Quote (inkanddagger @ 5 Nov 2019 13:47)

Literally everyone in the Democratic Party has access to NGP VAN. By design. I just laugh when I hear about these "scandals."

Quote (excellence @ Nov 5 2019 10:51am)

so why is it even an issue which is being highlighted? i'm asking genuinely since you have more insight on this.

Quote (inkanddagger @ 5 Nov 2019 13:57)

Probably because Kamalah isn't a professional political organizer or consultant. She's just a politician. Politicians don't run or manage their campaigns; they do and say what we tell them to do and say. Sometimes they find out about the backend and freak out. That's what this is. Tom Steyer, unlike most of the politicians, is actually familiar with NGP VAN because he regularly manages campaigns that require access to the voter file. In California, we use PDI instead of VAN, but the rest of the country uses VAN. NextGen (Steyer's org) uses both since they run campaigns everywhere.

The NGP VAN is where all of the Democrats log their voter data from canvassing, phone banking, who donated and when, who voted in what election, etc. It exists to help the Party in general. Every Dem consultant in the nation has access to it. Every intern for a Dem in the nation has access to it. Hell, we access it to look up people before we date them lol. It's Tinder for campaign organizers.

Quote (inkanddagger @ 5 Nov 2019 14:07)

Yeah, Kamalah's just mad because she wants to be top bitch from California and Steyer is leeching her already insignificant support.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Nov 5 2019 12:50pm)

you cant inflame something if there are no combustibles around. the mistake by the Kochs was that they thought they could redirect the frustration and anger over obama's policies and the nation's leftward shift (which were already there!!) into a strong anti-tax, small-government movement. simply put, they thought they could turn this anger on the right into energy that gets a Romney-esque figure into the White House.

when that didnt pan out, they thought they could let this energy on the right fizzle out in a losing campaign by a RINO candidate like JEB! bush. instead, Trump came along and tapped directly into the anger that had been there all along, without trying to spin it in an "anti-government"-direction. remember that he specifically ran on not cutting government benefits, on preserving medicare and medicaid and so on. which is also why the "Kochesque" Obamacare repeal attempts by Trump and the GOP in the summer of 2017 were such a political disaster for them. (keep in mind that the biggest topic for Democrats in their 2018 wave was healthcare!)

Quote (Thor123422 @ 5 Nov 2019 23:01)

A fairly reasonable summary. They funded the inflammatory part of the right-wing and eventually lost control

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The only issue I would have is in pointing out trumps run specifically saying he wouldn't cut things like Medicaid and Social Security benefits. On a national scale any candidate promising to cut Medicaid and Social Security is political suicide because of the age of their base. No candidate realistically runs on that platform even if they would love to do it when they are in office

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Nov 5 2019 04:08pm)

To be fair, they really couldnt forsee that, first, a figure like Trump was gonna run at all, and second, that he would be so effective at thrashing the Republican field in the GOP primaries.

Realistically, no one else but him could have pulled off such a "populist insurgency". He was only able to pull it off against all odds because of his skyhigh and preexisting name recognition, his preexisting millions of twitter followers, and because of his mastery of the media and the news cycles. No other populist but him, even if they had been more savvy and competent politicians, would have had these tools at their disposal.

edit:

True, but many republican candidates before him didnt say anything about medicaid or medicare while talking about tax cuts and deficit reduction and cutting government spending in general terms. They basically used to talk around the issue. Trump, on the other hand, very specifically promised not to touch those programs.

Quote (Thor123422 @ 5 Nov 2019 23:35)

I honestly rejected the notion that Trump is doing something that constitutes Mastery of the media, or ever has. He happens to be an archetype that gets a lot of clicks but I really don't see it as him mastering anything.

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Well, yeah because when nobody is talking about cutting it there's not really a point to saying you won't cut it.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Nov 5 2019 04:40pm)

Yeah, well, "mastery" is perhaps the wrong word. He instinctively knows which buttons to press to get media attention, let's put it like that.

But that's my point: those previous Republican candidates were indirectly talking about cutting it, by talking about cutting "government spending" in general terms while never clarifying that they want to leave medicare/medicaid unscathed. Trump visibly broke with that, and imho it helped him in the Rust Belt. And obviously hurt him big time when he broke this campaign promise during the Obamacare repeal attempts.