Andrew and I were joined by former CD 6 Democratic primary candidate Chris Donat for a podcast episode taking apart the JoAnna Mendoza v Juan Ciscomani Clean Elections debate. Please like and subscribe to feed the algo!
Just a word of warning: if you just want to watch the debate straight through without frequent stops for context, fact-checks, and criticism, you should probably first watch the debate itself:
A second warning: we are not doing just a partisan spin for Jo here. We are trying to give context and facts behind a bunch of lies, elisions, and puffery by CiscoMAGA, but we are NOT going easy on Jo. We criticize Jo’s perrformance and preperation, and how effective to the average voters their respective performances might be. We conclude that Juan won the debate on style and effective (but largely untrue) messaging, and reaching his likely goals for this debate. Jo certainly didn’t discredit herself or do poorly, but we conclude that she failed to reach the goals she should be pursuing in this debate. We conclude that she was inadequately prepared, staffed, and coached, and she did not stick the landing on discrediting and attacking Juan’s record for most voters. Most of my own concerns and conclusions about the debate are in my pre-debate and immediate conclusions of my live blog post. So, if you can’t stand to hear Jo criticized at all, you might want to skip this episode.
We got some pushback to our posted ep on Reddit, some of which I will address here.
“Punditry/podcast banter is not critical analysis. And if you are into electoralism as your path towards better candidates/government you should know that past the primary is not the time for being publicly critical of the candidate you support, especially if your intended audience are supporters of that candidate.”
We, of course, disagree. We feel strongly that providing critical feedback is important and critical to success. We aren’t just spin doctors for Democrats: we try to tell the truth as we see it. Voters are sick of partisan hacks who will only praise and never criticize Democrats. We are VERY critical of Juan; it’s only fair we are equally honest about our own candidate’s performance. I feel that we provided A LOT of critical analysis of the debate and the candidate’s goals and performance, not just punditry and banter.
“These idiots will vote for ciscomani and continuing to protect pedophiles and billionaires.”
No, we fucking won’t! Don’t be a dumbass, or call us crypto-MAGAs. We ain’t that. And anyone who knows shit from shinola in AZ politics knows that we are hard-core Democratic partisans and supporters. And a big “fuck you” to this guy, BTW!
“I tried to watch it and all they do is pause every few minutes to give some “insight” or provide commentary and it’s really annoying and breaks up the flow of the debate. All I wanted was to see the key points of the debate with maybe additional context on their points, but I couldn’t make it past 10 minutes of this video because they kept pausing it and didn’t let it get past the introductions without constant interruptions of useless opinions like “he’s grifting, I don’t like it” and “wow her intro was so much better”. Stfu, those are your OPINIONS, keep to the facts and address those. You should really work on making a condensed version where you keep your interjections very VERY short and only if they’re actually MEANINGFUL. Not dumbass “I prefer this” comments.”
Maybe this person should just watch the debate first? If you don’t like LOTS of opinion, context, insight, criticsm and analysis of the purpose and goals of modern televised debate, this isn’t the version you will want to watch FIRST, before forming your own impressions by watching the debate straight through first.
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I read the OpEd.
People who like Hegseth will like Ciscomani.
People who like genuine will go with Joanna.
Sure – she could be slicker and yes, she was likely not prepared enough. But she sure beats a little dab of Brylcream.