15 Comments

Thanks for the great roundup! Why are you putting your live coverage on fascist-owned X instead of here?

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This normally is the kind of question I resist answering, but because you've been a longtime member, Michael, I will.

The bottom line is that if we left Twitter, it wouldn't harm Musk in the slightest, but it would harm us tremendously.

Despite Musk's depredations and various attempts by others to create alternatives, the center of gravity for political and elections coverage remains on Twitter. I can't say why, exactly, though I suspect the fact that Twitter was so deeply interwined with American journalism for long makes it hard to disentangle from.

Whatever the reason, it's the reality we face. Other social media platforms simply do not bring us the same level of engagement—not even close. I'll illustrate with an example. The tweet announcing our launch received 460,000 impressions on Twitter, a huge number. Bluesky and Threads do not offer similar analytics, but I can compare the number of reposts: 290 on Twitter vs. 38 on Bsky and 25 on Threads.

And it's not just the number but the quality and nature. We got 86 quote tweets, all offering incredible support, many from major accounts with big followings. Just one example: Josh Marshall, whom I've been reading since before there even was a liberal blogosphere to speak of, tweeted about us *twice* to his 400,000 followers, calling us "one of the few truly essential news sources for following and understanding electoral politics in the United States."

Thanks to the ecstatic response we received to our announcement, most especially on Twitter, we had an extremely successful launch, beyond my wildest dreams. And a good portion of that had to do with the considerable time and effort *we* put into building our following on Twitter over the last 15 years.

I think Musk is a disgusting fuck, and I dream of the day his fortune collapses and he's forced to sell Twitter. But asking us to leave Twitter is asking us to abandon our own investment in the platform, to abandon our 56,000 followers, to abandon a vast infrastructure that's extremely eager to show its support for our fledgling site. We simply don't have that luxury.

Substack, alas, lacks proper tools for liveblogging—we'd have to repeatedly edit the same post over and over, and risk overwriting one another. What's more, the traffic to the-downballot.com is quite small. The vast majority of folks read us via email. We probably have more direct traffic than is typical for a Substack site, but according to Substack itself, 99% of readers do so via email.

Could we have chosen a platform other than Substack? We looked into it. Generally speaking, no one caters to small companies that want to do *both* an email newsletter *and* an on-site liveblog.

In addition, there are huge advantages to Substack thanks to the considerable infrastructure it's built, as well as the fact that they demand no money up-front (they just take a cut of subscriptions), unlike many other services.

So we're in a world where we're a tiny startup, with limited options for the tools we might use. We have to make imperfect choices. There's no ideal setup. In addition, we're operating with a tiny staff, and we really mean it when we say we don't want to waste a penny. We could look for fancier tools, but we don't want to start spending our readers' hard-earned money on shiny toys.

That left us without a ton of choices. We felt that the best use of our limited time and resources—and our readers' dollars—was to stick with free platforms like Twitter and Discord, where we know engagement will be high.

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I understand. You have to admit it's an unfortunate situation, though.

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So where was the real-time coverage of the primaries? I didn't see anything newer than the post about the new Downballot site on Twitter.

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On Twitter and on Discord!

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Like I said, I didn't see it on Twitter. Did I have to log in to Twitter and look at replies to the post announcing the new website, or was there somewhere else I should have been looking?

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FL-SEN:

Regarding the Senate race, likely Democratic Senate Nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell may benefit more than typical Democratic Senate Nominees running in previous FL-SEN races simply because of what could be likely high turnout among women and non-white voters.

That's assuming the FL Democratic Party and Chair Nikki Fried have their GOTV ground game going well.

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FL Dem Party isn’t the best.

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Local one here in very red county surprisingly active.

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What county?

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Collier

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I like Naples

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It's improving; incrementally.. Fried has brought some real energy.. Long ways to go

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Historically no. However, from what was previously reported on DKE, the FL Democratic Party under the leadership of Nikki Fried has been making strides.

We shall see how the turnout ends up being in November.

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I voted for Debbie, hoping Trump and Guv Ron's unpopularity helps her race.

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