz Cheney & other Republicans who are campaigning for Kamala have not asked for policy changes or rhetorical shifts. Abortion rights & LGBTQ rights have not been sacrificed, nor have POC been thrown under the bus. This is to the credit of many, including both Harris & Cheney.

No one can say, for sure, what will happen if Trump is elected; what we can say is this: there is a distinct possibility that, if Trump becomes POTUS, every person who could be of Latino descent will be a target for his BrownShirts, even before Trump enacts other "round-up" plans

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1848757993619231004

Trump is not just saying he will round-up people b/c they are here illegally." He is accusing them of being enemies of the state. Of having their own militia. This comes after accusing Haitians of stealing & eating other people's pets. Trump is creating a pretext for violence.

Journalists: Trump's language has changed significantly; it has changed in ways correlated w/ progressive dementia; I am going to provide you w/ a blue-print that should be easy to follow if you have tools to build language corpora & run analyses. @NYT, @washingtonpost, @CNN. Build 2 corpora of Trump's speech: One for Oct, 2016, One for Oct, 2024. Make sure that "event type" is equally represented in both corpora, e.g. roughly analogous amounts of Trump's language from rallies, town halls, interviews, etc.

Given we're talking about dementia, it is important that the corpora control "time of day" as a variable, meaning the corpora should either both only include evening speech OR should both include the same amount of daytime vs. evening speech.

If it were me, I'd focus on the evening; that will tell you what you need to know & it will also be easier to maximally control the "comparability" of the corpora.

I can't believe how much we've let ourselves be so thoroughly gaslit about Russian interference. We know they're interfering across the globe. If it sounds conspiratorial, take it up with the folks waging asymmetric global informational warfare. There has been 8 years of post-2016 investigations, not just within the United States!, but across the globe, into Russian interference. This website is not well-regulated at all anymore; All of the guardrails are off.

I hope people take what I am about to say very seriously; I am not spouting off. I am speaking as an expert. Trump's linguistic ability has deteriorated over time. The fact that he is in what we could call "linguistic" decline is objective and measurable. This isn't about subjective impressions. It is about systematically observable linguistic and pragmatic changes in the same man's language output, as compared to 8 years ago. Further, these systematic changes are empirically associated with the presence of age-related cognitive decline in the broader population of elderly adults, as has been systematically measured over decades of cognitive scientific research.

I'll add: Democrats, online, are unintentionally feeding the beast. When we are in "disarray," this is reflected in the press. When we are depressed, this gets transferred onto Harris & is interpreted by the press as "bad vibes." We need to regroup. We need to be Joyful Warriors.

https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1846179971896680451

Social media--by design--functions off of negativity. Because we increasingly exist in bubbles, we often find our need for negative input and output. The political press is more in tune w/ liberal twitter than any other kind of twitter. When we sink into negativity, the press reports it.

If you deny or celebrate the murder of Jewish civilians, you are not an advocate for peace. You are an advocate for war. The "Ceasefire" Movement is the most vile thing I've seen my seemingly like-minded compatriots engage in. It has also prolonged the war & ensured more death. 10/7 was a genocidal murder of civilians. 1200 people murdered in hours. That day, Israelis saw blood soaked ground. They heard the taunting of the victims' families. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands. I’m using the dead Jewish woman’s phone to call you now.”

Pay attention to Trump's syntax, as well, as it has become notably & measurably less complex, a sign of possible decline. He doesn't embed clauses within clauses as much as he once did; rather, he speaks in lists, like a child telling a story. "And then X, and then Y, and then Z"

https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/1842931493578166475

There were many reasons why I never believed Biden was in cognitive decline, his intact syntax being one of them. Every speech error Biden made was tied to either articulation of speech sounds or word replacements followed by corrections. All linguistic errors tied to stuttering

No one should spend their time talking about "moving the party left." That ship has not only sailed, but has also been deemed a political failure by the Democratic Party. I say this as someone who said, "Push the party left!" from 2016 & beyond. I'm ambivalent about this. I hate the online left, despite thinking myself a "leftist" before joining this site. I also don't want their causes--causes I still care about--to crash & burn. I hope some semblance of a rational left is able to regroup.