TRUMPkins And Surrogates Get Their Marching Orders to Intensify Criticism of Judge and Journalists

The Wrong Battlefield

We fought hard. We were vocal. We stood up and were counted, to the tune of 35,000 at one campaign rally. We had the enthusiasm. We had the truth on our side. We left everything on the field.

So why did we lose?

We were fighting on the wrong battlefield.

The real fight for hearts and minds was happening on twitter.

Does that make you snicker? Maybe you're not part of the digital generation and don't see the value in social media at all. Or maybe, since you're here, you do see the value in certain types of social media, but 140-character status updates just aren't your cup of tea. Not substantive enough. Not enough space to say something that really matters. Just another place to throw out a status update.

Besides, there are so many idiots on twitter.

Guess who decided this election...

I'll give you a hint. Barack Obama made social media history, according to The Guardian, Tuesday night when he tweeted this and it was re-tweeted by followers more than 700,000 times... by the following morning.

Four More Years... re-tweeted 791,215 times

The unprecedented viral success of the post confirmed the role that social media played in the US presidential campaign, and abroad.

There were more than 31 million election-related tweets on Tuesday night, making election night "the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history," Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz told Reuters. 

But wait a minute, isn't Mitt Romney on twitter, too? Yes! In fact, there are over a dozen official twitter profiles associated with Mitt Romney, his road team, his VP, his first lady, his campaign staff.

Unfortunately, as would be true for any challenger, he had nowhere near as many followers on twitter or facebook as the sitting president. Today, Mitt Romney's official twitter page has 1,778,351 and Barack Obama has 22,933,844. That disparity surely impacts the personal reach of each politician for getting important messages out to the people. There's no way Mitt Romney could have come close to Barack Obama's tweet reach, not without a lot of help from tweeters.

I don't mean to imply there were no conservatives on twitter. There are some incredibly intelligent, prolific twitterers spreading the conservative word on twitter. And there's twitchy.com, where Michelle Malkin compiles left-leaning tweets for conservatives to respond. That certainly gets conversations going.

But it isn't enough. Not in quantity and not in efficacy.

Many, many conservative commentators, professional and lay, lamented the negative, juvenile tone of this election. For goodness sake, our PRESIDENT called his opponent a BS-er, and his close friend Beyonce tweeted post-election, "Take that, Mitches." This is not high-brow. If we want to change the culture in our country (and the WORLD), a good place to start is twitter. And if we want to change the culture on twitter, we need to be there.

Rock the Vote was there.

Congratulations! Against all odds and because of our work and the collective power of our generation, we were heard!

The pundits are talking about the winners and losers. We think that’s a stupid f*cking idea. Let’s talk about this: Last night, we proved that we are engaged, we vote, and that we are a political force that cannot be ignored.

They're right. They should not be ignored. According to Huffington Post, young voters (18-29) represented a record 19% of the electorate, one point up from 2008. Guess how much of that Barack Obama got? 60%. The disparity between young voters in the two parties is shrinking, but not fast enough for this growing voting demographic. If they are going to come out in greater and greater numbers, we had better make sure they aren't voting with their #ladyparts -- or manparts, for that matter.