Agenda Over Accomplishments

to hold on. And let me tell you that the comments that I have been sorting through on both of those videos, let's just say they were not the fucking best, with over one hundred people or so commenting about the fact that they are not going to vote for Joe Biden, that there is no difference between Biden and Trump, that they are going to vote their values, that they are done voting in fear, and that genocide Joe quotation marks

is not going to get their vote. Let me tell you that I am fucking terrified, and I am trying desperately to figure out how in God's green Earth we convince people. I convince people that they need to vote for Joe Biden. Otherwise the twenty twenty four presidential election is going to be the last fucking election that we have.

I want to express to you that the Heritage Foundation, up on their website site, has Project twenty twenty five, which is being aggressively funded at over a billion dollars by white right wing extremists to have staff in place on day one to begin finishing the hit job that Donald Trump started on January sixth, twenty twenty one. These people are not playing games. They elected Mike Johnson as their Speaker of the House, and the man lives and

worships the nineteenth century. Just a reminder, women did not have the right to vote and black people were still enslaved. And that's where he gets his values from. They want a chrysto fascist society where there are no elections, where they are both the judge, the jury and also the executioner, where any dissenters are put in jail or indicted on trumped up charges. But who cares because all of the judges will be at Donald Trump and his sycophants whim.

I can't express enough how much of a game this fucking is not. And look, I'm folks, I am sitting here alongside you and watching the horrors unfold in Palestine. I am watching our tax dollars go to funding murder of children. This is not an easy pill to fucking swallow. But what I also know is that we don't have an alternative. It's either we are voting for democracy or

we're voting for our demise. That's it. It is really that black and white, and so I want people to honestly understand that, like I am here with you, things don't seem much better, but they will never have the opportunity to get better if a Democrat is not in control of the Department of Justice, of the EPA, of the Department of Education, so on and so forth. Who do you want making decisions about what your child is learning?

You know, folks. So coming up next a really important conversation with a guest that we've had on the show before because she's so brilliant, a not Schenker Osario, who is the host of Words to Win By. She's a researcher, a message maker, a campaign advisor, and somebody who gets it and wants the administration to get it too. So listen to our conversation coming up next, folks. I am very happy to welcome back to wok F Daily. As a matter of fact, I don't even know how long

it's been, because time is a vortex. But I'm very happy to welcome a not shanker Osario back to wok F Daily. She's the host of Words to Win By, a podcast about progressive wins. She is included the whole chapter dedicated to you in the book The Persuaders. And so you are the messenger, You are the message maker, as your platform says, and my guy, odd, do we

need a message? Do we need some fixing? Because as it turns out, folks, you know that I am not a person that believes in polls, particularly this far out from the presidential election. However, much like I just said to it not earlier, that much like horoscopes can be a form of a guide, you know, just like we look at the weather and we decide what code to put on or not, two polls can particularly give us some guidance as to what is working and what is not.

And right now, nothing this fucking administration is doing is working, and it is being evidenced in polls in swing states that show Biden down to Trump by some and in some places as much as five or more points. We've seen his poll numbers dip over the last two and a half weeks below forty percent, because we know that he's been unable to get climb out of the forties for his entire presidency. So not what is playing in

what is happening? We know that there is a lot happening, as you see it from your vantage point of messaging. What's going on?

I didn't check what the sampling methodology was for New York Times Enna, but it's probably some sort of hybrid. And to answer questions about your feeling in this present moment, and how is that like and how is that different to being in the voting booth. Act of taking a survey and answering survey questions is quite a different act than the act of being in a voting booth and choosing to go into that voting booth or to mail in a vote if that is allowed in your particular jurisdiction.

So what this survey tells us, and here I really want to shout out my frequent colleague Michael Podhorser, who wrote a really really important piece monthly. Mike and I are you know, famous sparring partners, longtime friends. He wrote a cure for mad pole disease. And basically what's happened with this New New York Times poll is they've introduced the omicron of this new mad pole disease and we all, you know, it's just a new virulent strain and we

all need a booster shot. So why he would say this, why I'm echoing it, is people are famously bad predictors of what we want for dinner on Tuesday, let alone what we are going to want to be doing a year from now. But so, what this survey is telling us that in the present moment, people are registering really strong displeasure with Joe Biden. As you said, so that is correct. Does that mean that that's going to manifest

in the election. The answer is, we have no idea this poll does not tell us one way or the other. What it does tell us is that right now, as you said, the things that are going on, the touting

of accomplishments is not working. And I have lots and lots and lots to say about the touting of accomplishments and how that is rubbing people the wrong way, because, in point of fact, having looked at it recently myself with colleagues through a randomized control trial experiment, which is a much more rigorous way of looking at these things than surveys, what we find is that discourse about accomplishments, with the exception of the jobs, the showing how many

new jobs have been added, that does with a needle a little bit on vote choice. The rest of the accomplishments, especially that inflation graph that shows the you know, the little line going down that actually backlashes.

I can tell you that they're not. So it's either a reaction to I don't believe that and I'm very angry with you, or more simply, even if they do understand that inflation is a rate of change, you're telling them, hey, I'd like you to think about inflation. Please put inflation top of mind. How do you feel about Joe Biden? And the answer is boo, yeah, we don't want to bring up the things that are people's pain points. Now. The jobs barograph, in contrast, doesn't rub people the wrong

way because it isn't felt personally. You can have a sense that you know, maybe there are more jobs being created, maybe there are not. I have no kind of way as an individual human being living within my own community to assess whether there's X million jobs. But I can buy that, whereas I do go to the grocery store, I can tell you I don't feel like I have enough money I feel personally. But the other thing that we see is that across the board, touting agenda is

much more effective than touting accomplishments. And there is a reason why it's a canard about campaigns that campaigns are about the future, they're not about the past. And so talking to people about we've done this, we've done that, we've created this, we've created that, they either don't buy it, they feel like it's not enough, they don't like it, and they're frustrated about it.

Protecting our freedom to send our kids off to school and know they're going to come home safe at the end of the day. First of all, just the act of touting a second term agenda, does this thing we call presupposed, don't assert? It suggests that this is going to be the administration in the second term. Because going back half a step to your question around pulling, what happens with the reporting of pulling is that it creates

social proof that people don't like this guy. And when we have more discourse around people don't like this guy, they think he's too old, they think he's to this, they think he's to that, that actually increases the number of PEP people who don't like him. It's like we saw, for example, reporting on vaccine hesitancy increased vaccine hesitancy because people are reading their environment for social cues to understand

what does a my kind of a person think. You know, a young person, a black person, a you know mom who lives in Oakland, like, whatever, what does a my kind of a person think? And when the social cues in your environment are telling you will they think that vaccines are scary, or they think you're kind of a person thinks that Joe Biden is too old, then that actually creates license for you not just to have that feeling, but to think that that is kind of the social norm within your case.

what I have already done for you. And then to express, not to reinforce the things that are upsetting people, right, which is like you're you're totally right because let me tell you something and I never even thought about it until you say it. When I see those inflation gap inflation charts, I'm fucking annoyed. I'm like, why are you showing me this?

It means that if you look at any of these poles, the margin of error on all of them is always more than one percent, and the election is going to come down to and hinge on a smaller margin than any of these polls are able to. So essentially, what you're doing is you're taking out a yardstick and you're trying to measure, like, you know, something that an orthodontist is trying to move a millimeter Uh, I don't know

why I've decided to use a dental analogy. It's probably a pretty far fetched one, but I'm down this hole. I've gone down this commit doing it. Yeah, commit, commit makes total sense. So, first of all, it's just a fundamentally blunt instrument to measure something that is extraordinarily fine grained, because our elections hinge upon an extraordinarily small set of voters in an extraordinarily small set of places. And then the other piece of it is just from the vantage

point of actually having a responsible media. And this is where it's really really just sick. How is it possible that we have a media instead of reporting on the actual news, they are creating this news around these what I would call deeply irresponsible pulling numbers because they do not take pains to say it's a year out. You know, people actually have no idea. And the way that we win or lose national elections in this country hinges upon

who turns out to vote. In the first place. The operative question is not really who are you going to vote for? It's are you going to vote? Because what we find and we saw this in the midterm right the red wave, it was coming. It was overtaking us. That's what all the pundits, the polls, et cetera said, because historically that's always been the pattern that the incumbent

party takes a shal lacking in the midterms. That's always been true, with the exception of the election after nine to eleven, for I think obvious reasons and the one we just had. What happened in twenty twenty two, it's important to look under the hood and note that in the states where Democrats won, the fifteen states where Democrats won and staved off the Red wave, turnout was at twenty eighteen levels, which was historic and so even more historic because we managed to do that again, but we

were the incumbent, so basically unheard of. In the thirty five states where Democrats did not win, and that is why we have the House of Representatives that we have, turnout among Democratic base was down, as we would predict in a midterm, and so it's always been the case that in these battleground states, it hinges on who is going to turn out to vote, and so the question is really why why did we have this mass turnout in twenty eighteen, in twenty twenty, in twenty twenty two

despite the incumbency, and it was because it was a repudiation and a rejection of Maga that was the force. You know, it's fantasy to say it was some sort of love of an embrace of and you know care or rats.

our rights, our freedoms, our future, our children's lives. And so every moment that the media is not reporting on the fact that a criminal is currently the front runner for the Republican nomination, that a white Chrysto fascist is now the speaker of the House representatives, that they're passing initiative after initiative after initiative, or at least trying to to destroy our lives to take away our money, to harm our children. Every moment that they're not reporting on that,

they're just reporting on the horse race. It's as if they media doesn't realize that they're actually impacting the horse race by making the discourse be about you know, this is how people feel about Biden instead of saying, hi, there's an authoritarian fascist takeover underway.

This idea of people living in this twenty four seven fear and anxiety and the solace being cable news or the breaking news headlines coming out of the New York Times, is what is driving a dying market, right And so for them, I think to alert people, which is what I try and do on these shows, and what you do by the research and the work that you do

and on your show. Like, the reality is they don't want to do that because it's not good for their bottom line, even though we believe that telling the truth to people would have them tune in at record rates because they want to be kept in the know. But the media is choosing, is picking and choosing what to

keep them in the know about. Apparently Joe Biden tripping right is more important than the front runner of the Republican Party having been found liable for rape, right, Like so that like it's just like so Joe Biden being three years older than Donald Trump somehow makes Trump's incompetent rants, whether at a rally or in court, seem Okay.

going on there. I think what it is is this kind of congenitally instinctive need for what they call quote unquote neutrality, as if the human mind were actually capable of not having emotions and beliefs and ideas about the information that we're provided, which we know is just simply not how cognition works. I think that because there is this kind of crusty thinking that the job of the reporter is to in fact present both sides. How could

you possibly present both sides? Of an authoritarian takeover, you have to try to find something negative to say. And I mean the irony is that there's plenty of negative things to say, not like there isn't negative things to say about what's going on with democratic leaders. There is, but the tripping or the age or the reporting on the pulling results itself and thereby making that into the news.

I mean, that's not where it's at. I think that it's this, you know, it's it's the same thing as when they used to have a climate scientist and a climate denier on, because otherwise you're not presenting quote, both sides of the story.

risk here. And while all of the things that I said before about crediting that with being accurate and true in an arena in which we need to measure tiny, tiny, tiny percentage points a year out and a survey is not a vote and so on, is still holds. It's something that The New York Times is actually being honest about which voters matter, because traditionally, the only voters that they give a shit about live and eat and sleep and breathe and never leave Midwestern diners. Right, They're like

white early dudes. I mean, that is like an entire yes thought. Yes, I wish I were joking. I'm not joking, so that at least is noteworthy. Why am I saying that in answer to your question? I'm saying that in answer to your question because we have this base that is, you know, sometimes turns out, sometimes doesn't, and really is the crux. It is the hinge for our winning and losing in these elections. It's not about swinging. I mean, who is left in America? But it's like Joe Biden,

Donald Trump, I don't know. I still haven't made up my mind. Like pretty much that person, if there's one of them, they live in a test tube. Like that's a very strange person. The decision is am I going to turn out or not? So these things that democratic leadership is doing, and I want to focus in particular and the most heart wrenching, heartbreaking, horrific one, which is

the situation in Palestine Israel. I think that there is a very very relatively simple, morally unambiguous position, which is that we choose life, that we believe that all of life is sacred. It's sacred here, it's sacred there. It's sacred when it's sacred when it's Muslim, it's sacred when

it's Israeli, it's sacred when it's Arab. And what it means to hold life sacred is that we need to have a life saving mission, a campaign, not a pause, because what applause suggests is that the main stay, the ongoing thing is the war, and that you're still kind of tacitly supporting that. But you know, there are many many things that messages don't fix. When the policy is not okay, the message does not fix it. The message is wrapping paper. If what's inside the box is not okay,

the wrapping paper is not going to do it. And so what I hope, not even from a political dimension, but really from a like I actually care about people's lives, I'm absolutely devastated dimension, is that we change course here and we do what is right, which I think is pretty straightforward. And there is a counter terrorism mission or a counter hamas mission that can be conducted precisely and surgically, and there is a life saving mission that needs to be conducted absolutely immediately.