Blueprints for Donor-Advised Funding w/ Beezer de Martelly and Fatema Ahmad

To start off, I'd like to highlight a small win in the fight against gerrymandering in Missouri.

Their state Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a so-called veto referendum ballot initiative was unduly blocked by the Republican Secretary of State.

A petition of over 300,000 signatures statewide was set to place a ballot initiative on November's ballot, which, if passed, would legally veto Republican gerrymandered maps.

While the state Supreme Court has successfully blocked these new maps and returned the decision back to the voters, Republican state leaders intend to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could risk further erosion of the power of voters to block gerrymandering in their states.

And a lot of the political communicators that I know have been talking about a report published in The Atlantic last week looking at the conservative effort to dominate social media feeds with clipping campaigns.

Clipping, which is the practice of taking short segments from longer videos and repackaging those segments for social media platforms that run on short videos like TikTok and Instagram Reels, has become a major strategy in getting messaging of any kind out there.

This often feels pretty organic.

The short videos are posted by accounts with no apparent connection to a candidate or party, and the strategy is designed for volume, seeking to push attention and discourse in a particular direction.

There are absolutely aboveboard clipping operations out there, but the Atlantic article reveals something that a lot of people online have suspected, that there are foreign clipping businesses who take money in exchange for flooding our socials with specifically super conservative ideas and talking points.

The reason I think these types of tactics are worth knowing about is to manage our expectations about what the online discourse has to do with real election outcomes and the actual politics that impact our lives.

It's really not clear what the downstream effects of this kind of thing are at this moment, but a word of caution.

We shouldn't either overhype or underestimate the effects of this type of campaign.

On the one hand, buying into it too heavily makes it seem like the issue is the clipping itself or getting carried away by the popularity of the clips, as if this kind of artificial campaign is a genuine reflection of popular opinion.

On the other hand, capturing and warping the attention of US audiences on social media, divorcing ideas from their context and spreading them around, and pouring hundreds of thousands of dark money dollars into these operations is how new common senses can be formed.

I don't think there's one clear answer here, but staying grounded in real reporting while taking everything you see on social media with a healthy grain of salt is going to go a long way to keeping you grounded this midterm.