I touched on this briefly in the news links yesterday, but a much clearer picture is emerging that the current focus on the gun issue is hurting Dems on the generic ballot. Also, this from the WaPo:
 The survey shows the GOP making a more pronounced shift among white voters, who now prefer Republicans by a 14-point margin over Democrats, up from five points in January. Republicans lead by 60 percent to 31 percent among white voters without college degrees, slightly larger than an 18-point GOP advantage three months ago.
White voters without college degrees are responsible for closing the gap? Gee whiz…. what issue could that demographic possibly care about that could account for this? I can’t imagine.
After watching some of the Facebook hearings with Zuckerberg, it became apparent to me we won’t be getting any regulation of Silicon Valley that it isn’t OK with. None of the lawmakers have any idea how any of this stuff works, and they’ll be ripe for regulatory capture.
Social media makes astroturfing a lot more effective, and you don’t even need a lot of money to do it. Lawmakers weren’t prepared, and it’s a new world they have no understanding of. There are Republicans who fell pretty readily for Bloomberg’s narrative post Parkland. Those Republicans, like Phil Scott in Vermont, need to be punished electorally for their transgressions. There are a number of Florida Republicans in that boat too. But we will have to pick our battles carefully.
Social media is a bag of caltrops, razor sharp and smeared with poison. (And feces)
Even with the site operators’ thumbs on the scales – they can interfere with the big noises, but they can’t stop samizdat usage of their networks. And every time they do try and disrupt the big noises, they remind everyone of their oppression.
Trump played the Social Media game better than anyone before him, including Obama. Arguably he still plays it better than his opponents, including the social media owners. He knows how to get the clicks, and the clicks are what matter.
Can anyone else succeed at the same level without using his playbook? I haven’t an earthly.
Re: social media, public sentiment, etc: heartened to see that Apple’s support of the 1st Amendment has kept them from joining the hi-tech 2nd Amendment lynch mob.
While we can’t count them as friends of the 2nd Amendment, they still respect traditional American norms sufficiently to provide us with breathing room.
For now.
Too often people think social media shows which way the wind is blowing. Except only hard core people participate in political debates there. Its easy to get into a bubble and think “this is how the US is”. But there are large swaths of people who aren’t on there at all, including youths.
We can all be Pauline Kael now, to quote a much better wordsmith than I.
This all bothers me. Half the time they look down on those ‘white voters without college degrees.’ Yet that is basically half the middle class or more, all the blue collar workers, most of the farmers, and the bulk of the military enlisted. People just don’t seem to understand whom they are degrading half the time in the media.