Posted on 02/05/2020 6:28:59 AM PST by Red Badger
Shadow, a branch of the glossy digital strategy startup, was a mess from the start.
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Acronym, as the groups founder and CEO Tara McGowan has told seemingly any reporter who would listen in the last year, was supposed to shake up Democratic politics. Faced with Republican opponents that now actually know how to campaign on social media, the non-profit digital strategy organization intended to offer an effective Democratic countermeasure, guided by digitally savvy hands of the Obama 2012 and Clinton 2016 campaigns.
After the disastrous Iowa Caucus on Monday, its hard to imagine that anyone is buying this story now. A faulty smartphone app, developed by the Acronym subsidiary Shadow, failed to correctly tabulate Iowa caucus votes. Though the Iowa Democratic Party says the vote counts are unaffected, the confusion has given ailing campaigns room to maneuver that they otherwise wouldnt have had. Pete Buttigieg took the opportunity to declare victory, apparently based on nothing more than a gut feeling. Joe Biden, who has been slipping in polls for the past couple weeks, has asked for the actual votes to be invalidated.
According to an Acronym staffer, who spoke under condition of anonymity because of a non-disclosure agreement, Acronym is far and away the most disorganized place I've ever been a part of. Though Acronyms initial statement to the press on Monday night kept Shadow at arms length, referring to it in the third-person and noting that it also has other private investors, this is a diversion.
According to my source, Shadow operates within the confines of Acronym, and its staff works with and alongside workers from other parts of Acronym in offices located Denver, New York, and Washington, D.C. The Intercept reported similar details on Tuesday afternoon, noting that as recently as last month McGowan identified Acronym as the "sole" investor in Shadow. The company appears to have edited its website in the last month, now claiming that it only invested in Shadow, rather than having launched it. McGowan herself tweeted the statement from Acronym early Monday, saying that Shadow is an independent company that Acronym invested in.
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Kate Knibbs 🏄🏻♀️ ✔ @Knibbs
If you look at Acronym's "About" page today it says "we invested in Shadow" but if you look at the Wayback Machine from last month it's "we launched Shadow" View image on Twitter View image on Twitter 4,866 10:08 AM - Feb 4, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy
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It seems that Acronym, with its bold-faced plans to spend big in an effort to take down Donald Trump, perfectly encapsulates how in 2020 this money-soaked Democratic political culture inevitably leads to one place: failure.
Launched ahead of the 2018 midterms, Acronym was described initially as a digital-first startup (in the words of Axios), co-founded by McGowan and Michael Dubin, the founder of the mens grooming company Dollar Shave Club whom you might recognize from their ads. McGowan, who previously worked as the digital director of the Obama and Clinton-affiliated Super PAC Priorities USA Action, was able to bring in money for Acronyms affiliated political action committee Pacronym from a variety of well-known wealthy Democratic funders, including the billionaires George Soros and Marsha Laufer.
Acronyms actual headcount is difficult to determine because of the hiring spree the company has been on in the last few months. In November, McGowan told the Times that Acronym and Pacronym had raised 40 percent of a planned $75 million, with the goal of deploying that money on anti-Trump advertising in five key battleground states: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, an effort called Four is Enough" (based on the logic that only four of these five states are required to win a national election).
What distinguishes Acronym, McGowan told the Times, is the flexibility offered by its 501(c)(4) dark money structure beyond the obvious advantages of being able to collect virtually unlimited dollars with no required disclosures. A flattering profile (An A student with an attitude) of McGowan that appeared on Ozy.com last September described Acronym as having a web of for-profit companies beneath it, one of which was a political tech company with a peer-to-peer texting product Shadow.
Although this structure makes it seem that Acronym has the ability to reinvest whatever profits it makes, the Acronym staffer said it manifested as organizational chaos.
They call it a startup environment as an explanation for why no one knows what's happening, the staffer said. Acronym did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
McGowans theory of how digital campaigning works churning out content for mass reach on social media has gotten significant media play. In two separate Times articles published within a week of each other this past November, McGowan explained that the Democrats and their donors needed to get smart about digital. We dont need to spread lies or play to peoples insecurities to win, we just need to compete and get our message to voters every single day where they get their information, she told the Times on November 1. Right now, were not even on the field.
Trump has upped the ante by spending more than any candidate this early in a general election campaign, she told the Times three days later, and right now our side is simply not on the field.
As described by the Acronym staffer, McGowan and Acronym were hardly competing on the field she described. Staffers hired to churn out digital content sat in a room for at least a week, given no direction about what to do. There wasnt a clear understanding about what the content strategy was supposed to achieve.
Theyll say, look at all these impressions we got! as if that has a correlation to persuasion, and not just being a billboard on the highway, the staffer said.
These missteps are also not limited to ideas being badly executed the problem is that the ideas were bad in the first place. A key project McGowan announced in a glossy Bloomberg Businessweek profile in November was the launch of Courier Newsroom, a center-left content network designed to mimic the aesthetics of local news sites, which McGowan cheerfully spun as a replacement for actual local news.
As a digital strategy firm, Acronyms idea of how to win the digital war against Donald Trump in 2020 also reflects this blinkered thinking. Much like Hillary Clintons doomed 2016 effort to campaign against Dangerous Donald and to focus messaging on why Trump is a uniquely bad guy McGowan (whom the staffer describes has an aggressive hand in Acronyms content production) told the Times that Democrats must tell a powerful, true, cohesive story about why this guy is dangerous.
And whatever special alchemy to reach people that Acronym claims to possess, a Tuesday Daily Beast investigation notes, they dont appear to have actually tried to tell that powerful story: the group reportedly only disbursed about $200,000 of the $1 million they had promised to spend on impeachment advertising against Trump.
I think theres been a lot of claims that have been made about the efficacy of digital that are out of line with the reality of electoral politics, Sean McElwee, founder of the progressive advocacy group Data For Progress, told me.
Ironically, of all the parts of the Acronym organization, Shadow is the part working on some of the tangible initiatives. They built a small-dollar fundraising tool reportedly used by at least one campaign, and the purpose of the malfunctioning app built for the caucuses was to make the reporting of votes more transparent, in line with new rules issued after the 2016 election. But Acronym in spite of its billionaire donors and well-connected founders was unable to pull it off, as evidenced by Mondays catastrophic failure in Iowa.
Theres such a pervasive culture of self-dealing when it comes to consultants and party committees and stuff, said Karthik Ganapathy, the co-founder of the Democratic messaging firm MVMT communications (Ganapthys partner, Mike Casca, is currently a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders though Ganapathy himself has no role on the campaign).
And we have a situation where as a party if we are the good guys we have to be the good guys not engaging in this, Ganapathy told me. Theres a reason why so many Americans think politics is an elitist plot to make a handful of people wealthier, and its kind of true."
This really is better than Lee Atwaters sabotage of Jimmys balloon drop. They did this to themselves.
My bet? They had a program they used 4 years ago. They forgot they buried a line of code that gave Hillary every tenth vote. So when they needed a new program they just used the old one and changed the names. They didnt realize it until they started getting results and there was a column for Hillary with ten percent of the vote.
Just the name of the app, Shadow, who the heck thought this would be a good name to attach to elections? Rats are insane.
shadow is soros’ company ... to control voting (results).
you can trust him. he is not like the others.
When they are not projecting, they are Freudian slipping....................
It is very possible that the Iowa Caucus may have given the 2020 win to Trump.
Just like the video of Hillary being carried to the SUV sealed her fate.
Both showed America they are being lied to by the Media, Hollywood and DC.
Sounds quite plausible They still havent released all the data yet as far as I know. Why not unless they are hiding something.
It would be funny as hell if it were true and leaked out.
I think he already had it. It's the House I hope it gives us.
They will get more and more desperate as the weeks go by.
Biden is toast.
All the others are so far left they cannot win even in blue states.
The Party Elites know this and they are panicking.
The big money donors are walking away.
The AOC faction is going to be the dominant voice for the near future.......................
What gets me is that you could have hired three 16-year-old kids to write the App-code, $2k each, and in 90 days....you would have had a simple program that worked. You haul in 90 12-year old kids to do a test-run for a whole day....each making up numbers and inputting the data into the App, and then have some audit team just verify the results. This is simply not rocket-science.
I’m not buying into any part of this story. I don’t think it was ever tested. I don’t think it was even written as an App within the US or by American coders.
The harsh reality here is that they gave Trump at least two major ad’s for the fall election, and it makes this episode look like chimps were hired to write the code, and chimps hired to produce the data. Chimp - in, Chimp - out.
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If you look at Acronym's "About" page today it says: "we invested in Shadow"
.....but the Wayback Machine from last month says: "we launched Shadow"
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View image on Twitter View image on Twitter 4,866 10:08 AM - Feb 4, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy
IMHO, it has much to do, AGAIN, with scamming someone (in their own party) for millions. You know, like the billions spent on a flawed server back when Hitlery was running. I say, follow the money!
Really. Two organizations with bunches of peoples...
It seems like one, maybe two people could’ve put this app together. It’s not like they were building the Taj Mahal.
You said it a whole lot better than I did...see #17.
Launched ahead of the 2018 midterms, Acronym was described initially as a digital-first startup (in the
words of Axios), co-founded by McGowan and Michael Dubin, the founder of the mens grooming company Dollar Shave Club.
Dubin.
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