Yes, fair enough.

I've gotten some results (i.e. replies, occasionally a correction) from journalists, but I have my own small platform in that I'm a professor who is viewed as an expert on some things.

There are MANY ways to accomplish these goals; bugging journalists is just one of many.

Senators stuck in the DC/media matrix can and should hear it constantly from *other candidates* that they're doing it wrong. Other candidates are among the people with megaphones.

(Perhaps it gets a little extra bite when the candidate is your own daughter.)

This is the kind of question everyone with a megaphone needs to hear about 7 million times more often than they do now.

Not just the Senators themselves. The people who could ask the Senators this question and the people those people read and hear from and so on and so on...

Schumer's a coward. Shaheen & co. soiled themselves. Yes, yes to all of it. But why don't Murkowski, Tillis, & company even get asked questions? Why do we have zero expectation of them? Journalists don't even bother trying. We have accepted Murc's Law as a constitutional provision. It's maddening.

This is exactly our world, and it makes it the weird obligation of Dem partisans to inform their representatives about reality.

Trump and many Senate Democrats seem to me to share the problem that they live in an extremely mediated bubble, impervious to what is happening.

The difference is that Trump at least understands this (he has no pretensions of caring about reality), and so he bullies the media accordingly.

The good news is: this process is working. @ezraklein.bsky.social has one of the larger megaphones in the business and he definitely is part of the way there.

But the column still reflects media assumptions that Trump—TRUMP!—is an implacable force as opposed to an utter follower, easily influenced.

So yes—@runforsomething.net, support primary challengers, and campaign.

ALSO work to change the media diet that our confused leaders—some of whom we are stuck with well past January 2029—consume.

It's exhausting, it's an unfair burden, etc., but it's where we are.

That possibility is consistent with what I'm saying here. They know they need D partisans to turn out, and they think, incorrectly, that those D partisans out of touch (since the partisans' assumptions are so different from the reasonable things they hear every day). But they do want their votes.

Possibly what they learned was they listened to Politico/Axios/Fox/X/the networks for a few weeks and realized that "when will the Democrats cave" was the only question people were asking, ergo they'd better cave, because no one else was going to be an adult and do it.

So it’s just hard to explain this as a strategic decision at all. Instead it looks like what they learned was their own unwillingness to see people harmed by the shutdown and their own lack of leadership, not anything about strategy

To be concrete about this: we need a D trifecta willing to enact major changes in January 2029 if we want to preserve this democracy.

Some of the Senators who will need to vote for a filibuster carveout for that are _not facing election_ before then.

So their assumptions need to change.

Replacing leaders, and threatening to replace them, is important and worth work and money and organizing.

But it's also important to work to change the water they're swimming in so they can see more clearly—and that is work that doesn't need to wait for the right even-numbered year to come up.

My basic point in this thread is simply that if we want different politics, the answer isn't (only) "primary them all" (often years from now).

The incredible weakness of some of our leaders is a kind of opportunity because we, too, can work to change what they hear—and thereby change what they do.

Get your local politicians to whom you have more access to hear these messages because they can amplify them, just as journalists can. So can non-tradtional poltiical figures (e.g. influential people not in politics).

They need to hear from people thousands of times for reality to break through:
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So, channel the outrage toward the people who can make a difference (even if they don't realize they can!)—from media figures to politicians themselves.

They need to hear from thousands of people, constantly, that their assumptions were 180 degrees wrong, that this is not what we want from them.

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You might feel like you have little agency because you are not in a swing state, not in a state w/one of the Senators who caved, etc.

But we all constitute the public sphere—such as it is—together. It’s useful to move the Senators who sort of get it toward really getting it. Same w/journalists.

BlueSky is not real life but X _really_ is not real life. Ask your Senators and representatives AND the big-megaphoned journalists you read/watch/listen to why they are spending time on X and why they are not spending more time on here. Nudging all of them in the right direction matters.

Show up and put yourself in places where your representatives and Senators can see you, with messages that they don’t hear in the DC-media bubble. Write and call often.

Explain why the stuff that seems normal and obvious to them is, to you, their constituent, a wildly wrong, primary-worthy error.