I agree with Joe that the right way for candidates to respond to questions about Hasan Piker is to say “who?” and pivot. (A rough summary, I’ll admit.) Still, Piker is still being talked about, incessantly. As Kay pointed out in the comments of the last post, attacking Piker is a proxy for anti-Muslim bigotry against El-Sayed, it’s passive-aggressive, and it’s in part fueled by the right wing of the Democratic Party.

That all said, there is no way that Democrats can thrive in a media environment where every little utterance of a streamer who talks for hours each day is both analyzed and hung around one of our candidates’ necks, while stuff like this is just another Sunday:

I’m talking about Loomer, not Nixon, of course. Loomer has actually spent a lot of time with Trump until she was cast aside for another emotional support female. Yet, other than breathless speculative coverage about her role with Trump, zero critique of this obvious bigot’s role in the MAGA universe and the Republican Party.

I have a couple of videos that I think address some of the reasons that the Democratic Party falls short here. First, centrists/institutionalists, pick your adjective, have gotten themselves into a place where there’s almost nothing they can talk about that’s positive. Jamelle Bouie has a good video where he suggests things the party could talk about:

Bouie names, as Joe has, that corruption as one, and of course Jon Ossof is making hay with that. Others include Flock cameras and AI data centers, as well as tweaks to the ACA.

Hayley Stevens and Angie Craig, to pick two recent insitutionalist election failures, were unable to do this. I didn’t observe the Stevens’ campaign as closely as Kay did, but from what I saw, she mainly focused on personalizing the campaign. And no wonder, her issues page is hopelessly vague. If you have nothing positive to talk about, campaigns devolve. “Nothing positive” is also Republicans’ happy place — they don’t have any kind of real agenda anyway, so focusing on negatives works well for them. It’s a trap for Democrats, one that their consultants walk them into because they’re afraid to push for a concrete, positive agenda.

Related to this, I thought this little clip of Mamdani talking about the way he engaged with the latino community in New York was honest and good:

He did two things: first he talked with Trump voting Latinos about their reasons for voting for Trump, which boiled down to affordability . Then, he cut an ad in Spanish that took him six hours to do because his Spanish is so bad. (I feel that, completely.). He makes the explicit point that he ignored consultants who told him that these voters weren’t “gettable”.

What’s that have to do with Hasan Piker? Nothing! That’s the point. Mamdani had many, many other things to discuss. If we’re going to say “who’s that” and pivot, we need something to pivot to. Some of that can be negative, but some of it needs to be a positive agenda. And, overall as a party, we don’t have that. Yes, we have vague promises. But we don’t have the equivalent of “free buses”. That’s why DSA candidates are beating institutional candidates — they have something people want.