Add my "what went wrong" take to the pile

[BumRushDaShow]

43. "people's opinions were already baked in"

That sums it up.

I would add that over 15 years ago, infamous funders of the GOP - the Koch brothers - made a decision to get involved in "local politics" - literally down to the "school board level", using their "Americans for Prosperity" to fund their agenda.

How the Koch Brothers Backed Public-School Segregation

Politics
August 15, 2011

Andy Kroll


(snip)

The story starts back in 2009, when elections were held for four of Wake County’s nine school board seats—enough seats to dictate the public school district’s agenda if all four board members wanted the same reforms. That’s where Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, came into play. AFP funded a local grassroots group, WakeCARES, that organized on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district’s policy of busing to ensure diverse, desegregated public schools.* The four candidates ran against what they called “forced busing”—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.

Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate busing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. “They’re definitely pushing an agenda to resegregate these schools, but there’s also a real push toward privatization,” Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.

In the end, with the help of AFP-backed WakeCARES, all four anti-busing candidates won, and the school board has since taken steps toward rolling back its existing busing policies despite a wave of protest and outrage in the local community.

(snip)

That model "worked" and through those school boards (culminating in the more recent "Moms for (but really against) Liberty" engaging in censorship and a culture war, they were able to meddle and influence down at that lowest community level.

In some urban areas, like here in Philly, there is still the old vestiges of "patronage party politics", with a "boss" who would organize the local infrastructure. But in this day and age of the internet and social media (which has exploded with all the independent programming coming through "podcasts" ), that type of "patronage system" is outdated and unable to keep up.

This is definitely an opportunity to be ready for 2026.