That’s because you’re using the word “strategy” in a very different sense of the word than everybody else.
There’s “strategy” as in “here is our defined goal”. And, sure, Trump and his team have the Black vote as a goal. No doubt about that. And for working on women voters and other major groups. No nationwide campaign will exist without “strategy” at that level.
Then there’s “strategy” as in “here is a coherent plan we execute to achieve those goals”. That might exist back in the brain trust but having Trump out there talking to unfriendly crowds so poorly prepared indicate the “coherent” and “execute” parts of that need a lot more thought. Like, a lot a lot.
I know you got that from the article, but there’s some question as to the overall accuracy. It’s based on exit polling (of course - we can’t actually validate against the real results), which can be accurate to a degree, but with margins of error.
Worse, we do know that for 2020 in particular (hey! pandemic), exit polling was going to be challenging.
Even worse, the methodology changed because the polling groups knew it would be challenging. So there was more early exit polling and phone polling rather than directly accessing voters as they left polling locations. Not quite apples and oranges but certainly apples and pears. In a broad sense, it’s the best they were going to get but with such uncertainties, hoping to be on the good side of the increased margin of error seems foolhardy.
If the campaign was actually using those numbers as ground truth, again, their execution of their strategy leaves much to be desired.
A recent poll (albeit prior to Biden dropping out), that is mentioned in the same article had Trump with 12% of the Black vote this cycle.
Trump and his team defeated Clinton and her massive political machine. He and his team are not some bumbling morons who just repeatedly get lucky. They carve off slices of disaffected groups and package them up with his base mob to win electoral votes. It is childish wishful thinking to simply dismiss him as dumb and lucky. That kind of complacency is why we are here in the first place.
No, but neither are they stable geniuses who always know what they’re doing and never make mistakes. The truth is in-between, and what happened yesterday leaned much more heavily on the “mistake” end of the spectrum.
“I do not believe that the former president will get 22 percent of the Black vote. I’d sooner believe he’d get 22 percent of the votes from pixies, elves, and the Tuatha de Denaan.” - Charlie Pierce
Reading that result more closely says there was a 69/12 split, leaving the remaining 19% as other or undecided.
That’s not remotely what’s going to happen and taking that as a likelihood that black voters would have split 69/12 with 19% other if the election happened then would be unrealistic.
Sure, try to mine the data for whatever you can, but interpreting this poll in such a fashion is more than foolhardy.
Who exactly is doing that?
There’s a HUUUUUUGE excluded middle between dumb and lucky vs 25th dimensional chess masters.
Of the 7 Black Trump voters (vs Biden) we originally recruited just 2 weeks earlier, 3 had to bail because they were now supporting Harris. We all know better than to generalize qual findings, but this remarkable problem is not one I’ve ever encountered in 15+ years polling.
Trump has the white idiot/asshole vote sewn up and he’s working on a share of the black asshole/idiot vote. What is the Harris campaign supposed to do about that? Appeal to, and motivate, as much of the non asshole/idiot population as possible. You can’t win by playing in the mud with the pigs.
I highly doubt he has any black advisers, if he did they would have been marched in front of the camera’s to show the black loves him. More likey he has some white adviser who read some OPed’s from a white pundit who had also read the 70 year old book that you were touting and decided to use it as the basis for his weekly column, knowing that it will be popular among conservatives since it tells them that they will win the black vote, and that black people are the real racists.
Everyone who was telling off @split_p_j for saying that Trump and his campaign are following a plan when they tell black people that Kamala isn’t black. He even said he didn’t think it would actually work, because everyone knows Trump is racist.
He wasn’t at any point saying that Trump was chessmaster. Just that he’s not just flailing around. He has and is executing a plan–a plan that will work on some black men.
You guys seem to forget that Trump has a campaign. That there are other Republicans out there. He doesn’t come up with all of his ideas on his own. Yeah, Trump would be too stupid to realize this. But his handlers are legitimate politicians, who know how to be political.
They know how to use racism to their advantage. Including anti-mixed racism from black people. It’s not like all racists are white.
PJ may say some stupid things, but he does have insight into a part of Black culture that a lot of us don’t know about. That’s the benefit of diversity.
I noted, in that thread, that he raised some points that were potentially valid, and certainly worthy of discussion. And I recognize that, as a bleeding-heart liberal white guy of a certain age, I have very little firsthand knowledge of how black men, particularly young black men, may be thinking about politics.
My issue was, and is, that he made a number of statements as facts in the thread, and when asked to provide cites, and links to polls or surveys, repeatedly said (paraphrasing), “I’ve given cites elsewhere” (i.e., in other threads, I guess). Which is, as I noted, unhelpful, and not a useful way to try to aid others in seeing your points as having any validity.
The ones I didn’t appreciate were the ones who acted like “guy I don’t like said this, so it must he wrong.” It just seemed like people want to believe that Trump is stupid, despite his success in the past.
Not taking Trump seriously is so stupid. To do it because you hate a particular poster is even dumber.
Will it, though? There’s scant evidence he’s actually moved the needle at all compared to 4 or even 8 years ago.
There’s a bit of polling data that could be taken as a hopeful sign but very little that’s substantive.
The issue with his handlers is that many of them are like TV executives back in the 70s. Rather than actually engage with the audience they wish to target, they’d rather rely on (often bad) assumptions and act on those instead.
So, sure, he’s got political operatives. But the assumption they know what they’re doing, at least in this particular case, doesn’t meet the sniff test.
Now, among Hispanic men? Yeah, there’s more than a little evidence they’re making significant in-roads there.
