On the one hand, the election is five months away and the real value of Trump’s conviction is late-cycle attack ads hammering his criminality. Further, setting my expressive aesthetics aside, clogging up the cycle with Orange Man Crook is unlikely to persuade anybody. It’s baked in already. However…
The lack of message coordination among Ds is pretty concerning right now. The news cycle is so fast, so short, that the punch from Trump’s felony convictions *feels* under-leveraged. That’s partially a structural function of the news + Trump has always been a crook. And yet…
Democratic elites seem to have an unshakable trust in “Normal Politics” that is so poorly suited to a full-frontal assault on social and political norms that I have a hard time believing that their muted response is strategic and not simply disbelief that any of this matters.
Zander we still can we just need someone to pay us a lot of money to run some surveys - that’ll be our winning secret sauce no one has ever done that we could be the first
I fluctuate between that and realizing that despite huge structural disadvantages they held a veto point for 16 of the past 18 years. But boy howdy were the four years they didn't control one of Senate and Prez disastrous.
Yeah but also what like 50% of people think we're in a recession right now? I saw that in GA Biden polled better on abortion 47-45 over Trump? People are very bad at ascribing policy to party and it's killing the country.
FWIW, I think the idea it's baked in is an error. For the hard base, sure, but Rs can't win on just those numbers; but for low-information lean-Rs it does mean something. But the problem here is /what/ it means to them will mostly depends on following elite, public, and social messaging
So if you argue it's a big deal (and why) loudly, and put Rs on the backfoot over it, they will be more inclined to see the event as important and bad for Rs. But critically, this isn't a fight happening in statis: Rs are also creating a narrative response to it too (political prosecution etc)
And that means that if you /start/ your messaging months later, you're asking low-information voters to /change their mind/ about the meaning of the event and decide that /only now/ it is important or shameful, after primed to see you didn't care before, and after Rs have a message why it's not.
Which is to say: if you don't capitalize on it early and hope for ads close to the election to reignite it, you're fighting uphill, because you're then asking low-info voters to battle their way past cognitive dissonance, and it'll be (reasonably) easier for them to dismiss it as "election hysteria"
I think this is probably where the disconnect among D elites lies: they are so wrapped up in one-off message testing that they ignore the role that *agenda-setting* plays. And they have agency over the agenda! (But they act helpless and reactionary.)
or worse, feeding directly into the Republican narrative that it *was* a political prosecution because you're only bringing it up now, right before the election.
point being: yes you want folks to be HYPER aware the closer it gets to whatever zero-day it is, but you need to build awareness months in advance so they have some baseline understanding
I always go back to the way that Hollywood markets movies. You start 6 months out (first trailer, poster, etc), then do some hits at 3 months (paid media, new trailer, etc) and then the last 3 weeks is nonstop burning 70% of the marketing budget
Also, a cult and a politician who gifts billionaires with goodies has tons of $$$$ and brainwashed obsessed zombies who 24/7 dominate social media owned by billionaires. Normal people focus on their lives, not the cult leader.
To quote "Confidence Game", if the put up lands successfully then it is much harder to get the mark to see the con. So to disrupt the con you *must* disrupt the put up.
And despite it being so among hard-Rs doesn’t preclude the possibility that it alienates a small but nontrivial proportion of potential voters when the margins are so thin. They *should* be hammering even if persuasion is unlikely — defection / not casting a vote would be a win
Especially when it’s 34 convictions and by a jury, not a judge. Add in that two juries found him liable for rape (and defamation) and you’ve got guy I don’t trust to run a hot dog stand, little less the country.
Exactly, sure, obviously do all the careful, empirically grounded research on what to do with each particular group, but come on, in what election would a political campaign not take huge advantage of their opponent being a creepy convicted crook?!
