The massive leftist campaign on social media for the US midterms. By Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection.
The explanation:
CNN contributor and progressive activist Van Jones explained to colleague Kaitlan Collins precisely how Democrats were able to pull off their surreal blowout victory. “Now it can be told,” Jones said with a sly grin on his face.
“How did we win the narrative on affordability? Was it just these nice little Democrats out there running for office and going to — No. The Republicans never figured out what we were doing.
“There’s something called the American Accountability Network. Tens of thousands of online humans — not bots — coordinated to make the affordability message a winning message online.” …
“32.5 million people hit on Instagram every day, 88.8 million hit on Twitter, X every single day. And 185 million hits on Facebook every single day. And they never figured it out.”
“The Republicans could not understand. It wasn’t bots, it was actual human beings. The most effective online organizing campaign … flew under the radar screen.
Driving the kitchen table affordability message and tying that to Democrats on a positive and Republicans on a negative. …
“And what that meant was, everywhere you go, people are talking about affordability.”
Jones noted that “they couldn’t get any traction on these cultural war issues anymore,” but had “figured out how to get around all that.”
Analysis:
I would call [this campaign] manipulative, nefarious, and unscrupulous. However one views it, the operation was so effective that even many Republicans fell for it.
Well aware that the party had nothing real to offer the American people, and desperate to escape the political wilderness they’d inhabited since November 2024, Democrats fabricated a lie and pounded it into voters’ minds ‘every single day.’
While both parties spend big to win the messaging war, there is something deeply cynical about inventing a narrative and then flooding social media with it until repetition does the work that evidence cannot.
Think about how advertisers capture our attention. We don’t have to study every advertisement or consciously weigh every claim. A slogan here, a familiar phrase there, a headline glimpsed while scrolling — repeated often enough, a message can begin to feel like something we already know. Familiarity can pass for credibility.
Now apply that approach to political messaging on a massive and unprecedented scale. …
Strategy:
Democrats have waged similar disinformation campaigns in every election since Donald Trump arrived on the political stage in 2015. From that point forward, elections stopped being about issues for Democrats. Their overriding priority shifted from debating policy to destroying Trump and securing one-party rule in the U.S.
Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the party manufactured the Russian collusion hoax. The ensuing investigations stretched through the 2018 midterms, casting a shadow over the very legitimacy of Trump’s presidency.
The party’s strategy in 2020 was two-fold. As the Twitter Files revealed, Democrats colluded with the FBI, Big Tech, and the legacy media to suppress damaging coverage of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business and then-candidate Joe Biden’s declining cognitive abilities ahead of the election. Simultaneously, they pushed the disingenuous narrative that Trump posed a threat to “our democracy.”
In 2022, affordability actually was a pressing issue. When voters cast their ballots that November, inflation stood at 7.7%, down from its 9.1% peak several months earlier. To divert attention from that reality, Democrats made abortion the centerpiece of their campaign. The Biden FBI also raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August that year.
Well maybe. It still doesn’t explain how the Democrats did much better than the polls, which are biased in their favor. Or how the Republicans lost so decisively despite scoring slightly more votes than in the previous midterms.