For today’s new stuff, Trump’s desecration of Arlington seems to be a scandal that he can’t brush off. It’s especially damaging coming on the heels of his other recent horrific words about veterans.
Meanwhile, the appearance of Harris and Walz on CNN with GOP talking point parrot Dana Bash seems to have gone well. (You can find more kos stories trashing CNN and the MSM in general over this interview, and I agree with them completely). Yeah, they’ve been smart to avoid the press, since the press is a bunch of fuckheads that pick apart Democrats while finding it impossible to calibrate for Trump, even though they’ve been reporting on him for nine years.
Of course an interview is going to repeat the GOP talking points. And that is exactly its opportunity: a chance to disarm those talking points. Which it sounds like she mostly successfully did. And managed to avoid having to get too bogged down with too many too specific proposals.
And it also is a chance to do a trial run with responses that will be trotted out again, possibly improved upon, at the debate, when more are watching.
An interview is NOT expected to be all softball questions and being fawned over.
So, then, how can an interview be bad? Asking fair but tough questions is one thing, but framing everything in such a way that the candidate is left completely on the defensive and not allowed to showcase their positives is another. And it’s difficult, I’m sure, to get the balance right.
The problem with Trump is that the media have never learned how to handle him. At this stage, even interviewing him at all legitimizes him as a candidate. He just lies and says crazy shit during “interviews,” while Democrats are held to a high standard.
I saw clips of the Dana Bash interview, and while it wasn’t the most unfair, unflattering setup in the world, my feeling was, “Who needs this horseshit?”
Yeah, I think Harris has been managing the media in a strategic and intelligent way.
No poop, Prufrock.*
*This is my less rude version of “No shit, Sherlock!”
Good to hear you realize that. Your post gave me a clear impression that you did not.
An interview can mostly be “bad” by the interviewee missing the opportunities.
Of course there can be overtly hostile interviewers. And some that are skillful at giving the interviewee just enough rope to hang themself with (Mike Wallace in his prime on Sixty Minutes for example). But the hostile interviewer well handled impresses the crowd more. And a good candidate can handle a loop of rope without tripping let alone hanging themself. This btw did not seem like either of those. This was exactly the list of questions Harris would have expected. She had every chance to showcase herself. And did.
Look at this clip:
Here she accomplished what she needed to accomplish the most - a human story of kids pancakes and breakfast with a call that changes your life but making that call not about yourself but one of empathy and respect for the man stepping aside. It connects with people. It helps people get a feel for who she is. Not a person they want to have a beer with perhaps, but maybe a Sunday breakfast with instead? With the kids. And board games.
Bash gave the opportunity and the room for that. That is a “good” interview.
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. There’s a big difference between “no one I know is voting for Trump, obviously Harris is winning” and “I live in an area where there used to be a lot of Trump voters, but I see vastly fewer yard signs than 4 or 8 years ago”.
Are Trump voters, wherever they’re hanging out, talking to each other about how their neighborhood used to be full of Clinton and Biden yard signs, but no one has Harris yard signs? I mean, I guess I don’t know that they are not. But it’s certainly not automatically the case that people are making those sorts of claims, at least not with any regularity.
Just look at the mood of liberals on the SDMB leading up to, and particularly immediately following, the Biden-Trump debate; and contrast it with now. Morale is up by a zillion percent. Which presumably also means that morale is up among people on the general left a zillion percent. Which certainly should be reflected in a surge in voter registration, volunteerism, donations, enthusiasm-among-independents, etc. All of which, sometimes anecdotally and sometimes with some attempts at verification, do seem to be the case. All of which, going one step further, should be reflected in the polls. And they are… sort of.
Sure it’s easy to live in a bubble. But that doesn’t mean that no observation ever has validity.
I saw a couple of clips of Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania today. In addition to the usual blather, he made a point out of recognizing all the people who have followed him around from rally to rally. And not just collectively, but individually, by name.
It’s like Trump hasn’t yet realized, or refuses to realize, or is too dumb to realize, that he’s the political equivalent of the Grateful Dead. He’s preaching to the same choir, time after time after time. If they think he’s doing well because they’re always there, well, maybe he’s not doing as well as he thinks.
Well, I was curious to see how many rallies Trump is doing and the size of them. A Google search threw up the donaldjtrump website and (somewhat reluctantly) I clicked on it… only to find, under ‘Events’, the text:
‘No events scheduled’.
I know - the assassination attempt might have something to do with that, but there’s better ways of conveying the message that you have an active campaign!
Trump knows only one way to campaign: through rallies. It’s what threw him for a loop in 2020: “Biden’s not holding rallies! He’s not campaigning!” (Paraphrased.) No, Biden, while quiet, was letting Trump hang himself with all his rallies and his BS. Especially his BS. I’d suggest that people got tired of his meandering in his rally speeches, and his “in two weeks” false promises.
The Morris/538 model has declined a bit for Harris – now she just wins 57% of model runs (her high was 59%, about four days ago).
I think this is in part due to a bad poll for her in Wisconsin (Trump +1%) by a well-regarded outfit (Emerson). That may prove to be an unrepresentative outlier – we should know better in a week or so.
Well, after all, most politicians do that. He’s an extreme case, but this is generally how it works; politicians on the trail spent almost all their time with supporters and avoid hostile crowds. They use these events to keep the turnout machine running and raise money that can be used to buy ads, which are a safer way of reaching voters whose minds you might be able to change.
Trump rallies have the effect of really galvanizing his turnout. Like it or not, it works. US presidential election turnout is very low. In 2020 it was 66.1% (or 61.5 percent, depending how you figure it) and that was the HIGHEST it had been in sixty years. When the most popular choice is usually “I can’t be bothered to vote,” as in fact it had been for every single election going back to at least the days of Calvin Coolidge, and damn near was again in 2020, turnout operations are a huge deal. If you can marginally increase your turnout, that will win. In such a hard-set, polarized climate, the election doesn’t depend on winning the other guy’s votes; it depends on turning non-votes into votes. That’s where the opportunity is.
Trump’s rallies and cult-of-personality approach were a deciding factor in 2016 and nearly were again in 2020. I absolutely believe a less rally-oriented, more traditional campaign approach would have resulted in him losing in 2016.
Neither Harris nor Trump is going to change the polling needle much. When the debate finally happens, people will be pouring in here to say how Harris annihilated Trump. (Trumpists will be in their spaces, saying the opposite.) In the aftermath of the debate, and various events between now and November, people on both sides will keep insisting their candidate is pulling ahead and other other one is “falling apart” or whatever. All these claims will be stupid bullshit. The polls really will not move much at all no matter what happens short of one candidate or the other literally dying. Trump could GO TO PRISON and it wouldn’t affect his odds much, if at all. Every honest predictor who looks at the actual facts will say both candidates could win. On Election Day, turnout efforts will probably decide matters in just two or three swing states.
No, not just friendly crowds vs hostile crowds. The same people in the crowd. That’s what was meant by the Greatful Dead reference.
So he’s got a really avid base, but he’s not reaching new potential votes, not convincing undecideds. He’s already convinced most of these people to vote for him. They enjoy the show, and Trump feels important.
FWIW, there’s a group of noisy trumpists who have staked out a street corner near me. Two major boulevards crossing, hundreds of cars per hour. And there on one of the 4 sidewalk corners are 3 or 4 people dressed in red, white, and blue blowing horns and energetically waving US & trump MAGA flags and signs at everyone. For hours. In the hot and sticky Florida sun.
In one sense they’re only 3 or 4 voters. But enthusiasm is catching. And their enthusiasm is very much self-evident while there is exactly zero evidence of Harris’ existence anywhere in our very purple town.
As @Rickjay said 3 posts ago turnout is what matters. Getting the “might vote for either, but will probably not vote at all” crowd to join your bandwagon and actually vote is the key to victory. Those folks will bother to vote for what are usually ego reinforcement reasons. To be able to say “I voted for the winner” If they see lots of enthusiasm for trump and none for Harris they will conclude the way to vote for the winner is to vote for trump. Which is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy if enough people do it.
I see way more Trump than Harris signs and bumper stickers in my blue county (Chester County PA). Maybe the Harris-Walz signs just haven’t be distributed yet. But if Trump winds up winning the sign war, and the honk for me battle, there is nothing there to be worried about.
The election is going to be decided by voters who do not much like either candidate. Rah rah for Trump will not appeal to voters who have to hold their nose if and when they vote for him.
Oh yeah. I understand and agree. A harris sticker on your car or in your front yard is an invitation to vandalism.
My point was merely that to a barely interested observer who might vote or might not, the trump campaign is the only campaign they’ll encounter in their casual wanderings around town. And that’s dangerous; very dangerous.
All that you say is reasonable. I guess I don’t interface all that well, or believe in very much, the legacy MSM template set. And I think a large chunk of what I feel now has to do with their utter failure to report on Trump without legitimizing him.
I think what Trump experienced at the NABJ recently (though it seems like years ago) is the closest he’s received to a fair interview. And that’s the thing: if you are interviewing a career criminal and antisocial actor like Trump and being nice while doing so, you are already doing it wrong. But if you go hard against him, as the Black journalists most appropriately did, then he will just whine as he always does and say it’s unfair. And that’s a good example of how Trump uses these legacy templates to have himself portrayed as a legitimate candidate by the media.
