What the F*ck is Dark Woke? with Bhavik Lathia | Hello Merge Tag Ep. 33

“Dark woke is Democrats breaking out of the respectability prison that Republicans have put us in for decades and finally saying shit and doing things that stop voters in their tracks and actually get their attention.”

Bhavik Lathia is a political strategist and technologist. He’s led campaigns in India, Australia, and the US, and supported activists around the world as they built and executed strategies superpowered by technology.

He recently served as Battleground Mobilization Director on the Harris-Walz campaign. Before that he was Senior Digital Director for WisDems. He helped lead the distributed organizing team on the Bernie 2020 campaign and served as Digital Director for Color Of Change.

This past month, he was one of several democratic strategists quoted in a New York Times piece on the idea of “Dark Woke.”

Throughout our conversation, we spoke about:

• The origins of “Dark Woke”
• What voters actually care about
• Why Republicans’ shamelessness is their superpower — and why we need to combat it
• Where Democrats got it right in 2024 — and where we got it wrong
• Why we need to keep pushing back on the right wing’s bad-faith attacks — and how to turn them into liabilities
• Why Democrats need edgier ways to talk to voters
• Why Senator Booker’s filibuster was more effective than most folks realize
• The role of podcasting in Democratic messaging (and who’s doing it well)
• Why our party needs to invest in and empower content creators who know how to speak directly to their audiences
• The power — and importance — of WhatsApp
• How WisDems thinks about winning State Supreme Court races and what we can learn from them
• How WisDems used Elon’s money against him during the SCOWIS race
• How technology has evolved in the industry — and why progressives must keep evolving with it
• Why everyone working in digital should focus on becoming a better writer
• And a whole lot more!

Dark Woke is about Democrats doing and saying things that optimize for getting attention. We all want to drive our messages with voters and build narratives to help us win campaigns. But we can’t do any of that unless we first get the attention of voters. And Republicans have basically spent my entire life — the past few decades — investing in and optimizing for talents and topics that grab voters attention. And Democrats basically started caring about attention as a strategy on November 6th, 2024.

Find all episodes at HelloMergeTag.com or wherever you stream podcasts.

Links

Here’s the New York Times piece about Dark Woke

Bhavik’s Bluesky

Bhavik’s Twitter

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