{"id":175745,"date":"2020-12-09T19:57:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/12\/09\/ive-called-this-out-for-a-while\/"},"modified":"2020-12-09T19:57:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T00:57:00","slug":"ive-called-this-out-for-a-while","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/12\/09\/ive-called-this-out-for-a-while\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve Called This Out for a While"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>  A study has shown that   <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/the-hottest-campaign-ads-on-twitter-didnt-really-work-study?ref=home\">The Lincoln Project&#8217;s ads actually had a negative impact<\/a>, something which   <a href=\"https:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2020\/11\/so-not-surprise.html\">I noted on my blog a month ago<\/a>  and at least 6 months ago on the   <a href=\"http:\/\/stellarparthenon.org\/\">Stellar Parthenon BBS<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>  As long as I&#8217;ve known of the Lincoln Project, I have maintained that it has   two purposes: <\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<li>Enriching its principals.<\/li>\n<li>    To embrace and extend the Neoliberal capture of the Democratic Party.  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>  It comes as no surprise then that this enterprise actually had negative   utility on the matter of delivering votes to the Democratic Party.&nbsp; That   was never its purpose:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>    <span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">At various junctures during the 2020 campaign an attack ad would pop online     that had observers on Twitter buzzing about how devastating for Donald Trump     it would be. Except, more often than not, the ads weren\u2019t effective, at     least not for the nominal point of the election: persuading on-the-fence     voters to back Joe Biden.   <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">  <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">    That\u2019s the conclusion the Democratic Party\u2019s top super PAC reached after     doing analytical research into a handful of spots that went viral on     Twitter.   <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">  <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">    The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the     effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to     conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money.     They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain\u2014the     Lincoln Project\u2014and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among     persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump     voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different     treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads.     Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the     likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for.   <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">  <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">    The idea wasn\u2019t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project,     which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran     imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if     Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which     took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was     doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could     use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were.   <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">  <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">    But that didn\u2019t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed,     Priorities\u2019 analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics\u2014likes and     retweets\u2014and persuasion was -0.3, \u201cmeaning that the better the ad did on     Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.\u201d The most viral of     the Lincoln Project\u2019s ads\u2014a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times     and liked more than 210,000 times\u2014turned out to be the least persuasive of     those Priorities tested.   <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The&nbsp; Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and the useful idiots at MSNBC who were so enamored of of these ad campaigns were suckers for a group of con men.<\/p>\n<p>The lesson to be learned here is beware of Republicans bearing gifts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A study has shown that The Lincoln Project&#8217;s ads actually had a negative impact, something which I noted on my blog a month ago and at least 6 months ago on the Stellar Parthenon BBS. As long as I&#8217;ve known of the Lincoln Project, I have maintained that it has two purposes: Enriching its principals. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[608,513,368,575,374,405],"class_list":["post-175745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-advertising","tag-campaign-finance","tag-corruption","tag-fraud","tag-politics","tag-presidential-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}