Activism

There are 118 posts filed in Activism (this is page 1 of 12).

Follow-up on “How to get the Democratic message out there”

Recently, I wrote a post about an idea of trying to get the @kamalahq social media feeds going again. I took the following actions:

  1. Reached out to the communications contact for my county Democratic committee, sent them a pointer to my post, and asked if there was anything the county committee could do to help. The person wrote me back, said they agreed with my post, and added a link to the post in that week’s newsletter. I waited a few days, but did not get any response. I touched base with the county committee person again, the response was “there are some connected people on the mailing list. I have not written back.
  2. I signed up for a trial of LinkedIn Premium to be able to send directly email to Lauren Kopp (head person of @kamalahq feeds), asking if the feeds might be restarting. No response yet (need to remember to cancel my trial….)
  3. Sent email to the digital director for the Oregon Democratic Party, with the same info I sent to the county party committee. No response yet.

What to do next? I will follow up to the state party office (probably should write the top person) and the county committee (maybe the comms person has some other ideas). I am not surprised by the level of response, but perhaps a second try will get a little farther.

What a difference 161 votes makes

There is a saying that ” your vote makes a difference” or “every vote is important”. In a Oregon House race that just concluded, every vote was, indeed, important.

This happened to be Oregon House District 22, in which I reside. The incumbent, Republican Tracy Cramer, was being challenged by Democrat Lesly Munoz. On November 5th, initial results showed Cramer leading by over 500 votes. However, as votes continued to be processed, Cramer’s lead narrowed. On November 14th, Munoz took the lead by a single vote.

Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, and in addition, Oregon counts votes mailed that are postmarked by Election Day and received within 8 days after Election Day. As a result, my county (Marion County, Oregon) was still receiving valid votes through November 12, and then was continuing to process ballots after that point. so vote totals kept changing.

After all valid ballots had been counted, there were still over 800 ballots for this House district that needed to be “cured” to be considered valid ballots. In general, this meant that there was a signature verification issue, and the ballots were set aside. Marion County then sent letters to all of those registered voters informing them of the problem and told them they had to go to the county elections office to “cure” their vote by 5pm on November 26th. The campaigns and parties also received lists of these voters, and worked to get these voters to cure their ballots. As of November 25th, there were still over 500 ballots not cured, and the last report from Marion County showed Munoz ahead by 149 votes. The final unofficial tally was released by Marion County around 6:00pm on November 26, with Munoz leading Cramer by 161 votes. Yes, in this race, every vote did make a difference.

How to get the Democratic message out there

Recently, Dave Winer has written about how the Democratic Party stops communicating its message when the election is over. His position is that the Republican Party has supporters/surrogates/podcasts/TV networks pushing the Republican message 24/7/365, but that the Democrats are only “on-the-air” during the lead up to an election.

This is not a new message from Dave Winer. He has long voiced the opinion that past Democratic campaigns (Obama in particular, but now Harris as well) shut down the campaign websites they created, lost contact with the voters they organized, and left a void in the Democratic Party organization. See also similar comments from Ken Smith echoing this refrain.

Shortly after the election, Dave Winer put out a request for identifying who was behind the @kamalahq social media feeds, which did a good job of responding to Republican activities during the 2024 presidential campaign, pretty much in real time. Within a few days, he had a name (Lauren Kapp), a link to her LinkedIn site, and a link to one of her TikTok videos, where she said that two staffers and three interns produced the content for these feeds. Based in the frequency of updates, I would say they worked seven days a week keeping the flow of content going.

I think it was great that Dave Winer was able to use his blog and network to find this person. His next steps were a little underwhelming, and I think it is worth taking some time to analyze how the “call to action” could have had more effect. His post of November 19th where he revealed the identity of Lauren Kapp included these words:

“We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web.”

Good statements, but no next action step provided. Also, the use of the “royal we” (“We need to…”) implies that someone needs to take the ball and move it forward, but no effort is made to identify or motivate “them”. If you wanted to try to do something about this communication problem, why stop at identifying the talent and leaving the rest up to “them”? Dave recorded a podcast giving some more detail on how he sees this project, but again, no next step is provided. Also, I think it would be easier for the target audience (“them”) if there was a next step in the post instead of trying to get someone to listen to a podcast that has no action step.

Two days later, Dave Winer followed up on his first post, saying he would contribute $100 to get @kamalahq “back on the air”:

“Let’s get the Dems back on the air before the inauguration. I’ll kick in $100 to get it started, and I’ll tell everyone I know to fund it too. There’s no time to waste.”

A nice offer, but who is going to do something about it? The phrase “when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge” comes to mind. Dave’ earlier version of this post encouraged people to reach out to every Democratic influencer they know about this topic, but it ended up getting revised to “I’ll throw in money when someone else puts it together. Maybe he made some other efforts, but if he did, why not tell us about it?

Before I examine some alternatives, I want to be clear – this is a typical problem of ideas thrown out on the Internet. “Here’s an idea, world – get back to me when you have it implemented”. I am boring down a little deeper on this one because Dave puts out calls like this fairly often, and I think it’s a good idea, but sometimes ideas need help.

Now, what if there were some steps suggested that people could take like:

  1. Reaching out to Lauren Kopp before even making the first post and seeing if she is interested in participating in keeping this news flow going, and if she is, telling us about it. That could provide a spark.
  2. If she is interested, start a GoFundMe or some other crowdfunding vehicle to see if there is other interest.
  3. Reach out to your local Democratic county organization or state organization, provide links to these posts, see if there is interest/support (here is a next step for readers)
  4. Keep banging the drum (Dave says he does this for projects he is promoting)

These are a few ideas of how to help make this idea (getting a prolific social media platform for Democrats going again) a reality again.

SPOILER ALERT: I actually did steps 1 and 3, will post back on what response I get…taking action is key, not just posting ideas on the Internet…

Thoughts on the US 2024 election

I am feeling somewhat better now. Last week, I was suffering from “election depression. On the night of the election, we turned the TV off at 10pm. In the morning, neither my wife nor I wanted to turn the TV on, but we did, and the first words we see are “TRUMP WINS”. Ugh. As I thought about the the past four years, and why did the election end up with a Trump win, the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” came to mind. It was necessary to update the Electoral Count Act, and it was necessary to take actions to have hundreds of lawyers ready to fight frivolous election fraud claims, and it was necessary to build up the elections offices across the US to ensure a free and fair election. But, those things, in and of themselves, were not sufficient to guarantee victory for Kamala Harris. Another phrase that comes to mind is “preparing to fight the last war“. Again, preparations were made to avoid another violent takeover like January 6th, but preparations were not made (or actions taken) to help ensure that Donald Trump would lose the election (fair and square). I am not the person to say what should have been done, or how the Democratic Party should have approached the 2024 election, but the fact that Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote shows that (1) more people wanted Trump than Harris, and (2) all of the weird things that Trump did, all the things he did, the civil and criminal cases against him, did not sway his supporters to vote for Harris.

Nine days after the election, Trump has picked up the rest of the swing states, and Republicans will be in control of the House and Senate – the trifecta. Trump’s cabinet picks so far look like a “clown car from the circus”. His strategy – selecting people who will be totally loyal to him.

For myself, I need a little rest from the election. My wife and I have cut way back on our news consumption. I think our short term plan will be “watch and listen” or “wait and see”.

Completion of the Kamala Campaign Timeline project

With Election Day in the US come and gone, I have completed updates to the Kamala Campaign Timeline website. This site covered the day-by day events of the Harris-Walz campaign from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race through Election Day. Each daily entry contains a link to the CNN daily blog for that day, links to other press coverage of the campaign, and links to videos of campaign events.

Having covered topical events before (see my Portland Protest News site), I was familiar with tracking down stories and links. The CNN daily blog was very helpful as a starting point for finding other coverage. During the development of the site, CNN began to restrict the number of page views to their site, and to reserve content for subscribers. Whenever this happened, I looked for other coverage.

As with the Portland Protest News site, I found it difficult to make time everyday for site updates. Since I was using a static site generator, I was able to catch up and still keep the consecutive date timeline. I have seen some recent comments about creating news streams. I have created a few streams myself, but aggregating feeds still depends on someone creating those feeds. Kamala Campaign Timeline was such a site (although the template did not support generation of a RSS feed – darn!). To me, the best site of this kind is Political Wire. However, it takes time to sift through the news, pick out the stories of note, and post cogent summaries/quotes, and to do it day in and day out. The DailyKos site is probably the best known Democratic/Progressive news site, and they have a staff supporting their efforts. Similarly, keeping the @kamalahq Threads account going took some effort, and someone, somewhere was paying for that. So, my opinion is that it is a tough job for a single person to carry that kind of load, but maybe there is someone out there who can handle it, or organize it (like Election Law Blog has a set of guest editors).

Anyway, I enjoyed having another shot at creating a daily news site, and hope that this serves as a historical record of a unique campaign. I’m just sorry that Harris and Walz didn’t win.