Archive: Year: 2022

There’s been a surge in youth voting since 2018, and if it continues it’s going to upend next week’s US electionAccording to a new national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 40% of 18–29 year olds say they are definitely going to vote in the mid-terms. That is on track to match or maybe even surpass the record level of turnout from young people in 2018.This, more than any other bit of political news I’ve seen in recent weeks, is a big deal.Unlike other national surveys, the Harvard Public Opinion Project focuses solely on querying young voters, which means that it offers more precision about the way they are trending.It should be obvious why this is important,...

Chasing crazy dreams, our would-be Big Tech Emperors are hastening the destruction of any kind of healthy democracyElon Musk as Napoleon, courtesy of Stable DiffusionFive years ago, when Facebook hit two billion global users, no one imagined that we would start referring to the company in the past tense as something that used to matter, with a slumping valuation now lower than Home Depot, the big box store. Nor did anyone think that Twitter, then at the center of whatever was happening right now — Game of Thrones!, @RealDonaldTrump!, Beyonce is pregnant again! — would become the icky plaything of the world’s richest man and on the verge of an employee meltdown.But here we are, watching the creative destructive forces of capitalism (plus some...

Support for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clearHitler rally; Trump rallyIf you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.Miller is one who got away. After cutting his teeth as an Iowa staffer on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, serving as press secretary for Jon Huntsman’s 2012 presidential bid, working for the Republican National Committee as its 2012 liaison to the Mitt Romney campaign, and then...

Door-knocking is the best way to earn votes, but for all their vaunted tech savvy, Democrats’ core tools and voter data are a messSunday I spent the afternoon walking the hills of ex-urban Woodbury, NY, about an hour north of New York City, knocking on doors with about 30 other volunteers from my local Indivisible group, NYCD16-Indivisible, along with a smattering of other grassroots activists from Westchester county. We were there to talk to registered Democrats about several candidates, starting with Tim Ryan, a veteran who is running in the newly redrawn 18th district, along with several of his down-ballot colleagues including James Skoufis, an energetic two-term state senator.It was a gorgeous day to be out and about, vibrant with the...

In Kansas, Idaho, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington, longtime GOP officeholders and business leaders are putting country over party.Reps Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney aren’t the only ones speaking upWhat do these life-long Republicans all have in common?Former governors of Kansas Bill Graves and Mike Hayden. Idaho’s former Gov. Phil Batt, former Attorney General and Idaho Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones and former Secretary of State Ben Ysursa.Former Pennsylvania Congresswoman and state Supreme Court Justice Sandra Schultz Newman Greenwood of Pennsylvania. Michigan business leader Bill Parfet, chairman and CEO of commercial real estate company Northwood Group.Kathy McDonald, vice chair of the Clark County Republican Party in Washington State. Julie Olson, a two-term Republican member of the Clark County Council.They are just a few...

It’s time to artificially limit the supply of content in order to prop up pay rates, the way we did during the Depression for farmersIn 2020, just 184,000 artists made more than $1,000 from uploading their songs to the Spotify platform. That’s out of a much larger universe of more than 3 million artists on the music platform.Spotify is one of the lowest paying streaming sites, offering about 1/3 of a penny per stream. Amazon Music pays 4/10 of a cent. Apple Music pays a penny.To make $1,000 a year, a typical YouTuber needs to get about 1,500 views per day, or more than half a million per year, according to InfluenceMarketingHub.com.And here on Medium, you can earn somewhere between half...

Not all elected officials who are powered by small donors are populist demagogues.If money is the mother’s milk of politics, then the Internet is every politician’s best friend. In 2000, which was arguably the last pre-Internet election, just 777,000 people — one-quarter of one percent of all adult Americans — gave $200 or more to federal candidates, PACs or party committees. In 2020, more than 4.7 million people contributed $200 or more. Millions more give smaller amounts, with roughly 15 million unique donors reported on the Democratic side alone by fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue during that election cycle. (WinRed, the main GOP counter to ActBlue, doesn’t release individual donor data).What happened between 2000 and 2020? First, people learned from using big consumer websites like eBay...

Because savvy consultants like the folks profiting from Marcus Flowers’ doomed campaign against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have figured out how to milk them dry.And I’m flapping my arms to fly to the moon!Whatever else happens on Election Day next month, I can already name some of the biggest winners from this political cycle. They are the Democratic consultants milking the doomed congressional campaign of Marcus Flowers, a veteran who is running against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. As of the end of June, Flowers had raised $10.7 million compared to Greene’s $10.2 million, but don’t let that fool you. He’s going to lose the general election to her. In their respective party primaries, 103,000 Republicans voted (most...

His new documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust isn’t just about the past.The final minutes of the last episode of the new three-part documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, are not about the Holocaust.Instead the filmmakers show us the following montage: the signing of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished the national quotas on immigrants that had kept so many Jews out during World War II (but still imposed restrictions on people from the Americas, the narrator notes), followed by images of diverse groups of newly naturalized citizens smiling at their good fortune, and then old black and white photos of Ku Klux Klan marchers filling the streets of Washington DC in...

How marching as the books you love and want to protect may build the pro-democracy movementEmily Rizzo, WHYYSaturday evening in Doyleston, Pennsylvania, a group of residents put on clunky pasteboard outfits each depicting the cover of a different book: Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. They were out as part of Banned Books Week, a nationwide campaign to insist on the freedom to read that is pushing back against rising efforts to ban books or limit access to them because they address sexual or racial topics in ways that conservatives want to suppress. In addition to marching, organizers also collected dozens...