I have been saying this for years, but: the Democratic Party — as a single organization, or any campaign, candidate, or PAC within it — is not prepared for or capable of defending itself against the disinformation war currently underway. It is now escalating by orders of magnitude.
It isn’t that they don’t want to be, but rather that, as an institution, they refuse to live in the world as it actually is. They act like the old rules apply and refuse to update their approach or operations, either in strategy or tactic.
There are tons of people who know more than I do about law or impeachment and they are cataloguing their frustrations. Those shortcomings require elected officials to have the political will to act and change, and there isn’t much operatives or activists can do directly.
However: campaigns, candidates, operatives, and activists can fight a real fight against disinformation and do it in a way that can affect real change, and I am hopeful that as this stuff plays out on the national stage, downballot candidates and campaign managers take note.
It requires new and intentional thinking about communications and media, budgeting and strategy, and it requires a real understanding of what the fight actually is. It isn’t just winning a race. It is building an audience, a constituency that is resilient against disinformation.
It will, in short, require processes and people that work to actively define objective reality, and then defend that definition all the way down to the ground. And it will demand that candidates and campaigns never ever throw up their hands and say “There’s nothing we can do.”
Because, fuck, of course there is. But you have to be willing to do that work, and spend the money and the time to do that work, which reflects how the world really is.
The apocalypse already happened.
If you’re in a congressional race and someone is telling you to keep your powder dry and prioritize TV 11 months from now against a GOP opponent that will outraise you by 2–3x, fire that person. You are already behind.
If you expect that telling the truth will be enough, and you don’t have a plan for when someone takes some spectacular, awful event in your district and connects you to it with some invented lie and it takes off, you’re already behind.
If you don’t have a plan for when your opponent mercilessly works the refs and pushes disinformation about you to the press, you’re already behind. And if you’re not at least thinking about these things and preparing to raise and spend money on them — you’re in trouble.
OPSEC and cybersecurity matter and should be foregone conclusions to mitigate digital risk. Really earning an audience by building it, and starting from a place of acquisition and persuasion now, early as hell — that ought to be a baseline thing, too. We don’t have a choice.
It’s an unfair fight. It is especially an unfair fight if you play by the rules and frameworks that your opponent is choosing to ignore, because they can.
It should be beyond obvious to all of us by now that the bad guys think there’s no consequences waiting for them.
We should not do bad guy shit. We should tell the truth. This is more true now than it has ever been. But we must not allow ourselves to be hobbled by old ideas and dead thinking and fear.
And the reason for that is that the fight isn’t just winning an election. It is fighting the fight that comes afterward when the outcome of the election is unclear.
This stuff with Ukraine shows you where the boundaries are: totally gone.
The chief executive, after Mueller and investigations and everything, didn’t only seek help and interference from a foreign entity in our elections AGAIN, he did it using the power of the office he won it with last time.
What lesson will that teach those running in other races?
This behavior — the disinformation, the lies, the overall bad guy shit and internet fuckery, the outright illegal stuff — is not only consequence-free, but they think this is how business is done now. And I can’t fully say that they are wrong, because look what’s happening.
It’s coming to your town. It’s coming to your race. And you have to be ready to fight it. You have to be ready to fight those battles in the media, and you have to be ready and willing to earn an audience that’s ready to go to battle for you, up to and after Election Day.