I want to return to a post that was very “Hot on the Grok” after the midterms … Postmortem Analysis of the Red Puddle. The author believes that the Red Wave failed to materialize in New Hampshire, in large part, because NH-Democrats had a technological edge over NH-Republicans that allowed them to find new voters, specifically “Gen Z,” (which apparently comprises persons born between the mid-1990s and 2010):
Somehow the Democrats found an entirely new set of voters and their singular message was: Republicans want to ban abortion. They want to take away your freedom and control you. And they heard that message relentlessly without any counter narrative. Gen Z showed up to vote and Republicans didn’t even know where to find them. This is a generation who 1. Don’t have bills to pay yet 2. Were raised to believe that abortion is equal to contraception and 3. Who only care about social issues. Democrats found them through sophisticated algorithms, social media influencers, and other technological means I don’t understand. Considering the Democrats essentially control Big Tech, it is no wonder we lost a game we didn’t know existed.
Actually, this “game” is not new. Micro-targeting has been around for some time now. For example, the Trump campaign, in 2016, micro-targeted voters successfully:
Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”.
“I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.”
Parscale said the campaign constantly tested minute variations in the design, color, background and phrasing of Facebook ads, in order to maximize their impact. Typically 50,000 to 60,000 variations were tested each day, he said, and sometimes as many as 100,000.
In other words, the problem is NOT that the NH-Democrats have some super-secret software that allows them to find Gen Z voters. The problem is either that the Republican State Party is NOT utilizing the technology because they are either unaware it exists or are too cheap to pay a competent consultant OR there are simply not enough potential Red-voters left in New Hampshire after the COVID migrations to offset the abortion-obsessed Gen Z.
The author of Postmortem Analysis of the Red Puddle also points to pro-life Republicans as the reason why there was no Red Wave in New Hampshire:
Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is decidedly pro-choice. Until the hearts and minds are changed, abortion as a political policy is a liability. We were winning on the bodily autonomy issue with vaccine mandates until Dobbs, and then we ran scared from the entire issue instead of going hard in, branding ourselves as truly being the party of “my body my choice”.
This is an extremely myopic analysis. Both Florida and Ohio passed abortion restrictions that were more restrictive than New Hampshire’s. And yet both Florida and Ohio saw a Red Wave. And while I don’t have any data to back this up, I am sure that both States have as high a percentage of abortion-obsessed Gen Z voters as New Hampshire. Yet these States were able to turn out more than enough Red-voters to offset them.
