Anyone who tells you what is motivating voters is lying. The best-informed people are the ones in charge of making ads because they’re constantly testing to see what messages resonate, but it’s hard to know if even they have a clue. The Trump campaign seems to think the best message for Pennsylvanians is about biological men playing girl’s sports and Kamala Harris wanting to pay for inmates getting sex changes. Maybe they’re right, but it seems like this anti-trans effort was tried in the 2022 midterms and bombed.
The Harris campaign is less singularly focused. They’re rotating through four main messages. The first features regular folks who say Trump is for the super-rich but they’re not super-rich and support Harris because she’ll protect Social Security and Medicare. The second features former Republicans expressing support for Harris. The third focuses on the unique danger presented by Trump. The final one focuses on women’s reproductive rights. Some of these messages overlap.
Here I just want to go back to October 2020 when the Access Hollywood “Grab’ em by the pussy” video became the biggest story in the campaign. I didn’t think Trump was going to win before that video, but I definitely thought he was toast after it. And I wasn’t alone, at all. We were all wrong.
So, I am never going to forget that error or the hubris and overconfidence that went along with it. It was my first thought when I saw that former National Security Council member David Rothkopf wrote that Sunday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden was “political suicide.” He was referring specifically to some of the jokes made by right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who was part of the warm-up act for Elon Musk and Trump.
To date, getting upset about racist or sexist jokes has not been a way of beating back Trump or Trumpism. If anything, that kind of “Woke” complaining is fuel for the MAGA movement and their love of giving offense. Bitching about politically incorrect behavior is definitely ineffective at winning the white vote, but this time it might not matter. Almost everyone’s mind is already made up, so the only likely meaningful backlash against Hinchcliff’s jokes is going to come from the targets of those jokes.
That would be Jews, who are supposedly so un-athletic that they cannot throw a piece of paper, Palestinians who don’t know how to do anything but throw rocks, Puerto Ricans whose home island is a “floating garbage dump,” Blacks who do nothing but eat watermelon, and Latinos who breed like rabbits because they “cum” in their partners just like they “come” in the country.
The biggest impact appears to be in the Puerto Rican community. As Markos Moulitsas points out, the backlash was immediate:
The holy trinity of Puerto Rican stardom—Bad Bunny, J-Lo, and Ricky Martin, with over 315 million combined followers on Instagram alone—have been on a tear, sharing Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan for Puerto Rico side-by-side with the comedian’s racist tirade against the island.
There are substantial Puerto Rican populations in several swing states, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where the polls are tick-tight. And I think a lot of the people who follow Bad Bunny, J-Lo, and Ricky Martin on Instagram are probably not high-propensity voters who were paying close attention to the campaign. These hard-to-reach folks are exactly who the campaigns are trying persuade in the final days, and this was a big gift to Harris because it’s so disrespectful and the messengers are normally non-political.
Having said that, precisely because the anti-woke bullshit works so well for Trump with white voters, I don’t think Harris should want the national narrative to stay on this story. She needs to stick with the messages she’s been working with, on reproductive rights, Republicans who support her, protecting entitlements and the middle class, and the unique dangers of Trump.
Leave the speech-shaming to surrogates on Instagram.
But what do I know? As I told you, anyone who says they know what is motivating voters is lying.
Also, I visited Puerto Rico for the first time earlier this year, and it’s breathtakingly gorgeous.
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El Yunque National Forest was awesome!
It would seem that going forward in future elections, the white voters who are now still voting Trump will always vote for whatever version of MAGA candidate there is in the future, as long as that candidate sufficiently hews to the proper level of hatred and vitriol. I know a lot of enthusiastic Trump supporters, and I cannot imagine any of them ever voting, in the future, for what counted as a Republican prior to 2016. If there is no MAGA candidate, I expect they will simply decide to stay home. It seems there is little doubt that the white voters still behind Trump will ever be sated by anyone who is not at least as horrific and detestable a human being as Donald Trump.
However, the GOP knows they are now chained to Trump candidates for as long into the future as they can see. If Trump loses, there is no doubt that Vance has worked overtime to posture himself as the future of MAGA, and he might well be the standard-bearer for the short term. Another big question is, should Trump lose, where do the never-Trumpers hang their hats going forward?
I don’t see it this way. If Trump wins and everything goes swimmingly for the country, then ok, they’ll be locked in. But do you really think everything is going to go great after he wins? A second Trump administration will be run be competing factions of crazy with nobody keeping anything in check. There’s a fairly high probability that the shit-show won’t be contained to the rallies. It will start touching the lives of ordinary voters.
“but this time it might not matter. Almost everyone’s mind is already made up…”
So is there no line that they can cross or ugliness they can perpetrate that will disgust their followers enough to turn away?
I don’t trust polling….but….
CNN sees voters thinking this election isn’t really that big a deal. WTF? Unless they are measuring the sort of casual voter who has voted for Trump in the past. This incident just made the election a big deal for Puerto Ricans, but I bet it resonates beyond that community into other Hispanic communities.
I think ABC polling shows Harris winning white men with a college degree. I would take that to the bank. It will only be something like 52-48, but Biden narrowly lost this demo and I would wager Harris wins it, maybe by healthier margins. We know she will clean up with white women with college degrees. (Plus the obvious non-white demos.)
IOW, this “closing argument” of Trump’s is designed to turn out massive numbers of Whites Without College, but it will alienate every other single constituency out there. In effect, they are wagering that there are WWC voters who voted for Biden in 2020, but will abandon Harris because they dialed up the racism? I don’t see it.
Are the polls really tick-tight?
The Democrats have outperformed Biden’s 2020 numbers in every election in widespread geographical constituencies since the last Presidential. Also 7 million more people voted for Biden in 2020. I suspect the polls are showing systematic error – an effort to over compensate for the hidden Trump voters in 2016 that made them incorrect. Also several pollsters are working with the right wing groups to contaminate the polls.
And DiaperDon’s strategy is NOT to win the popular vote or even the electoral college. As he signaled in MSG, he has a secret agreement with MAGA Mike Johnson to throw the certification. If the Rethughlicans keep control of the House, he will not certify the state slate of voters.
If they lose control, he will find a way to not seat the new House on January 5, 2025.
And as far as DiaperDon’s successor for MAGAts, JD will not cut it. Already the peeps leave his rallies, sometimes before he even arrives, but mostly within a few minutes of their stipulated contracts for the money. JD has the charisma of an used sofa – so they will not show up for this cartoon!