Close Read

Close Read 21 - We Won! The Competition Over Post-Election Narratives

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 22:59:36 GMT

It’ll be weeks and months till we have a detailed understanding of how people voted, but the hot take factory is operating at full speed and Democrats are already arguing about what happened—including contentiously in the press. I break down some of the arguments from progressive and moderate Democratic House members. So far, the progressives have the data on their side. But let’s ask a bigger question: what if Democrats, after they won, simply acted like it?

> 2020 Popular Vote Tracker (Cook Political Report)
> High turnout in swing state cities helped deliver those states. (The Nation)
> Black Lives Matter uprisings over the summer increased voter registration. (Tom Bonier)
> Democratic members who sponsored Medicare for All and won re-election in swing districts. (Jonathan Cohn)
> 3 out of 4 Democrats who sponsored the Green New Deal in swing districts won re-election. (Earther)
> Centrist Democrats punching left on a caucus call with reporters (Washington Post)
> Nate Cohn explains what went wrong with the polls (New Yorker)
> Messaging guidance for restorative justice and rethinking discipline (Race Class Narrative Action)
> In-depth study of non-voters. (Knight Foundation)

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Close Read - 20 - Customer Service for Democracy w/ Daniela Lapidous

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 22:17:25 GMT

Campaign helpdesks are huge operations—and good ones can empower volunteers to serve as frontline communicators for a campaign. The Sanders 2020 team did a ton of innovation for helpdesks, including building a large volunteer corps and even letting people slide into Sanders's DMs. Daniela Lapidous ran the helpdesk and joins us to discuss what she learned and lessons for other campaigns and causes.

Find Close Read on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon and Google Podcasts. Or subscribe via RSS feed.

> Follow Daniela Lapidous on Twitter (@danielalapidous)
> Bernie 2020 Help Desk: Yes, we actually read your messages and here’s how (Medium)
> TikTok from a grassroots supporter after they got a DM from Sanders (TikTok)

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Close Read - 19 - Bad Faith Arguments Against Majority Rule

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 20:41:37 GMT

As conservatives hustle to confirm a Supreme Court justice during the election, their anti-democratic rhetoric has become increasingly strained. Fundamentally, conservatives are arguing against majority governance and for minority rule, but few are willing to do so directly. We break down how these arguments are playing out and how advocates—and elected officials—can stay grounded in fighting for democracy in our republic.

Find Close Read on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon and Google Podcasts. Or subscribe via RSS feed.

Trump Is An Underdog, But The Electoral College’s Republican Tilt Improves His Chances (Five Thirty Eight)
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (Wikipedia)
Urban vs. suburban vs. rural populations. (Bloomberg News)
An example of the anti-democratic possibilities of the Electoral College (Cook Political Report)
Senate representation on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote (The Atlantic)
Future projections of Senate representation (Washington Post)
Mark Levin threatening to split up Florida and Texas (Twitter)
Sen. Mike Lee accusing Obama of packing a court. (NPR) Sen. Lee reminding us we're not a democracy or a rank democracy.
Federalist 10 by James Madison (Yale Law)
Carissa Byrne Hessick telling Sen. Lee's comms director that he's grossly misrepresenting Federalist 10. (Twitter)
Joe Biden accusing Republicans of court packing. (FNC)

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Close Read - 18 - There is Power in the Inbox w/ Tisya Mavuram

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 17:49:13 GMT

Email is one of the most important tools we have for communicating with supporters. But it often gets a bad rap because donors and volunteers get frustrated with unsolicited messages and gimmicky, high pressure tactics. The good news is that there are tons of high quality email programs out there, too. They integrate with a campaign's grassroots fundraising strategy as well as its volunteering and advocacy work. Tisya Mavuram, a digital organizer with Act on Mass and a former staffer for Elizabeth Warren's presidential run, joins us for this discussion.

> Follow Mavuram on Twitter @tmavuram
> Medium post with the three Warren 2020 emails we discuss.
> ActBlue has become a critical piece of infrastructure for Democratic campaigns and causes (Boston Globe)
> Warren's grassroots donor success was second only to Sanders's (New York Times)
> Warren debating Mike Bloomberg (NBC News)

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Close Read - 17 - How We Talk About Who We Represent

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:53:58 GMT

Pundits, advocates and think tankers spend a lot of time arguing that a majority of Americans are on their side. And conservatives often inflate the popularity of their positions by claiming to represent “half” of all Americans. That's far from the truth. When they can’t do that, they focus on small subsets of voters and try to portray them as important or representative of a much broader set of people. This episode deconstructs two versions of this argument, including a particularly ham-fisted one from Bret Stephens.

> Washington Post interactive map
> Cook Political Report interactive map
> Bret Stephens’s Worst Column Yet? (New Republic)
> The missing 100 million voters (Knight Foundation)
> Projecting eligible voters by state (UVA)
> The case for youth voting rights is better than you think (Medium)
> List of Trump 2016 rallies with attendance stats (Wikipedia)
> 2016 election results in NYC (ABC 7)
> 2016 exit polls (CNN)
> Chuck Schumer’s imaginary couple the Baileys (New Yorker)
> Joe Biden “Come On Man” compilation (Youtube)

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Close Read - 16 - Process is Power w/ Adam Jentleson

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 22:58:25 GMT

Process arguments are important in a democracy. They're about who gets to make decisions, how they make them, and on what timeline. But process arguments can be weaponized to undermine functioning government and distract from the actual issues we care about. Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff for Harry Reid, has a clear-eyed view of how Republican senators have abused the chamber's processes to hold onto power—and what Democrats can do to fight back.

Jentleson's forthcoming book: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy
Jentleson's New York Times oped laying out how Democrats can use process arguments to fight a Supreme Court nomination
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) explaining his opposition to honoring Obama's Supreme Court nomination in the last year of his term, a position he's now had to obviate
Jimmy Stewart's filibuster from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Mark Levin threatening democracy advocates with a good time

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Close Read - 15 - We Are All Digital Organizers in the Markeyverse

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:10:54 GMT

Ed Markey’s primary campaign in Massachusetts broke new ground for digital organizing, especially during a pandemic. Markey's long-standing ties to the youth climate movement—and his innovative campaign structure—meant organizers could work hand-in-hand with grassroots supporters, including Sunrise Movement, to deeply integrate digital media and field operations. We talk to Emma Friend and Paul Bologna, two Markey campaigners who helped make his movement-fueled primary victory possible.

> Don’t Agonize, Organize: The Ed Markey Organizing Model by Rory Clark, Joe Thibodea, and Emma Friend w/ Joe Kent
> Ed Markey’s original desk ad
> Ed Markey’s ad with Sunrise Movement
> We spoke with Emma Friend (@EmmaYourFriend), Director of Distributed Campaigning for Ed Markey’s campaign and Paul Bologna (@pawlbologna), the campaign’s Digital Communications Director and Creative Director
> Special shout out for other members of the Markeyverse: Nicole Bardasz (@nicole_bardasz), Olivia Whitaker (@OliviaTwitaker), Brian Hanley (@brianjhanley), Grace Fernandes (@FernandesGrace), Sean Reardon (@sreardon15), Lauryn Allen (@laurynallen_) > And an additional very special shout out to Ed’s Reply Guys (@edsreplyguys)
> Everyone is a Digital Organizer panel from Blue State

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Close Read - 14 - Narrative in Media and Organizing

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:29:51 GMT

When we talk about “narrative” in political communication we often use the term very broadly. But it has a specific meaning: how campaigns use storytelling to advance an agenda and galvanize more attention in their preferred frame. There are a lot of narrative methods out there that can be useful for political communication. This episode examines two: Randy Olson’s “And, But, Therefore” framework, which has roots in science communication and scriptwriting, and Marshall Ganz’s “story of self, story of us, story of now," which comes to us through grassroots organizing.

Randy Olson’s Houston We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story
Olson discussing the "And, But, Therefore" framework with The Business of Story
Marshall Ganz’s public narrative framework
Barack Obama's 2020 DNC speech and transcript
Bernie Sanders's Iowa rally speech from March 8, 2019

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Close Read - 13 - Strategic Framing of Protests from The Boston Tea Party to Kenosha

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 17:34:11 GMT

Media coverage of protests—from marches to uprisings to street conflict—is incredibly contentious. Protesters themselves attempt to get attention for their demands while advocacy groups, media outlets and policymakers try to both shape and gauge their effects on public opinion. We should think critically about how political actors attempt to use protest coverage while putting the focus back on what protests are actually trying to achieve.

Sources cited in this podcast:

> Full Spectrum Resistance by Aric McBay
> The Whole World is Watching by Tom Gitlin
> Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting by Omar Wasow
> Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide by Matthew Dessem
> It’s time to change the way the media reports on protests. Here are some ideas. by Kendra Pierre-Louis
> M4BL Policy Platform
> Stop Helping Conservatives Spread Propaganda About Protests by Aaron Huertas
> Unrest is not the enemy, fascism is by Kelly Hayes (You can support Hayes and her work on her Patreon page!)

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Close Read - 12 - The Dead End Tactic of Attacking Someone Else's Online Supporters

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 23:28:13 GMT

As social media has played a larger role in driving mainstream campaign coverage, operatives have tried to weaponize online comments to attack rival campaigns, especially in primaries. Rep. Joe Kennedy’s campaign recently tried to do that to Sen. Ed Markey’s campaign, but rather dramatically overstated their case. These tactics exacerbate conflict among volunteers, grassroots donors and voters and fail to address actual policy disagreements in the party as well as the ways in which social media platforms discourage effective political work.

> Joe Kennedy’s campaign attempted to weaponize online commenters against Ed Markey’s campaign.
> The Markey campaign’s response.
> A data scientist analyzed negative sentiments among different candidates’ supporters in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and found little differences among them.
> Ady Barkan’s endorsement of Elizabeth Warren, which encouraged people to pick sides in the primary to build organizing power.
> Kamala Harris Dropped Out, But The #KHive And Stan Culture Aren’t Leaving Politics by Ryan Brooks for Buzzfeed
> White America’s Age-Old, Misguided Obsession With Civility by Thomas J. Sugrue

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Close Read - 11 - Democracy is About More than Voting

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 12:38:19 GMT

Party conventions repeatedly remind viewers to vote, but rhetoric around elections often invokes voting to the exclusion of other forms of political action. A more progressive view of democracy recognizes the limits of voting, from disenfranchisement to the lack of competitive elections for millions of people. Voting is vitally important, but political organizations should ask people to do more, including fostering a deeper commitment to economic democracy and citizen participation in policymaking.

> Rethink Media has done deep research on how people think about voting rights.
> Get Out the Vote by Donald Green and Alan Gerber summarizes the best social science research on how to increase voter turnout.
> More than 6.1 million Americans can’t vote due to felony disenfranchisement laws.
> The case for youth voting rights is probably better than most people think.
> The Gov Lab at NYU studies different ways governments can co-create policy with stakeholders and citizens.
> Ireland has experimented with citizen assemblies for formulating policy with members selected by sortition, like a jury.
> We May Not Have Democracy, But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone is an excellent book by Astra Taylor

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Close Read - 10 - Vanquish the Trolls and Create Better Online Spaces w/ Jay Carmona

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 13:06:31 GMT

With COVID-19, everyone’s going digital. But online organizers have been building communities and driving effective political action for years. Jay Carmona is the founder of Sematonic Strategies and they have deep experience building, sustaining and growing online groups.

We discuss how to vanquish trolls, how to create more effective moderation in our online spaces, and how technology and organizing can scale to win. We also discuss two articles
(linked below) and imagine what a more inclusive, restorative, and effective set of online organizing communities could look like.

> Follow Jay Carmona on Twitter @jaycarmona
> Taming the trolls training for Power Labs by Jay Carmona
> Constructively dealing with trolls in science communication by Aaron Huertas
> Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate by Lili Loofbourow for Slate
> unthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19 by adrienne maree brown

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Close Read - 09 - Direct Action to Save the Post Office

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 19:32:32 GMT

This is a quick breakdown of a direct action I participated in this morning: a wake-up call outside Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's condo in Washington, DC. This episodes covers why direct actions like these are important and features audio from the demonstration and a short interview with one of the organizers. Demonstrations like this will become more common—and are likely to escalate—as threats to the election increase.

Follow ShutdownDC here and on Twitter. Direct action groups like this exist in every city and state. Ask around and find yours! Also check out Protect the Results, a national coalition of progressive groups and unions dedicated to defending election integrity.

For more in-depth discussions of political communication and organizing, subscribe at patreon.com/closeread.

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Close Read - 08 - Scale and Engagement in Political Communication

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 19:24:54 GMT

We spend a lot of time talking about messaging, but not a lot of time talking about how we get messages out there and what we want people to do with them. Scale refers to how large political operations are, both in terms of money and people. Engagement refers to how much time, energy and risk people are willing to take to exercise power for a political cause. We look at scale across campaigns, lobbying groups and think tanks, membership-based groups, media outlets, and protests.

This involves a lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons, but when we look at the orders of magnitude we’re dealing with, it’s clear that the strategic landscape is very complex and that progressive and left insurgents have to find ways to 1) leverage or take over larger institutions and 2) build competing movement-based institutions that can fight for parity among establishment and conservative ones.

Detailed show notes for subscribers below:

Email subscriber to Keystone protests. Becky Bond and Zack Exley wrote about “big organizing” and asking activists to do bigger things.
Climate movement and countermovement size. Robert Brulle at Drexel University has studied the size of the climate movement and the climate countermovement that opposes climate policy. He found that anti-climate interests outspent pro-climate interests on cap-and-trade legislation by about 10:1.
Campaign size. The average state legislative campaign cost about $150,000. The average congressional race winner raises $1.3 million. The average winner of a senate race raises $10.4 million. In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised $973 million while Donald Trump raised $564 million. (These numbers don’t include outside spending.)
Lobbying groups and think tanks. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a major trade group that spent $77 million on lobbying in 2019 and had $175 million in total expenses in 2015, when they were more active fighting Obama. The Heritage Foundation spent $86 million in 2018. The Center for American Progress spent $49.7 million in 2019. The Economic Policy Institute raised about $8 million in 2018. The People’s Policy Project has crowdfunding of more than $7,000 per month.
Membership based groups. Around 30 million people voted in the Democratic primary in 2016 while 28 million voted in the Republican primary. AARP has 38 million members. The NRA says it has about 5 million members, but reporters have had trouble verifying that claim when they dig into it. The SEIU reported 1,893,775 members to the Department of Labor in 2015. The Sierra Club has 750,000 members (but surely has many more email subscribers and followers). The Democratic Socialists of America has 70,000 dues-paying members. The Association of Flight Attendants has 50,000 members.
Media outlets. The Chapo Trap House podcast has 35,000 subscribers and perhaps somewhere between 120,000 to 150,000 downloads per episode. Jacobin has 60,000 subscribers and gets 2 million views per month. Ben Shapiro’s fracking-funded Daily Wire had 28 million visitors in June. Vox had approximately 38 million visitors in June. The New York Times had 390 million visitors in June. (Web traffic numbers are notoriously squishy, but the orders of magnitude differences here are the focus.) Among cable news networks: Fox News Channel recently had 3.6 million viewers per day in primetime, MSNBC had 2 million and CNN had 1.8 million. Meanwhile, the major network news broadcasts had an average combined viewership of 31 million.
Protests. Social scientists have identified 3.5% of the adult population as a benchmark for peaceful protests successfully ousting corrupt leaders or winning major policy change. The 2017 U.S. Women’s March activated 5.6 million people or 1.7% of the total population. The South Korea protests activated 2.3 million people or 4.4% of the population. The recent Black Lives Matter protests involved 15 million to 26 million people, so 4.5% to 8% of the population. The Hong Kong protests activated 2 million people or 27% of the population. The Puerto Rico protests activated 1 million people or 32% of the population.

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Close Read - 07 - How Persuasion Really Works with Anat Shenker-Osorio

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:49:39 GMT

Can you really persuade someone to change their mind? Absolutely. But it’s more complex than you may think. A lot of mainstream media discussions of “persuasion” imagine intellectual giants duking it out in the marketplace of ideas or thoughtful citizens carefully weighing the pros and cons of candidates’ policy platforms. In reality, the people who are persuadable often have mixed thoughts about politics, so effective campaigns bring their preferred messages to the forefront of voters’ minds. That involves things like incessant television ads, but it also involves giving our own base effective messages to share with their networks. We discuss the art (and science!) of persuasion with Anat Shenker-Osorio, who does some incredibly detailed and useful work for progressive campaigns and candidates, including the Race / Class Narrative.

> You can find Anat Shenker-Osorio on Twitter @anatosaurus

> Check out more of her work at ASO Communications, including the Words to Win By podcast.

> The Race / Class Narrative has a variety of resources, including updates related to COVID-19.

> The Lincoln Project’s ads are available on Youtube.

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Close Read - 06 - Constructive Communication in the Carbon Footprint Debate with Kim Cobb

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 19:27:36 GMT

Hypocrisy arguments can trip people up because they try to shift a debate from the policy to the personal. And that's certainly true on climate change. On the one hand, bad faith actors pretend to reject climate policy because prominent climate advocates like Al Gore, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez use airplanes, electricity and food. On the other hand, climate advocates have also advanced a good faith case that personal actions and policy actions to combat climate change helpfully reinforce one another. Scientists often feel caught up in these political back-and-forths, but Dr. Kim Cobb has a different, more constructive approach for discussing her own efforts to cut her carbon footprint, her work on climate solutions, and how she brings her whole self to her public work on the climate crisis.

> You can find Dr. Cobb on Twitter @coralsncaves

> Thanks to Ben and Cosmic Romp for letting me sample "Get Down." Their album Alien Funk is on Spotify.

> This podcast includes two audio clips. One is from a debate between Adam Green, with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and Tucker Carlson on Fox News Channel. The other is from Greta Thunberg's press conference after she got done sailing across the Atlantic Ocean (via PBS).

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Close Read - 05 - Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Rises with Dr. Sarah Myhre

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 15:39:29 GMT

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just gave an incredible speech from the House floor. It was a response to a misogynistic encounter she had with Rep. Ted Yoho, but it was so much more than that; it was a deeply personal and systemic criticism of how patriarchy, racism and other forms of discrimination are used to harm people. And it speaks deeply to what a real apology—and real repair—can look like. I'm joined for this episode by Dr. Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist and justice advocate who has deep insights into public narratives and communication that are well worth your time.

> Dr. Sarah Myhre on Twitter @SarahEMyhre
> Kate Manne on Twitter @Kate_Manne
> Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne
> The Rowan Institute's guide to improving dialogues about justice and equity in climate and science
> Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's full floor speech on C-SPAN

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Close Read - 04 - Framing, Abolition and Reform with Peter Loge

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 20:20:51 GMT

Abolition or reform? It's not just a question of messaging: it’s about framing. For this episode, I spoke to my old professor Peter Loge, one of the smartest political communicators I know. Loge did some foundational framing work that helped dramatically undermine the death penalty in the United States. It’s an example of reframing that worked, but it also had tradeoffs for advocates who had long organized around abolishing it. These same strategic considerations are impacting debates on carceral state abolition and criminal justice reform today, as well as the degree to which racial and environmental justice are integrated into climate policy.

Brief programming note: We're on ITunes / Apple Podcasts, so feel free to subscribe there, too, and give us a review if you feel so inclined.

> Peter Loge (@ploge)
> The Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University (@policommethics)
> Political Communication: Ethics And Theory, book launch event on August 6
> Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Baumgartner and Jones)
> Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police by Mariame Kaba

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Close Read - 03 - Cancel Culture, but for Public Science

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 20:26:36 GMT

I've worked on anti-censorship policies for several years. So amidst a rolling debate about free speech and free inquiry, I wanted to focus some attention back on government censorship of science related to COVID-19. After all, this is a life and death issue for millions of people. My old colleague Dr. Gretchen Goldman joins me for this discussion. She's the research director for the Center for Science & Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and she's studied how censorship happens, how scientists can respond to threats of being censored, fired and reassigned, and the effect that censorship has on public policy.

You can follow Dr. Goldman on Twitter and sign up for the organization's actions and resources here. Anyone can join, but if you're a scientist, please consider joining UCS's Science Network, too.

> UCS's research on the CDC and media censorship of scientists.

> UCS's guide to disinformation about COVID-19.

> Political appointees censoring National Park Service accounts on climate.

> UCS's 2018 survey of federal scientists.

> Science magazine interviewing Dr. Fauci earlier this year.

> Dr. Fauci responding to criticism from the White House in the Atlantic.

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Close Read - 02 - Bad Faith and DC Statehood

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 22:17:52 GMT

A ton of political arguments, especially nowadays, are made in bad faith. It's important to understand how such arguments work in practice and the utility they have for the person making them as well as their audience. When we understand WHY a bad faith argument works, we can address its root function rather than getting stuck in a game of whack-a-mole debunking. In this case, we'll examine some bad faith arguments made to deny people in Washington, DC equal representation under law, including moving the goalposts to a retrocession "solution" no one actually wants, making stuff up about a DC statehood bill, and tooting on a racist dog whistle which is actually a giant klaxon under Tom Cotton's desk.

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Close Read - 01 - How to Cancel Yourself: Open Letter Edition

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 21:44:00 GMT

Building on my essay here about the Harper's letter and what we mean when we actually talk about "open debate." I argue that the organizers and some of the signers were a little sloppy with their process and muddled their message, sometimes in very funny, hypocritical ways.

Please let me know what topics you're interested in for future podcasts.

Pardon the siren in the background, but otherwise would love to hear feedback on audio quality, too!

And if you're looking for an even more specific criticism of "the letter" check out this response from some other academics and writers.

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