Episode 1885: Strikeout

This is a strategist episode 1885. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always Shannon Phillips and no Stephen Carter. This is no Stephen

Stephen Carter. Just us.

Just us. He's he's off helping the Calgary party and the Edmonton accelerants gain. How many seats Shannon? Let's just put let's just put it out on the table between his two political parties and his 28 campaigns. I want this to be the definitive record. I've got a number in mind. in terms of how many seats they

they get. Oh, okay. I need to hear your number first. I'm going to drop it off. It's single

Don't mean to blow my buddy's spot. It's single digits for Stephen Carter. But all the best ones. All the best ones will get in, for sure.

Well, I mean, it depends on the combination in terms of being actually to be able to make change around a city council table. First of all, a mayor is only one vote for starters. And if you can get the right combinations in place, you can actually get stuff done. At least that's what I'm told. I'm not much for potable politics myself, but municipal doesn't really get me up in the morning.

It seems like it's getting no one up in any morning leading up to

to the election. Everyone is very tired on this one. Is that actually what you're, like, is that your universe too, in terms of, like?

yeah, certainly I've, you know, I've been kind of watching what's happening in Calgary. Like, nobody has really, you

you know, gotten excited about one candidate or another. Nope. I think it might be starting to happen a little bit in Edmonton. It looks like the progressive universe is understanding the assignment in Andrew Knack, Apogast, Tim Cartmell. I'm seeing a little of that congealed. I'm certainly not seeing it in Talgary at all, right? So there's no, there doesn't seem to be, with the exception of Ferkis, and I would say Sonia Sharpe is probably doing this too into the conservative universe, but they're not anchoring back

back to pre-existing social networks or relational, right? Right.

And so that's what I'm seeing. And of course, down here in Lethbridge, we don't really have a mayor's race. The incumbent, as unfortunate as he is, doesn't really have a challenger. But there's lots going on in the council space. So that's good. And maybe we can get another woman or two on council. That'd be nice. Yeah,

Yeah, I hear you on all of those points, including the fact that these pre-existing networks are not coming together in a unified way to, A, have the same perspective or an aligned perspective and B, do the work to make sure others around them know of that. I'm not seeing really any of that happening. And we're

we're like, we're in advanced vote period right now. Like you could advance vote in Calgary right now. And I know many

many folks, like, let me give you an anecdote. This is why I find this interesting, because I've been trying to figure out for a while why this is such a sleepy election. In fact, I've had people ask me, like, who should we vote for? What's going on? And I'm in a text group of, you know, center left to progressive people. In that group for all Calgarians, there's probably four mayoral candidates people support of varying viability. But I think that's also part of the question is that no one really has a sense of who's viable in this election. No one knows if we have enough runway here for any of the candidates that are polling in single digits to make a breakthrough when half the city is undecided and the leader is at 16%, give or take, depending on which poll is your variety. Yeah,

Yeah, your preferred poison, yeah. But then I think it's also this broader aspect of what

what you put on the table, maybe inadvertently, that I

I don't know if city issues are moving anyone when the province

is disrespecting the city, just can railroad quite literally whatever they want. The Green Line here in Calgary is a great example. Be like, this is what we want. Who cares? Like, your council is a pet project for us. And I think some of that negative partisanship against municipal politics, maybe not even against the politicians themselves and where they stand, is starting to pay dividends,

dividends, is not the right word, but is starting to see its consequences in terms of an extremely sleepy election in both jurisdictions where, frankly, yes, Josie Gondek is running again, but you can classify both of them as largely open races, per se, because she doesn't seem to want to necessarily defend her past or doesn't seem to have the incumbent advantage. It's a weird and wild sort of state of play with 12 days to go and

and no one wanting to choose to vote early, at least in the groups that I'm in. Everyone's like, I'm going to hold off to see if something happens so that I know what to do because the signals aren't out there yet.

Well, what I have seen has been purely relational organizing. Anything that is actually breaking through is purely of,

of, I like this person, you should vote for them.

uh at kind of variety that's what's happening down here that is what's happening but how

like how are you thinking like in terms

terms of like have you been part

part of these conversations like what yeah i mean through my personal networks through my you know whatever the algorithm is is uh uh serving up to me uh it it

seems to me that that is the only thing that is breaking through and there's not the the broader like in 21 and i'm i'm i'm harking back to what happened there people

saw it as mattering because somehow they were going to the polls to send a message to jason kenney uh

uh in 2021 right and a lot of the successful campaigns sort of hitched their wagon to that right

right now it doesn't seem like anything matters maybe because trump is blotting out the sun in some ways and so nothing does matter on my local street corner compared to that or we are just in we it is so obvious that there is not one narrative to be had and not one channel to be had and and

and uh the just complete atomization of communication networks means that uh

uh even people who are paying attention don't have something to pay attention to yes

an extended period of time or for any period

of time that keeps their attention other

other than you know the the orange menace floats through every once in a while and there's a gaudy oval office take and, you know, or some ridiculous thing. But other, other than that, people

people are not, there's nothing to plug in to.

Well, and here I think, I mean, I'm interested in your take on this because you understand this world a lot better than I do.

The lack of news links, outbound news links on meta platforms. forms yeah

how much is that actually changing how we see uh the world essentially what's important what's not what's uh what's a headline what's not and how much is that walling us off uh

uh because like it or not people you still use facebook people use uh use the hell out of that instagram threads is actually moving up in terms of its use uh but if you're not getting headlines out of there there's there's no there's no story there's no nothing there's no narrative to pay attention to i

think it's i think it's certainly contributing to part of it i think what you have a lot more of is people reacting to circumstances and things that have played out but the fact is that you

you know i'll go back to an example right one of the things that johnster would talked about with the daily show is that one of the reasons it worked for the population that it targeted when it did was that it was a commentary show where they would not spoon-feed you the context. They already relied on, the assumption was, that if you were watching the show, you would have the context in order to engage with it deeply. And over the 25 years or 20-some years since that comment was made, that still seems to be the case with that format. The problem with that format is that without legacy media and without people having a baseline understanding of what's going on, they can't patch into it. So what we are seeing the rise of is people like us, Like even folks that are

are great talkers on TikTok, on Instagram, have been campaign volunteers, have do political commentary. You may have never seen them on a major news network, and arguably they're better, more educated, have a more dedicated audience than

those folks that do, you know, present company included in some ways. And they're talking to a base of people. I forget the gentleman's name, but he's been fantastic on The Teacher Strike, which we'll get to in a second. I said Cole, and I apologize. I'm sure people listening will know his name. But I see them all the time on Instagram, on Reels, getting several thousand hits. But the fact is, I think there's more content than ever before for the hyper-engaged. And we are part of that machinery. Like our content, like, you know, to make this meta is for the hyper-engaged, is for folks that are either already engaged, know the baseline effects. I mean, our next topic is just, we're going to be talking about like the tactics of an ATA strike. Like, fuck, there's some people who woke up on Monday morning realizing that there was a strike. And here we are making political content for a very sub-genre. But that level of content has increased significantly. It is

is content for, yeah, for politically adjacent normies. But they are still adjacent and they still know that context. You're right. But we are a smaller and smaller group. Maybe. I don't know if we are. I would want to test that. I think we are. are uh based on what we're seeing in the municipal election i would say that we might be yeah

yeah and so this is i'm kind of past trying to patch this theory together right which is like i think there's more content than ever okay a couple points right in

the last half decade politics has become culture so when we started this podcast you know 10 years ago the idea that we would take politics and use it like a sports talk format was novel it's no longer novel because Because politics is now part of culture and culture has like a more, I hate to kind of lowest common denominator approach in terms of language and vernacular. Like politics in both other countries, USA and Canada, has entered that space. So our format is no longer novel. You add on the algorithmic element to it. So talking in a snippy, plain spoken language about big topics is part of it. So you're having this content machine kind of being produced. I think there's more people than ever before paying attention to politics because it is culture. It's embedded in everything. It's embedded in their identity. It's embedded in how they consume music and sports. Let the launch of the Taylor Swift album earlier this week, you know, be split on partisan grounds. Has she gone mega as an entire subcultural conversation right now? Now, so politics, I think, is like how it's the prism we slice and dice everything through. But I think it has not translated, A,