Trump explains: teachers turn kids trans. Scary! Being Liberal ® (@beingliberal) on Threads
Schools must be put under contol! Defund public schools! Only Trump can do it.
(click the link, Jimmy Kimmel)
For this reason and a lot of others, I am honestly starting to believe that social media is the worst thing to happen to contemporary civilization since the Second World War.
Well, no, it doesn’t. 
Comments from Georgia:
Republican ad spending must be insanely, ludicrously expensive here in Georgia. Every single ad break- not exaggerating here, every. single. break. from 8am until 5pm, which is the only time I generally have the tv on in the background at work- contains a trump ad, sometimes the same one twice in the ad break. It’s a really annoying ad, too, with a bouncy rendition of “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” that grates my nerves while blaming inflation on Bidenomics, which was entirely Harris’s doing, apparently.
I know LOTS of trump voters, people who voted for him in 2016 because he was funny and new and NOT Hillary Clinton, then voted for him in 2020 because they loved everything about him with full-throated approval (and dismissed his obviously egregious shortcomings as Democrat lies). None of them are currently trump fans. They’re over him, seriously hoped any other Republican candidate would have prevailed in the primaries, and see him a little more clearly as a flawed human being. Every single one still plans to either vote for him or to not vote at all, because the only alternative is a commie socialist Marxist Democrat who wants to take their guns and kill babies after they’re born or give them sex change operations in preschool. (I encourage the “not voting at all” path.)
Trump yard signs are almost nonexistent. What I’m not seeing is enthusiasm. Kind of the way a lot of us felt about Biden, insofar as we’d vote for him because the alternative was horrific, and we liked him well enough, but no one was jumping up and down with full- throated joy about it. There also doesn’t seem to be any particular urgency among Republicans I know about voting against Harris. They’re kinda ho-hum about it. “Both candidates suck” and so forth.
Of course, all of the above IMO and YMMV.
I’ve seen some discussion that the DJT campaign strategy is to go in hard on GA and PA as winning those is the only realistic path they have to 270 and likely blocks Harris from having much chance of getting there. How the numbers move in the next few weeks will give us an idea how well that is working.
How did Biden/Harris also cause inflation (sometimes larger inflation) in Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Turkey, South Africa, etc. etc.?
I’m told that all this world inflation is entirely Trudeau’s fault.
You can’t bring logic and truth to a political fight! 
In dollars and cents courtesy of Jay Kuo (Status Kuo Substack) and Ad Impact Politics:
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EDIT: Kuo comments on the Trump campaign’s PA/GA strategy.
To me, this means they are pretty much putting all of their eggs into a single plan, one that pretty much cedes all the traditional battlegrounds to Harris except those two …
This is a highly risky roadmap to 270 for the GOP, as Trump cannot afford to lose any of PA, NC, and GA. So we should expect to see a lot of focus on those three states by the campaigns. Georgia and North Carolina have been moving over to Harris, and she has led in Pennsylvania, so Trump has to beat back her momentum in all three. I wouldn’t want to be them right now.
Yeah–I’ve been getting that ad before Youtube clips for the past few weeks here in NC. At least on YT I can skip the ad after five seconds, but it’s a really annoying ad, and not necessarily in a way that works in Trump’s favor IMO. Its point isn’t particularly clear, and it does not strike me as well-structured. Weirdly, I can’t find it online: it’s titled “The Debate We’ve All Been Waiting For: Harris vs. Harris,” but searching for that doesn’t bring up the ad. And when I watched a YT clip talking about the ad, it was preceded by a Harris ad. (The fact-checking points out that the clips are from two different speeches, one about prices, and the other about job creation, and splicing them together in this fashion is really deceitful).
Edit: I found it on X:
Those are the ad reservations by the campaigns themselves, but there will also be hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising spent by affiliated SuperPACs. I think it’s likely that Trump is counting on Republican dark money to make up the difference where his campaign has scaled back
Yeah, I saw that. If the entire map holds from 2020, that gets him to 270 with Harris at 268. But if, say, Harris were to take NC, he would lose.
So Trump needs to hold his entire map from last time and get PA and get GA just to squeak over the line.
Based on this logic, Harris seems to be in a substantially better position than Trump.
The election in 2020 is a neat reference point but this is a new election, and assuming “Everything will naturally stay the same” is not a wise position to take. What matters is the probability of winning states NOW, and as it stands it’s basically fifty-ffity who wins the ones that add up to 270 or more.
Concentrating on two states as needing to be flipped misses some key points. First, every state exists on a line of probability as to who will win. Some are way, way, way on one end or another, like Massachusetts, which is near-certain Harris, or Montana, which is near-certain Trump. But a bunch exist in a cloud of purple. Secondly, the states are not entirely independent events in terms of probability. IF Trump does well in Pennsylvania, it is extremely probable he will do better than most of us would like in other states as well, like Georgia, Wisconsin, or North Carolina. He’s not going to do well in Pennsylvania and eat shit everywhere else. Similarly, if on Election Night, they call North Carolina early on for Harris, she’ll likely beat Trump in the Rust Belt as well.
States that Trump won, he’s almost certainly going to win again. States that Biden won, Harris is shakey on 6 of them. “Trump needs to flip more states than Harris does” is bad logic.
OK, let’s grant this premise. But he lost with what he had last time, so repeating his 2020 performance will again result in a loss.
Or rather, “In certain states that Biden won in 2020 but was probably going to lose in 2024 before he dropped out, Harris is now mostly polling ahead of Trump, and she doesn’t need to win all of them to win.”
And was never stated that way. But here’s the thing: if Trump is deciding to put all his chips on PA+GA+NC, then that makes it much easier for our side to strategize. If he were deciding to compete in all swing states, then that would be harder.
Yes, but choosing to compete in only a limited number of swing states significantly increases his chance of losing in otherwise competitive states.
Who says he’s doing that? “Going hard on PA and GA” doesn’t mean he’s not competing elsewhere. Of course campaigns will concentrate on tipping point states. Harris’s campaign will do the same.
There is speculation that he is narrowing his focus to this sole path to victory. It’s based on his ad spend. Still a developing story.
“Narrow” does not equal “zero” elsewhere. They are still spending and still working and competing in other states, but the vast majority of their attention appears to be on PA and GA.
There’s a pretty big excluded middle of numbers between 0% and 100%.
True, but PA and GA are the only battleground states at the moment where they are even close to spending as much as Democrats.
You are right that they spent at least a little in all of them, but aside from GA and PA, the closest they’ve come to matching Democrats is Wisconsin, where the Democrats have still spent almost three times as much as the Republicans, and Arizona where the Ds did spent over 3x as much as Rs. When you spend more than 20x as much as your opponent in a state, it’s hard to argue that your opponent is putting much effort there.
Sure, but that depends on what they think of their underlying chances of victory.
Trump was greatly outspent the last time and still only barely lost. If the campaign team estimates they can focus efforts on 2 or 3 states and still win a few of the swing states despite a big differential in spending - as they did the last time - it’s not an unreasonable strategy.
While money does influence elections, we’re not at the point where dollars directly translate to votes. Votes equal votes, and they appear to be calculating most “bang for the buck”. That’s not inherently a bad idea nor is it writing off the other swing states entirely.