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.