Apparently President Obama’s track record is shaping up as a real asset for Democratic presidential contenders. Associated Press reports, “You would expect in a Democratic primary field when people are crossing a broad ideological spectrum that they might be critical of the incumbent no matter who the incumbent is,” Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake said. “But I think Democrats demonstrated that across the spectrum it’s good to run with the president rather than against him.”
NYT columnist Paul Krugman has the response to GOP disinformation specialists trying to discredit Denmark’s example, which was spotlighted in the first Democratic presidential debate.
Here’s an important lesson for Democratic campaigns to absorb: Generate sharable content. “Successful social-media strategists understand that viral opportunities are fleeting. The window of opportunity often disappears minutes after an event. Successful rapid responses appear to be spontaneous, but most are carefully constructed and planned…Campaigns’ social-media teams should have a strong enough understanding of their candidates key talking points on every issue to successfully pre-write mounds of copy – hundreds of pre-vetted tweets and graphics which only require small tweaks before their timely post. Given Clinton’s vast resources and unparalleled access to the lead strategists and tools that defined Obama’s 2012 campaign, it is no surprise that her campaign employed a top-notch strategy to amplify her message. It is, however, surprising that neither Bernie Sanders nor Martin O’Malley generated shareable content on their Facebook pages during the debate – a huge opportunity squandered…Whenever her campaign tweeted issue specific messaging, it included a shortened URL, which linked to a trackable sign-up page. This will allow the campaign to identify these potential donors and volunteers by the issues that brought them into the campaign and ultimately use that data to buy targeted programmatic advertising buys and send super targeted emails to these voters in the future. More impressively, each link led to an issue specific landing page, thus potentially increasing the user’s engagement and likelihood of signing up. This data-driven approach was pioneered by the Obama campaign and is sure to pay big dividends down the road.” — from Reed Scharff’s “The candidate winning on social media” at CNBC.com.
The Communications Workers of America have launched a “Voting Rights Denied Story Project,” collecting accounts of voter suppression across the U.S. Story and link to reporting form here. I would urge the CWA to collect this testimony from everyone, not just their members, as a much-needed public service.
House of Reps Benghazi committee chair Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, was caught in a false allegation that former Secretary of State Clinton outed a classified source, which the C.I.A. then denied was classified, reports Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times. Committee member Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) explains: “Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this select committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons,” Mr. Cummings said in a letter to Mr. Gowdy. “These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the select committee and the House of Representatives.”
Lawrence Lessig explains the rationale for his presidential candidacy at The Atlantic.
The Clinton campaign clearly places a lot of value in building campaign infrastructure. “Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent more than twice as much as any other presidential candidate on campaign staff, more than three times as much on office space and millions of dollars more on advertising, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.,” report Nicholas Confesssore, Maggie Haberman and Sarah Cohen at The Times.
…while Patrick Healey reports “Bernie Sanders Uses Smaller Crowds to Push Back Against ‘Radical’ Label,” also at The Times.
Not much good cam come from this — unless some of the proceeds benefit good causes.
