When something terrible happens, a person can either laugh or cry before starting the long battle to correct it. Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) gives us the chance to laugh, because laughter is necessary and therapeutic even in the darkest of times. She writes:
Like lots of people on the internet right now, I am certain that the thing that went wrong in the 2024 Harris campaign is the very thing that I have been going on about for years, but unlike everyone else on the internet, I am right. I know what went wrong. Okay, I will tell you: not enough texts and emails from the candidate.
Every time I got one of those on my phone or in my inbox, I felt fired up. And I’m sure that’s how everyone else receiving them also felt. So why were we only receiving (and this is a rough estimate; I think I am lowballing it) 346 of them per hour? That wasn’t enough. We needed more.
Do not say to me: “Your assumptions are wrong. Obviously, we tried the strategy of sending more texts than any human being could possibly want to receive from a candidate in the course of a lifetime, and that strategy failed.”
False.
It has not yet been tried. We received only a countably infinite number of texts. We should have received an UNCOUNTABLY infinite number of texts. What were they even doing at headquarters?
How could this campaign have hoped to win the election unless every second anyone in America was looking at a phone, that phone was dinging with news that the candidate’s college roommate’s parrot was worried that not enough money had been poured into the campaign yet? If your phone is not wrung out and shuddering from the effort of fielding all the texts, running through its battery power, begging some unknown force to make it stop, then you weren’t getting fired up enough!
Emails from the candidate. Emails from the candidate’s running mate. Emails from the candidate’s spouse. Emails from Barack Obama. Where were emails from people with even more tangential relationships to the candidate? Their neighbors? Their dog walkers? People who had once visited an Airbnb right after they’d visited it and felt that it had been left in excellent condition? People who sat behind them at a screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” and thought that their verbal responses were appropriate? If we had had my way, everyone in the country would have been required not only to receive these texts but also to send them.
Also the subject lines of the emails weren’t dire enough.
What evidence do I have that my strategy would have worked?
Well, it seems to me (without much evidence; I did Google it, but that just meant that an insufficiently intelligentAI sent me a few sponsored results that were not entirely germane) that fewer people complained this year than complained in previous election cycles about the sheer volume of unrequested campaign emails and texts. This, to me, is an important signal.
Such a conspicuous lack of complaint, if it happened at all, which I am choosing to believe that it did, was not because we are just used to the world being marginally worse now and have stopped complaining as we stroll uneasily through 80-degree temperatures in November, tip at all transactions and accept that we are all 40 percent microplastics. No, it was because we liked it. The number of texts and emails was finally approaching the number of emails and text messages that it is ideal to receive from your candidate of choice. There is no ceiling. That is what I have always been saying! If we had just gotten a few more, we could have clinched this thing.
I know that some people are saying, “Your prescription is the opposite of what is true. You are just bringing a bad set of assumptions to a situation where there is no evidence that your suggested course would have made things any better!” To them I say: No! Try it! Only one way to find out, and that’s to try it! More texts! More emails! Midterms are right around the corner!We’d better start right now!
