GlacialTurtle

How did the Harris campaign fumble its messaging on cost-of-living issues, and why did they struggle to convince financially-stressed voters that the Democratic ticket was on its side? Many of the Harris campaign’s brain trust had spent years in corporate consulting, facilitating access for CEOs, and some brought deep corporate networks to their advisory roles atop the presidential bid. Looking at the Harris campaign’s senior strategists sheds some light on the campaign’s trouble connecting with working-class voters—for example, its unwillingness to more clearly identify the forces, like billionaires and large corporations, standing in the way of populist policies.

One leader of the Harris campaign was Democratic strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon, who stayed on as campaign chair from the Biden campaign, having previously served in that role in the president’s 2020 run. She moved from the White House to lead the Biden campaign in January 2024. Soon after Biden dropped out of the race in July, she was joined by Democratic consultant Stephanie Cutter, with her one of the founding partners of consulting firm Precision Strategies.Two other figures in campaign leadership were senior adviser David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager in 2008 who later worked as a policy and strategy executive at Uber, and Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and Uber’s chief legal counsel.

[...]

David Plouffe officially came aboard the Harris campaign in early August as senior adviser, reassessing the operation handed over by the Biden team. After managing Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and serving as a senior adviser to the president from 2011 to 2013, Plouffe joined Uber, where he worked as senior vice president of policy and strategy from August 2014 to January 2017. His responsibilities included harnessing his digital skills and political network to help the company gain access in cities where the company squared off against regulators. Plouffe was fined $90,000 in 2017 by the Chicago Board of Ethics for lobbying former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in favor of airport pickups by the ride-sharing company without registering as a lobbyist, and in 2022 he did not respond to questions from The Guardian about whether he had knowledge of a “kill switch” that could hide access to sensitive data after French regulators raided company offices.

[...]

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Harris adviser Tony West was named by an anonymous Biden aide as steering the campaign away from sharp criticism of corporate power, angling toward the approval of big business. West has worked as senior vice president, chief legal officer, and corporate secretary for Uber since November 2017, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2023, his compensation reached $10.4 million, composed of $7 million in stock and $3.3 million in cash, according to a Bloomberg Law review of company financials. West’s stock holdings in the company reportedly totaled about $14.7 million as of March. Before joining Uber, West was the general counsel, corporate secretary, and EVP of public policy and government affairs for PepsiCo for over three years, a role that had him travel to Saudi Arabia to discuss a potential sugar tax.

In 2019 and 2020, Uber and Lyft were at the forefront of a $200 million campaign supporting a ballot initiative, known as Prop 22, to protect their ability to classify rideshare drivers and other workers as independent contractors in California, as opposed to employees who would be eligible for benefits and other labor protections. According to the New York Times, West’s efforts on behalf of Uber encompassed negotiating with unions, legislators, and aides to Gov. Gavin Newsom on a compromise measure that was fiercely opposed by state labor groups. After massive influence spending by Uber, the measure was adopted by voters, and this year was upheld by California’s Supreme Court. At the federal level, Uber belongs to a coalition suing the Department of Labor over a rule on independent contractor status.

[...]

Campaign memos from October, first reported by the Washington Post, show the largest pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward, pointing out an opportunity for the Harris campaign to juice spending behind a “high-performing” ad with a script that leads with Harris saying, “I get it. The cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high. So here's what we're gonna do about it.” The ad saw little airtime, the New York Times wrote.

In the November contest, working-class voters went 63% for Trump, according to an NBC News exit poll, compared with their leaning Democratic in 2008. Trump’s gains among Hispanic and working class-voters, especially in seven battleground states where Harris slightly underperformed compared with Biden in 2020, were plenty to deliver him the Electoral College, and wider trends like lower turnout for Harris helped Trump win the popular vote. Harris’ campaign time spent with Liz Cheney ended up losing ground to Trump compared with the 2020 election—the share of self-described conservatives voting for Biden in 2020 was 14%, versus just 9% for Harris this year, according to NBC News exit polls.

Really weird coincidence that a bunch of consultants and campaign managers that are part of the revolving door between regulation, politics and business would want to move away from messaging about the 1% and corporate greed and towards obsessively targeting anti-Trump republicans with people no one cares about like Liz Cheney.

The inherent assumption in “big computer” socialism is that the problems in the Soviet system of planning were not insurmountable, and other alternative planning systems, like the brief Cybersyn experiment in Chile show a way forward. Indeed, there was a glimmer of this possibility in the USSR. Faced with a stagnating economy in the 60s, it was clear to many that the Soviet planning system needed reforms. The road taken was that of the Kosygin-Lieberman 1965 reforms which introduced some market mechanisms, such as using profitability and sales as the two key indicators of enterprise success. These substituted the old Stalinist principle of “business bookkeeping”, where enterprises had to meet planners’ expectations within a system of fixed prices for inputs/outputs, causing perverse incentives such as making badly-made surpluses or increases in product weight as a net positive for the enterprise.

However, there was another option to the introduction of some market mechanisms in the economy: the road of using the available computing technology to help the planners plan and eliminate the perverse incentives. This was the main idea of Victor Glushkov, and his OGAS system. OGAS was not just “the Soviet internet” as it has sometimes been referred to; in its original form, it was supposed to be a system for radically modifying the planning systems of the economy. The original idea of OGAS was never implemented. Instead, it was downgraded and gutted to the point it became a ghost of itself, failing to provide a line of flight for the creation of a new economy. However, the principles behind it still hold, and can guide us in thinking about what shape the future can take. It is in this context that we present a short biography of Victor Gluskhov and the Soviet attempt at having a “big computer” plan its economy.

A very good look at the severe problems with how certain campaigns are run, the way certain people just fail upwards in the Democratic party, and the huge gap that can exist between media impact/prevalence and actual on the ground reality.

Also a weirdo 21 year old organising a campaign complaining about communism and usual signs of liberals sticking their head in the sand because anything that might critique them is automatically "helping [Republican opponent]".

While Cruz underperformed Trump in counties across the state, Allred also underperformed in almost all of the state’s most populous counties—most of which already swing Democratic—and barely won more than Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 total. The loss was so bad that Texas’s longtime Democratic Party chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, stepped down—but not before he partly blamed Democrats’ loss on the party’s support for trans rights.

Texas Democrats perennially claim to be on the brink of turning the state blue, but this latest beatdown ought to be the first that yields a true reckoning with why the party continually disappoints in elections in a state which, the party sages tell us, demographically ought to be shifting to their advantage. But given the recent tenor from the party’s centrist wing, from Hinojosa down to his Gen Z heirs apparent, the lesson of Allred’s loss—that no amount of money or online clout can paper over a candidate’s weaknesses—could just as easily fall on deaf ears.

[...]

In his concession speech last week, Allred stumbled through a Winston Churchill quote: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others.” It took courage, he said, for him and his supporters to “participate in an American election,” despite the odds against them. Yet Allred’s strategy reeked of cowardice. Mirroring the Harris campaign, Allred ran to the right on the border and threw trans people under the bus. Counter to Harris, Allred tried differentiating himself from Biden, even voting to condemn his “open-borders policies.” It wasn’t enough.

The Democratic Party prefers candidates—particularly in red states—who can raise a lot of money quickly. Allred visited just 34 of Texas’s 254 counties, signaling an aversion to public confrontation, but spent a mind-boggling $57.75 million on advertising and marketing to make up for it. How? He relied heavily on donation centers in other states, particularly the suburbs of Washington, D.C., receiving far fewer small-dollar donations in-state and leaning on political action committees to make up the difference. When journalists and friendly critics pointed out the obvious risks to this strategy, Monique Alcala, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said on X that they were “spreading misinformation” and should “please—sit down.”* As Brandon Rottinghaus told Texas Monthly, “Beto worked from the bottom up, and Allred worked from the top down.”

As early as the primary, fellow Texas Democrats were ringing alarm bells about a wayward campaign. But online, Allred’s team seemed more interested in squashing intraparty dissent than winning in November. After Jen Ramos, a member of the Texas Democratic Party’s executive committee, told The Texas Tribune in August that Allred was taking the party’s liberal base for granted, “a group of influencers and organizers went out of their way to discredit me,” Ramos told me, adding that she was accused of “aiding and abetting Ted Cruz.”

Olivia Julianna, a 21-year-old influencer who spoke at this year’s Democratic National Convention and was advising the Allred campaign on “youth voter turnout,” took a similar line to Alcala, writing on X in the wake of the Tribune article: “Anyone saying Colin Allred hasn’t intentionally engaged the base or traveled the state is spreading misinformation and frankly helping Ted Cruz’s campaign divide the Democratic Party.” Since last week’s election, Julianna has been ranting online against “communism,” as if a tiny ideological milieu in the U.S.—let alone Texas—played a major role in their loss.

[...]

Meanwhile, Allred’s outreach to farmers, who make up 14 percent of the state’s workforce—and more than 12 percent of the U.S. total, by far the most of any state—was sporadic at best. Clayton Tucker, a rancher and chair of the Lampasas Democratic Party (based in a 712-square-mile county with a population of fewer than 24,000), said between the crowded Democratic primary and Election Day, there was “quite a dry spell” in communication. Tucker lobbied hard for Allred to appear before farmers and lay out his vision. Finally, in October, weeks away from the election, Allred joined Tucker in Lubbock, a college town just below the Panhandle, for a small roundtable to address their concerns. “That’s important work,” Tucker ceded, “but it needed to be more at scale.”

[...]

The more cynical among us might view this as a racket. Consider the case of Isaiah Martin, a centrist Gen Z Houstonian and friend of Julianna’s who briefly ran for Congress. In September 2023, he posted a single ad that went viral, landing him on MSNBC to talk about his vision for the country. He acquired Annika Albrecht, who previously worked for Blue Dog Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, as his campaign manager, raised about $400,000 (mostly from donors outside his district), and, a couple months later, unceremoniously dropped out. Despite his electoral face-plant, he became an influencer touring the country for the Harris campaign. The Texas Democratic Party is replete with “organizers” such as these, who seem always to fail upward. Other longtime Democrats have pointed to MJ Hegar as a similar problem: She raised all that money, and where is she now? (Far from the limelight, working for Deloitte.)

“There’s not much money to be made when you invest in grassroots,” Tucker told The New Republic. “I think we’re too culturally obsessed with commercials and mailers. Speaking for myself, no mailer or commercial has ever convinced me of anything, but a conversation, whether that’s over the phone or in person, has.”

Some have given up on the “demographics as destiny” argument, in which liberals assumed the changing racial makeup of the state would inevitably mean Democrats would sweep into power. Tucker, for instance, said an emphasis on economic populism is popular in the rural counties that lie devastated, to this day, by Nafta. But even as the demographic myth lies dying, the next one has been born: that young people, armed with technology and social media, will connect with voters to drive a blue wave.

It's literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

Democrats are committed to losing and are turning towards "we gotta be more racist and transphobic".

Seth Moulton also turning on trans people and outright declaring himself transphobic after prior tweets recognising things like Trans Day of Remembrance.

https://x.com/SLCLunk/status/1854597079773200550

"Progressive era has to end" from Elise Jordan. When was there ever one?

https://x.com/LailaAlarian/status/1854151933117788193

Full text of statement:

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right.

Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.

Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.

Today, despite strong opposition from a majority or Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government's all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.

While the big money interests and well paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much political power? Probably not.

In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.

Stay tuned."

To get around paywall: https://archive.is/JY11t or use Firefox's reader mode.

In-depth piece on the use of private detention centres that Biden and Kamala claimed they were going to close. Documents abuse of detainees, detainees being held in solitary confinement as punishment when asking for the paperwork they need to complete their applications, and the massive commercial growth thanks to private prisons converting to become detention centres instead:

But as record numbers of asylum-seekers continued to arrive at the southern border in the past three years, the administration has relied increasingly on privately operated immigration detention centers. The centers that DHS recommended be closed have remained open, continuing to hold thousands of detainees. And even though overall immigrant detention has fallen under Biden from the all-time highs during the Trump administration, the US now concentrates more of its immigrant detainees than ever in privately operated ICE facilities—the same ones Biden vowed to drive out of the sector.

Part of that shift is tied to an executive order he signed less than a week after taking office, one barring the Department of Justice from renewing any contracts with privately contracted prisons and jails. The ban, importantly, didn’t apply to immigrant detainees. Some of those private contractors quickly converted criminal jails into immigrant detention centers, signing new contracts with ICE. In 2021 about 79% of all ICE detainees were held in privately run detention centers; by mid-2023 the percentage had jumped to more than 90%, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the South, which absorbed much of the shifts in detention flows, the portion was even greater. In Louisiana, for example, about 97% of detainees are now overseen by private companies. Such shifts have helped some of America’s largest private prison contractors rake in more revenue during the Biden administration than ever.

[...]

Decker’s organization is part of a coalition that has conducted more than 6,000 interviews with detainees inside the nine Louisiana detention centers since 2022. They’ve compiled stories of beatings, sexual assaults and attacks with pepper spray and tear gas. Detainees reported being shackled in five-point restraints for as long as 26 hours, unable to eat or use the restroom, and left with cuts on their wrists and legs. They described conditions inside the centers that included rat infestations, black mold, leaking ceilings and worm-infested food. “The pattern repeated especially in the privately run facilities is that the companies are actually profiting by offering substandard quality of food, clothing and medical care,” Decker says. “Less than the bare minimum.”

[...]

But in 2021 the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights division conducted an investigation into allegations of abuse at Winn. The subsequent DHS report, published that November, raised “serious concerns” about substandard conditions, inappropriate use of force by staff and numerous “serious medical and mental health concerns.” A DHS memo written a month later recommended that Winn “be closed or drawn down” and that ICE immediately “discontinue placing detainees at Winn until the identified culture and conditions that can lead to abuse, mistreatment, and discrimination toward detainees are corrected.”

But Winn never closed. When ICE’s five-year contract for the facility expired this May, the Biden administration renewed it. The precise terms of the deal haven’t yet been made public, but Winn continues to hold hundreds of detainees.

ICE and the White House didn’t respond to questions for this story. But the agency has previously defended conditions in all of its facilities by declaring that it “is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody.” It has emphasized that it uses “multi-layered inspections, standards, and an oversight program” to continuously review the detention centers to ensure humane treatment as well as comprehensive medical and mental health care.