General point: Stancil's criticism of Democratic strategy is broadly correct and like other people who share it, it's always telling that the counter-arguments rarely address the core point about actions and demands driving salience (rather than e.g. messaging or shallow media tactics / stunts).
You don’t have to do anything crazy. Just respond the way politicians respond to every single other politician caught in a severe scandal, from George Santos to Al Franken to Bob Menendez: insist over and over that he leave politics and not seek election. Literally just apply the normal standard
Specific point: You can't scientifically A / B test this criticism the same way you can with narrow tactics like ads, mailers or email subject lines.
The universe where Durbin is roasting Clarence Thomas and holding repeated anti-corruption hearings demanding he resigns can't be created in a lab.
Even more specifically, operatives are drowning in data about how our programs perform, but once people stop responding to our programming they kind of disappear form our data, e.g. all the otherwise engaged people who stop subscribing to political emails and texts because they don't like spam.
turning political contributions into a guaranteed ticket to endless, un-opt-outable spam was such a mistake. i delete all the emails and texts unopened in hopes of slowing it down. why punish people for donating??
At Swing Left in 2018, we were splitting donations among various House races so had bespoke agreements with candidate committees to NOT spam donors who came in through our work otherwise they would get like 20+ tracks of campaign emails from thoughtless email list ingestion.
i’ve been a monthly donor to swing left for years via act blue. didn’t turn the donation off but the fact that act blue does not have a centralized opt out really pissed me off. they insist you let each campaign spam you and then you can unsubscribe from that one campaign
i finally set email filters and now i don’t even get emails from the campaigns i did intentionally support. no way to keep the baby without all the frigging bath water
A lot of operatives add "+fillertext" to their Gmail handle when signing up to 1) aid in filtering 2) deduce which campaigns are buying / selling lists from other campaigns.
