Elections

Something is Happening Here, But You Don’t Know What it Is

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…do you, Mr Priebus?

A study by  Pew Research  says that Americans are increasingly getting their news from Facebook and Twitter.  The study indicates that 63% of both FB and Twitter users says that they get news from these sites, up from 47% and 52% in 2013.  (Bear in mind that 66% of US adults use Facebook, whereas only 17% use Twitter.)  In general, it seems that FB users are more likely to pro-actively share and comment on politically-related posts, whereas Twitter users are more likely to follow stories from “official” news organizations.

Of course, the fact that someone gets news from FB or Twitter does not by itself say anything about how important  that site is to them within the universe of possible news sources.  Another part of the survey attempts to answer that question.  Among people 35 and over, 34% say Facebook is “the most or an important” way they get news; the corresponding number for Twitter is 31%.  But among those 18-34, the number is 49% for both FB and Twitter.

WSJ  recently reviewed a new book,  The Selfie Vote,  by political analyst Kristen Soltis Anderson, who says:

“I’ve spent the last six years trying to crack the code on young voters.  What I’ve found should terrify Republicans.”

She believes the current Republican approach to political marketing does not mesh with the way Millennials (“who view their comfort with technology as what makes their generation ‘special'”) tend to get information.  Quoting the WSJ piece:

“Take the 2012 presidential race.  Mitt Romney’s campaign stuck mostly with network TV ads during prime time, sometimes…paying nearly six times as much as Barack Obama’s campaign for an ad of the same length during the same time slot.  Team Obama made use of individually targeted ads for satellite subscribers, tailoring the campaign’s message to specific voters in swing states and spending less money on network TV.  The Obama campaign also developed cost-effective online ads that targeted Facebook and YouTube users based on personal-preference data, even running ads in online videogames…As more millennials pull the cable plug and spend their free time exclusively online, Republicans can’t expect to compete by pouring resources into 30-second spots during “Jeopardy!””

I think Facebook is a poor source for news and a very inferior venue for political discussion.  But the Left is using it very effectively to circulate memes, usually in the form of simplistic poster-like images with a photo or graphic of some kind and a few words or dubious statistics.  There does not seem to be any coherent effort on the part of the RNC, or any other Republican campaign organization or conservative/libertarian organization, to rapidly generate refutations of these when called for, nor do I see very many counter-leftist memes that I judge to be good enough, from a marketing standpoint, to be worth circulating.  And there is very little of marketing value to be found on either the FB page of the RNC or the FB page of RNC chairman Reince Priebus.

My sense is that while the RNC leadership may understand old-style get-out-the-vote campaigns and precinct organization, they have little concept of social media marketing, and have also been outdone in the use of “big data” for campaign management.  (See my post  Catalist, “The 480,” and The Real 480.)  I don’t think they’re really all that good at old-fashioned direct-mail marketing, either, based on what shows up in my mailbox.

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Is the corporate wing of the GOP leading the party to disaster ?

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SF killing

There are a number of national stories recently that seem to resonate with voters. A big one is the killing of a San Francisco woman by an illegal alien with seven felony arrests who was deported five times.

The fatal shooting of a woman in San Francisco last week, allegedly by an illegal immigrant man convicted of seven felonies and previously deported to Mexico, has sparked a debate about the extent to which local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities should cooperate.

At issue is the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of seeking to identify potentially deportable individuals in jails or prisons nationwide by issuing a “detainer,” a request rather than an order to extend the individual’s detention.

San Francisco is a “Sanctuary City” which has pledged to resist efforts by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to deport illegal aliens.

On March 26, Mr. Sanchez was booked into the San Francisco County Jail on a local drug-related warrant after serving a federal prison term, the city’s sheriff’s office said. The next day, Mr. Sanchez appeared in San Francisco Superior Court and the drug charges were dismissed.

After San Francisco officials confirmed that Mr. Sanchez’s federal prison term had been completed and that he had no active warrants, he was released from jail on April 15. He was freed despite a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, to the city’s sheriff’s department that would have enabled the federal agency to take him into custody.

This is routine, plus of course, the fact that the Obama Administration has chosen to facilitate illegal immigration and resist deportation.

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Is the Republican Party Worthwhile ?

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hillary

Today, an interesting column was published suggesting that, if the Republicans don’t beat Hillary, they should just disband the party.

I think this makes some sense. We have an attractive group of candidates and some valid issues, including the economy and foreign policy. She is a terrible candidate.

Add this to the mounting scandals, polls showing a lack of trust for her, the historical difficulty of political parties winning three presidential elections in a row, and the deep bench of fresh-faced Republican options, and the GOP should be in prime position to win the next election.

But the next election will test whether demographic headwinds are too much for Republicans to overcome.

Maybe the country is just not serious about issues anymore.

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A Politically Incorrect US View of the UK Election

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It is hard to get any real news of the UK elections through the Patriots/Tim Brady deflated NFL football scandal and the on-going hate campaign against Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for the “Thought Crime” of offensive to multiculturalism free speech after the Garland, Texas shootings. And for those that try, no one is explaining the rise of the Scottish National and United Kingdom Independence Parties and collapse of the Conservatives (AKA Tories), Labour and Liberal Democratic Party. And especially the across the boards collapse of Labour in its heartland of Scotland. The PBS News Hour last night spent five minutes on the subject and completely ignored the two monstrous political elephants in the UK political room.

Labour’s Rotherham Horror, and Tory sex scandals as depicted in the UK political cartoon below —

The Real issues of the UK Election -- Rotherham Horror & Tory Sex Scandals
The Real issues of the UK Election — Rotherham Horror & Tory Sex Scandals

As the UK Telegraph summarized:

More than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a 16 year period by gangs of pedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded.
 
Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.
 
In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.

This was a 16-year (between 1997 at the beginning of the Blair premiership and ending in 2013) long orgy of organized pedophilia by a Pakistani Muslim gang targeting under age, poor, white females and was defacto officially sanctioned by the Labour run Rotherham Council government, UK social services and the UK Police. The defacto acts of ratification being the prosecution and removal of female children from parents trying to save their daughters from the aforementioned Pakistani Muslim pedophile prostitution ring. Then the attacking of the UK Daily Mail reporter Sue Reid as “racist” for talking to the families of the victims and publicizing those stories.

This scandal has caused both the white working class and the white chav underclass in Scotland to abandon Labour en mass for the Scottish National Party (SNP) because they know that Labour will leave its children quite literally naked and defenseless before other “Asian” (the BBC code word for Pakistani and other non-white Muslim) gangs and that Labour will use the police to prevent the parents of those children from trying to save their kids.

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Those whom the gods would destroy…

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Does Barack Obama know what he is doing ? There is room for doubt. In foreign affairs he seems to be over his head. In domestic policy, he seems to be accomplishing what he wants to do. Hugh Hewitt asked former Vice President Dick Cheney his opinion.

Cheney said, “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard. If you had somebody who, as president — who wanted to take America down. Who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world, reduce our capacity to influence events. Turn our back on our allies and encourage our enemies, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama is doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind are those of the worst president we’ve ever had.”

Cheney has been involved in American government since Ford was president and knows a thing or two. What to make of Obama ?

The military correspondent of the Times of Israel has learned a few things since he supported Obama in 2008. Obama benefited from many people who saw him as a symbol and ignored his background and opaque record.

I noted, Bush, with his love of Zion, had been a disaster, inadvertently empowering Iran. Obama, with his cool detachment, was just what we needed.

Lastly, I encouraged her [his sister] to vote Democrat, now, before her Alex P. Keaton-like eldest got the right to vote and cancelled her out.

And she did (I think, maybe). She even wrote to me about the beauty of that cold January day in 2009 when he was sworn into office.

He was encouraging his sister to vote for Obama with the usual arguments made by intelligent people who believed Obama would be a good president. I never bought that argument. I knew the story of where he came from.

Then, reality began to creep in.

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