AP: GOP devotes $250M to midterm strategy: Keep House majority

[Virginiá]

https://apnews.com/4d1597e907be4b899f6739b31d19a19a/GOP-devotes-$250M-to-midterm-strategy:-Keep-House-majority

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[Virginiá]

^ I agree, mostly. But I don't think GOTV/organizing is completely useless. I think it needs to be done differently, with more money and resources and a long-term presence, so 365 days a year. The party really needs organic organizing though, not just paid. Paid organizing can only do so much. Unions and other community groups that involve copious numbers of people who interact with their community on a daily basis to help drive voting. In this sense, Democrats letting unions rot is one of the worst mistakes they could have made over the past generation.

What really needs to stop is presidential candidates lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire with TV ads that barely do anything. How many lost elections and different studies do we need to show that it is useless?

I posted a thread about this with a good Atlantic piece about how most campaign tactics do not work:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=273865.0

[Virginiá]

I canvassed a great deal for Clinton's campaign in Florida, and about 90% of the neighborhoods I was sent to were minority communities, where our task was to make sure they either voted or were going to vote, give them materials, etc. We were explicitly told not to try any persuasion.

The fact was that a lot of people I talked to were not enthusiastic about Clinton. I don't think this could be fully fixed by any amount of GOTV or persuasion. She was a bad candidate drowning in scandal, and for all the effort we put in, it was wiped out away by another bad media cycle at the end. Imagine GOTV efforts are like breathing into one of those tubs that tests your lungs. You keep breathing in, raising the ball, you feel you're doing real well, then someone periodically comes along and presses it down and you have to start all over. That was like Clinton's campaign. No matter how hard you worked, you could always expect some new scandal, some new FBI investigation update, something new to happen that would suck the energy right out of everyone.

Obviously it would have been nice to run some persuasion efforts and put a lot more effort into the rust belt, but I'm not totally sure what would have happened. Clinton did put a lot of resources into Pennsylvania if I recall correctly, and she still lost it by more than (or close to) states where she put few resources.

The lesson here is that the party should put up a (mostly) scandal-free candidate perceived to be authentic and who can also energize their supporters.