Price of Vindication: $153

Swedesboro, New Jersey

If you’re new here, then you should know what all my old timers and long termers already know I think:

Mainstream social media (MSSM) are very overrated, in fact, almost a total non-entity, when it comes to the outcomes of major elections. Even now, and very likely for the foreseeable future, elections will hinge on the baby kissing, pavement pounding and door knocking kind of old fashioned time honored factors that existed before the advent of MSSM and even before the advent of the World Wide Web.

The idea that MSSM have a big influence in the outcome of elections got started after 2012, and Baraq Obama ekeing out re-election over Mitt Romney. In the immediate days and weeks after the fact, the Obama campaign’s MSSM data mining operation (DMO) got a whole lot of publicity and the credit for the outcome. In fact, that operation got a lot of publicity even before the election. This was one of the most famous photos of it, and I remember many in our sector in particular making special note of the disproportionately parenthetical constitution of the group, others made hay of the lack of what are now termed BIPOC:

At first, I fell for the hype that Obama’s MSSM DMO made the difference and that it was the wave of the future.

Then, as 2012 turned to 2013, and we got more and better data about who turned out and who voted which way, it turned out that the whole operation was a big failure. Sure, Obama did eke out re-election, and his campaign’s MSSM DMO existed and ran technically smoothly. But the latter didn’t result in the former, it was correlation without causation. The constituent groups that the MSSM DMO were aimed at had lower turnout rates in 2012 delta 2008, and those that did vote swung slightly to Romney. The very groups of people that actually did make a difference were the kinds of people who hardly if ever used Facebook in 2012 and mostly still don’t today: Middle aged and especially elderly black women turning out even higher in 2012 than they did in 2008, which was remarkable because their 2008 turnout rate was already outstanding, (and it’s safe to assume who they voted for), and working middle class whites having a lower turnout rate in 2012 delta 2008 and a slight shift to Obama. Meaning that the Obama campaign thing that worked was the baby kissing, pavement pounding and door knocking to get elderly black women out and to sour WCWs on Romney, not its MSSM DMO.

The more time went on, the more I was convinced that MSSM DMOs were mostly ineffective, and the best they could do is help on the margins on top of already successful margins. It could be the cake’s icing, but never the cake. As of now, I think data games are necessary for any big time serious candidate or party in the First World, but they can never be in lieu of the baby kissing, and won’t matter if the baby kissing flops.

I no more buy the idea that any foreign government’s cheap Facebook ads or the Cambridge Analytica scandal elected Trump in 2016 than I believe that the Obama MSSM DMO helped him win in 2012. Plain words, no matter which side you are on, don’t credit MSSM for winning, and don’t blame it for losing.

However, American conventional wisdom never caught up with my extreme cynicism about this matter, and to this day, it still hasn’t.

The reason why MSSM executives and founders “blame” themselves for Trump winning in 2016 is for much the same reason why an old OG (original gangster) back in the hood is “contrite” about all the bodies he caught back in the day (people he murdered when he was younger and a seriously virile gang banger). People who are genuinely contrite about murdering a lot of people don’t like to talk about what they did, because they don’t want to call inordinate attention to what they did, and wish that everyone else would forget. So it means that the OG isn’t really contrite, he’s low key bragging, using contrition as a front. It’s also why journalists blame journalists for starting the Spanish-American War (“yellow journalism”), because journalists are bragging about the power of journalists and journalism, they want you to think that they have that kind of power. (Real history: The Hearst newspapers had zero responsibility in starting the Spanish-American War. The McKinley White House knew of those papers’ sensationalist coverage of the events in the leadup, and ignored them. Whether or not the SAW should have happened or not we can debate all day long till the cows come home, but we do know that “yellow journalism” didn’t cause it.)

Likewise, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Co. “blame” themselves for electing Trump, not because they’re sorry, but because they’re bragging. They want you to think they and their outfits actually have the power to influence the outcomes of major elections.

This is why one big reason MSSM have been so big on deplatforming in the Trump era and beyond. It’s because they’re so drunk on their own pretend power that they actually think they were preventing Trump from winning re-election and preventing a future analogue of him from winning.

I was hoping for a Trump win last year, by any margin, blowout or slim (and one that was obvious to everyone beyond the margin of fraud). Not only on GP, but also because I thought that’s what it was going to take finally to blow this almost decade long “MSSM Matter to Elections” lie out of the water for good. But, it wasn’t meant to be.

Alas, all I needed to do was wait a year.

For this:

As you can read in the article, Edward Durr spent only $153, almost half of that on Dunkin Donuts. But more importantly than that, his campaign website was a technical disaster, and his social media presences were only mediocre.

In spite of that, it looks like he wound up toppling the second most powerful person in public elected life in New Jersey state government, someone who was seriously touted as a future governor.

How did Durr do it? The article also provides the answer: “…walking door-to-door throughout the district, wearing jeans and tennis shoes and introducing himself to voters.”

Like I said, baby kissing, pavement pounding, door knocking.

Retail politics go Durrrrrrrrrrrrr. (Sorry, it was a slow meatball over the heart of the plate).

True, Durr had a lot of political headwinds, he surely benefited from the incumbent’s complacency and arrogance and sense of self-entitlement and laurel-resting, and he probably couldn’t have pulled this off the last time this district was up for a vote, when the headwinds were a lot different. But, that just continues to prove my point: Factors other than, and beyond the purview of, MSSM.

If enough of the right people are paying enough of the right attention, (and that remains to be seen), then I think I’m finally going to get what I want, which is to say, Official America to come around to my way of thinking.