 So lately, we all know that Bernie Sanders and even Kamala Harris to an extent has been taking a beating by the press because they were asked this question at CNN's Town Halls about whether or not their extension of voting rights to prisoners would mean that someone like the Boston Marathon bomber would be able to vote. And because of the way they answered that question, the media is priming people to only think very narrowly about this issue in terms of should the Boston bomber be allowed to vote. But I've been trying to explain that it's not about the Boston bomber. This is about acknowledging the reality that we have a racially biased criminal justice system. And if we want to start righting the wrongs and re-enfranchising Americans, then we do need to allow prisoners the right to vote. Now thankfully, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out and she made a defense of this position and I think she did a really good job at making a persuasive case as to why we need to support the rights of prisoners to be able to vote. She tweeted to avoid looking completely and utterly out of touch with the reality of our prison system, instead of asking should the Boston bomber have the right to vote, try should a nonviolent person stopped with a dime bag lose the right to vote. Because that question reflects way more people. Reminder, slavery led to Jim Crow and redlining, which then led to the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Black Americans and people of color are far more likely to be convicted and sentenced longer than white Americans for similar crimes. Our system routinely criminalizes poverty and exonerates wealth. Many rebut the voting question by saying, well, those people shouldn't be jailed. Glad you feel that way. But the truth is, the US incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere in the world, even more than China. Our system is built to disenfranchise people of color. And she then showed two cases of mothers committing fraud in order to get their kids into school. And you can see how the rich white woman is let off easier while the poor black woman is punished more heavily. So what AOC is pointing to here is how institutional racism is a very real thing. And racial bias is embedded in our system. It's not, you know, an unintentional flaw. It's a product of our system. It's a feature. So if we want to truly be a more just society, then this is one of the many ways that we can be more just. Now with that being said, Kyle Kalinsky made a video about this, and I think that his take is incredibly fascinating and important because he approached this from a different angle than I took. So for me, for those of you who've seen my video on this, I defended Bernie Sanders position, but the way that Kyle approached this was really important because he talks about the strategic angle and how Bernie Sanders should have answered this question in a way that couldn't allow him to fall into this trap, essentially where he should have just swatted away this question. And I do think that because this question was a trap, you couldn't answer this and come out on top. What Kyle says about this is incredibly important. Progressives, they're on the right side of every single issue, but I think that we have a problem with marketing some of our ideas because the media, I mean, within the course of a couple of days, they took a very nuanced and complex conversation that we were having about voting rights and they turned this into a conversation about the Boston bomber. So what we need to do is be more politically savvy and strategically astute and acknowledge that if we take the bait, then all we're going to do is allow the media to monopolize the conversation that we're trying to have. Now that doesn't mean that you sacrifice your principles. That's not really what Kyle is saying we're alluding to here. But what he is saying is we need to get better, essentially in marketing. This is what I took away from the video and I would encourage everyone to watch it. I'll link to it down below. We need to get better at answering questions and acknowledge the reality that politics is often a PR game and that irritates me because I don't want politics to be a PR game. I want to have good faith arguments with people about the policy issues and I want to state my position, but the problem is that it's not that simple. It's just not that simple. We need to portray our ideas in a way that is easily digestible for the American population. So for example, if you're progressive, you've been screaming about single payer for decades, but it didn't start to catch on until we started to reframe the conversation and talk about it as Medicare for all. Because when you say single payer to someone, it's incredibly unfamiliar. It sounds foreign because it quite literally is foreign, right? We don't have that in this country. But when you start calling it Medicare for all, that is something that people can tolerate the idea of because they know what Medicare is. We have Medicare in this country. They know that they love it. It has a couple of shortcomings currently because obviously people need Medicare advantage to fill in the gaps. But if you communicate to them, look, we're willing to fix Medicare or not necessarily fix it, but close those gaps and expand it to everyone. They can visualize that in a better way. So I think that's a lesson that is important. And we need to do this with other policies because there are policy positions that we take that aren't necessarily popular. We're lucky that a lot of our ideas are populist positions. And it's easy to make the case for those. But for more controversial positions that we take, like wanting to abolish the death penalty, we need to be more savvy in how we present these ideas. And that means not taking the bait if it's presented to us in a way where we're not going to come out as winners. And it's tough to anticipate how these questions will be framed. But we've got to do better, I think, at playing the PR game. And I hate to say that. I don't want to talk about marketing. I want to talk about policy because I'm more of a wonky nerd than a PR advertising person. That being said, that's the game of politics. And if you want to win, you've got to play the game, right? So I'm not a populist. I just so happen to take ideas that are incredibly popular, but I've never been on the side of saying, well, I only support policies that are popular because a lot of times Americans don't get it right. They're on the wrong side of history. They were on the wrong side of history on a number of civil rights issues, right? Slavery, interracial marriage, gay marriage. So I'm not someone who's only going to take a policy position because it's popular. But with that being said, because I have so many more, I guess you could say fringe ideas because technically they are, if they're not supported by most people. Because I have more fringe ideas in comparison with the electorate, like I support reparations, I support prisoners voting, I support ending the death penalty. I think that, you know, for someone like me and just progressives at large, we need to do a better job at marketing our ideas. And we need to, we need to make it so people can empathize and sympathize with our position more because if we don't do that, then we allow for situations like this where they can take our position and make it about the Boston Bomber when that's not really the conversation that we care about. We don't care about the Boston Bomber. So I think that also what Kyle points out here is that what was lacking in Bernie's answer was the human approach because he brought up the Michael Dukakis answer on the death penalty, which we all admit. I think it's universally acknowledged that he face planted when he answered that question, but we need to make it more human. If Bernie would have said, look, I think that someone like the Boston Bomber is a morally reprehensible human being. And of course, I don't personally want him to vote, but I don't want to have a conversation about him. Like if Bernie tailored his answer to really address the main crux of the person who was asking that question, I think it would have come off a lot better. So I think that what Kyle's point is in approaching this strategically is that we've got to do better. And I wholeheartedly agree. Well, I think it's important for us to defend the merits of Bernie's argument based on principle. We do have to simultaneously acknowledge that our boys got to do better. He's just got to do better answering questions and marketing his ideas. And for the most part, Bernie does do a phenomenal job at marketing a lot of his progressive ideas. But we've got to grapple with this fact that some of our ideas are not mainstream yet. They're just not. Now, do I think that if we made the case and educated people, they could be mainstream one day? Absolutely. It's just a matter of how we do that. And one thing that Kyle noted that I hadn't previously thought about, which is important, is that with the establishment we'll try to do going forward is try to draw out some of Bernie's more unpopular stances and really focus on those in a hammer away at those stances so you can kind of drive down his populist appeal. So we need to anticipate what's going to happen better. I think and we've got to adjust. So with that being said, I am unequivocally on the side of allowing prisoners to vote. But I think that we need to learn a little bit from this week. And Bernie, I hope, takes away, you know, something from this week in that he just he's more astute and savvy in answering some of these questions that are got your questions. I mean, again, there is no way you can come out on top answering that question. So at this point in time, what do you do? You reframe the question, answer the question that you just reframed because it's a biased question, right? You're asking a very leading question that you want a very specific answer to. You want Bernie to say, I want the Boston bomber to vote. So Bernie needs to realize that this is going to be something that comes up. And he's got to adjust his strategy to make sure that he maintains control of the conversation and he's able to continuously monopolize the discussion with regard to all of these issues. But I'm glad that AOC made the case. But yeah, overall, unfortunately, we have to play the PR game if we want to win because you can't win unless you play the PR game. And it's that simple. So I'm glad that AOC made the case because morally we're right. It's just a matter of convincing people that our position is in fact the just position. And we've got to educate people simple as that.