Vaush’s Project Died in the Crib
Progressive Victory 2022 is a sham. Not a scam, money is not being taken from volunteers, and its not claiming to need donations in order to achieve its stated goals of getting progressive candidates elected. But the group will not meaningfully achieve its stated goals.
Lets be very clear: The staff are lying by omission to the young volunteers who have joined the project’s discord server attempting to get involved. They know that this group will have a negligible impact on the national stage, they know that the group will have a negligible impact on the state and local level. The only reason that the group exists is so that the backers, and the staff, can add a line item to their resume that says “grew a national organization with volunteers on the ground in every state.”
There is zero need for the group to collect any amount of PII on members beyond a users Email Address, Discord ID, and Zipcode. The only reasons you would need Personally Identifiable Information beyond this is so that you can either have your own email list which you can later sell off or rent, or so that you can organize meetups within the group. Which, ok, maybe the latter is happening. Except if that were the case there would have been more infrastructure put in place at the start, there would not be an emphasis in recruiting in every state, and this would have been explicitly stated somewhere, by someone.
Every single time there has been a big team meeting, staff have had to quietly, and reluctantly, reign in the wild ideas of the random vols who have joined. The grand, cross-brand organizational plan so far seems to be creating a website that allows progressive candidates to have their headshots, and links to their socials and campaign websites to be listed. That isn’t nothing, but it certainly isn’t how Vaush described his ambitions, or how other streamers wax poetic about wanting to get involved in politics.
Here is the group roadmap in full: “Let’s just say that we were not prepared for the enormous volume of enthusiastic Vaushites pouring into this server (seriously y’all are incredible). But stick around, because here is what we’ve got planned: — This weekend, we’ll be providing state-specific information about campaigns into each state channel. — Next week, we’ll start our organizing program, sorting users into cohorts and providing actions. — Over the month, we’ll be hosting a series of Getting Involved in Campaigns 101 trainings in the Discord to answer all of your questions about A) what you can do B) how to get involved and C) what all of the esoteric political lingo we use means.”
All of this is great, except for the fact that this is not in line with what users expect to be doing, and not in line with what users are doing. You do not need a Public-Relations Team that is putting effort into writing Persuasion rhetoric if your group is going to be acting as a clearinghouse connecting first-time Vols with campaigns that could use the manpower and resources heading into the general. Campaigns already have the language they want to use. Is the idea to get a bunch of vols to go debate-bro the campaigns they’re volunteering for about how to have better persuasive rhetoric? (Setting aside of course the fact that campaigns will not give unknown and untrusted Vols Persuasion Turf) Or is this a hint that the group is actually gearing up to organize themselves on the ground (its not).
Very clearly, the community for one streamer has come together into what they expected to be a community-ran national organization to mobilize together as a group in support of their group interests, only to find that they group they are joining is a bunch of political careerists who are coopting the enthusiasm of an energized community to build their own political brand.
While staff say that they don’t want to be a repeat of Josh Collin’s campaign efforts-where vols from across the country were happy to join and chat but didn’t get on the ground-the various chatrooms in the server show that the actual supporters didn’t get that memo. You do not need a meme channel where people are posting screencaps of Gartic Phone answers that involve Vaush in a server that is for a capital-S Serious political project.
It is ok to have a community of politically engaged people I disagree with. It is ok for that community to want to sit and talk and not get active. It is not ok for political careerists to attract those people into their project to inflate their numbers of active volunteers. Especially when those people are not given any direction or guidance on what they can be doing right now to be effective.
How do I know this is the case? I know all of the races in my state(WA) that are close, or flippable from either being held by a Republican or from Moderate to Progressive. Not once has a single staff member done anything in the Washington channel to facilitate Vols connecting with the most important congressional race, of which many are in close geographical proximity to. Instead the efforts of the #Washington channel are going towards supporting the DSA candidate in a primary they will not win.
I cannot imagine the situation is different in the other 49 states that I do not know as well. These guys have had infinite time to prepare (or at least a month, judging by the dates of previous forward-facing messages by staff) a plan for what is and is not out of scope, and what races are and are not important. The fact that they did not gives the game away.
There are plenty great progressive organizations across the country that try to identify races were resources would make a meaningful and material impact to their chance of success. Unfortunately, Progressive Victory 2022 has made in-roads with none of them, or at least not publicly. This is only going to cause hurt and disappointment when people come to understand that the group they were hoping to join does not exist.
All of this is to feed the egos of around a half-dozen to a dozen individuals. What a colossal waste of time.
