Vienna Teng

No. 31 when I checked it just now! 🚀 Congrats!

I did not anticipate the appetite for a bike shanty, y'all.

I am obsessed with this new song "Sisters of Winter." www.instagram.com/reel/DHoumYg...
🌸🌲🎍

MILCK has generously given me permission to cover it live, so look for it in this Saturday's Patreon livestreams (plural!) & on tour in Europe next month 💜

Ooh you're doing deep canvassing! Yes, super interested in what those conversations reveal.

(While I'm here, a hearty +1 to a recent repost of yours: "I'm not interested in Democrats winning, I'm interested in democracy winning")

It appears I am only writing sea shanties right now. And because I've never been on a sailing ship (or worked fields, or shelled beans for hours), it appears these shanties are going to be about biking. Maybe next I'll write a drinking song involving mocktails. The muse, she has questionable taste.

Great points. I guess I'm wondering if there's a c) revisit Democratic priorities/approaches/etc along with that? The "I didn't love voting for this but Dems/progressives are worse" sentiment is a real thing. Maybe that's entirely perception due to poor media infrastructure, but I doubt it.

I totally hear you. (Big hug for the exhaustion!) It's a pragmatic thing for me - I absolutely wish the American public were different, that it rewarded different behavior, that its attention were calibrated differently. But to get real things done, we have confront reality & seek to understand it.

Not at all - thanks for the conversation! 😊

Our 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) Models Today, we’re releasing our 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) candidate quality models, for both the House and the Senate. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, here’s a brief primer: our mo…

Good question - I know the analyses of House candidates by Split Ticket are designed to separate candidate quality from the fundamentals of a race that year. Can't speak for the other data. But the Trumpward shift precedes 2020 and Biden, too. split-ticket.org/2025/01/15/o...

I think @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social makes a trenchant point that victim-blaming & gaslighting is a pernicious tendency, and we shouldn't buy into it. But I don't think that lets us off the hook for figuring out how to win *in the current context* - because that's ultimately how victim-blaming ends.

Much credit to orgs like this, which provide incredible tools & trainings for empathetic convos:

"Deep canvassing is the only scientifically proven method to influence constituents by using empathy and understanding to bridge gaps across differences."

deepcanvass.org

My two cents: just re-focusing on persuading the persuadable is a big shift for many folks, and one that would make a big difference.

Showing curiosity about someone's point of view first, without arguing one's own, is powerful. Right there you've created a different impression of progressives.

I agree it's absurd to blame progressives for the cruelties of Trumpism. Yet we are still losing the argument - against Trumpism, and against moderate politics.

There are simply too many people who aren't with us (yet). So...how do we persuade them? And...what are we missing, that we should amend?

Justice Democrats + Our Revolution House candidates underperformed last November (as did MAGA candidates), while Blue Dogs overperformed. We groan about milquetoast moderate pandering, but progressivism is losing voters where it matters most. Why?
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Democrats gained *affluent & white voters* while losing share of *every other demographic* from 2020 to 2024. Enough Black, Hispanic, female, and young people voted for Trump, or stayed home, to usher in what we're living through now.

Why? Should we not have some humble curiosity about this?

I have profound respect for @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social, so I'm grappling with why this piece feels unhelpful to me.

She's not wrong. Yet I think it encourages a "just keep going" mindset among progressives (like myself!) that flies in the face of electoral results.

Two Truths micro-workshop on Zoom
Sat Mar 8 @ 5:00pm ET

us06web.zoom.us/j/8254835136...

Two Truths Micro-Workshop YouTube video by Vienna Teng

Two Truths micro-workshop on YouTube Live
Fri Mar 7 @ 12:00pm ET

youtube.com/live/ce9sah-...

Two Truths micro-workshop on Instagram Live
Thu Mar 6 @ 9:00pm ET

www.instagram.com/viennatengmu...

Well, I'm flat on the couch with a fever & a nice wet cough. Gotta love winter bugs. At least I'm negative for Covid. (The 5yo's not even to blame this time, & I was masking for much of Folk Alliance!)

Shifting Two Truths micro-workshops to same times next week. 🗓️

Meanwhile Folk Alliance was last week & I'm so grateful for the existence of @ginachavezmusic.bsky.social, @kcturnerpresents.bsky.social, @allisonrussell.bsky.social & many other heroes of indie music 💜 They distill the joy not in turning away from hard things, but linking arms to go through them.

I think we agree. I wasn't saying try to win back MAGA. I was saying let's win back the people cautiously optimistic about this administration (whether they voted for them or not).

The truly disengaged are worth pursuing too, but that seems like a heavier lift than those already following politics.

It's a good question whether to focus on the non-voters vs. the swing voters, but <insert "why not both?" emoji> Plus we don't always know who becomes which from one election to the next anyway.

I think there are a lot of commonalities between people who stayed home & the people who aren't MAGA but cast a vote with them anyway just to see what would happen. Fed up with the system as is, need to see something fresh if they're going to vote affirmatively for anything.

I mean, in the near term it's probably just about hitting low-information voters with new scary messages to get them to vote against what's happening. But I hope we can do more than just swing the pendulum around.

My hope is that ultimately, most political differences are a matter of emphasis. It means reaching out & hearing people out is useful, and potentially gets us somewhere better than we would otherwise. But it requires depolarizing, and it takes two to de-escalate.

Finally: I've been wondering how much cheering & "gotta break a few eggs" arguments I'd hear if a clumsy admin were smashing the patriarchy, issuing reparations & land-back declarations, dismantling the fossil fuel industry. How would we behave if we believed in the principle if not the execution?

I think the (perception) of focus on marginalized communities, and neglect of majoritarian needs, is what's driving the rejection of so-called "woke"/identitarian politics, DEI etc. And why Bernie Sanders has such lasting appeal: his has always been a majoritarian agenda, a majoritarian emphasis.

It's good & right to stand up for the most vulnerable among us (and isn't that a Christian value?). But we haven't been forthright about or even aware of the tradeoffs in that choice of emphasis. And now the backlash might erase much what was fought for.

Another thesis I'm mulling over is that progressives tend to focus on the marginalized, at the expense of the majority.