I do. Maybe a dark, Hitlerian charisma, but Trump does have charisma.
Both Bushes won by beating Democrats who were even less charismatic than they.
Both Trump and Bush 43 have charisma. It’s weird to claim they don’t. Hell, that was the entire narrative of the 2000 campaign. Gore was like a robot up there. And ALL Trump has is charisma. I find him totally detestable, but I’m actually paying attention to what he says and does.
Also, looking back into history isn’t that useful here. One of the theories of the case is that social media and the collapse of legitimate journalism and fair and balanced network news have totally changed the rules.
Seems like a bad idea to say the Democrats should be running candidates like George McGovern and Mike Dukakis rather than candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
I agree with you on Reagan and Trump.
But I feel McCain and Huckabee had charisma.
I don’t want to debate who does or doesn’t have charisma, because my point is that so few people actually have it and almost none of them are in politics.
But I will debate the notion that social media has changed everything. It works for Trump. It works for AOC, too. But 99.9% of the people in politics, including the younger ones just getting in, show no signs of being elected via social media. Nor do they have enormous followings even after they get into power.
I could be wrong, but I continue to assert that Trump was an off-the-charts outlier. And politics is more than the presidential race. The next president is unlikely to be an outsider again. Trump won because nobody in the Republican establishment believed for a second it could happen. They won’t make that mistake again.
The influence of social media is not in a politician’s Tweets or followers, Trump excepted. It’s in the massive coordinated disinformation campaigns. A charismatic candidate is insulated and one who’s a highly effective communicator can neutralize that better than one who’s not. This is why someone like AOC will become very important.
But the bigger change that makes charisma more important is the de-evolution of mainstream media. The talking head shows no longer do journalism, they are infotainment. The Fox and Friends style shows feast on an unlikable candidate. Even shows like Last Week Tonight and the Daily Show will give a charismatic guy way more “earned media” than one who’s not. That’s what’s changed.
[Emphasis mine.]
Curious: how did Ronald Reagan become Donald Trump? 
…ACTING!
That’s probably true. I’m hard pressed to come up with examples, though. What politicians do you think are benefiting from it at a lower level?
AOC is the best example I can think of. Her ability to retort with well applied snark via Tweet to the idiotic attack of the day tends to almost immediately move the discussion away from a regurgitation of the bogus attack and instead a discussion of the burn.
One of my big diagnoses with Trump and all his lies, is this: he lies constantly…then the news channels replay the video of the lie, or show his Tweet, essentially giving the lie a massive force multiplication. Then they spend a half hour repeating the claim as they go about debunking it or talking about reactions to the lie. All this amplification and repetition gets that idea lodged in peoples brains, even when they know it’s untrue or suspect, the thing the end up remembering is the lie…not the correction.
AOC usually doesn’t engage directly on the lie directed at her. She instead attacks back or dismisses it in a way that the falsehood isn’t repeated in the retort. It’s subtle, but effective. Her humor also distracts from the falsehood being the thing people remember.
On TV…honestly it’s all the Lincoln Project guys that do the best job of talking about Trump and his lackeys in a way that mocks and dismisses them, without elevating them. Their points are sharp and succinct and they don’t get bogged down in policy rhetoric. It’s hard to quantify, but they communicate so much more effectively than whoever the Democratic surrogate on the program happens to be. There’s nothing at all mushy about what they say.
Trump and AOC. As I implied earlier, it’s hard to tell from single data points whether they are precursors or outliers.
Like picture if somehow people voted for Obama and then Trump, in substantial numbers. Inconceivable!
This is something that has been rehashed a ton on this board, and the vast majority here are very hostile to the suggestion, but this view of politics is broken. Democrats keep running moderates, so when they win they say they won because they ran a moderate. When they lose (or, as now, win by insufficient margins), they say they weren’t moderate enough, and feel that their suspicions that the people they never try to reach are unreachable have been confirmed. After all, they haven’t reached them! So they keep trying more and more moderacy, until it works, at which point it proves they were right.
It has been beaten into the ground around here, it’s not something people in the demographic of almost every SDMB member believe is true, and a lot of them are very, uh, sincere in their certainty. But for what it’s worth, I think it’s true. There are more political viewpoints on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, TomPerezio.
I don’t think they are that similar. They are certainly different than the standard issue politician, but besides that their approaches aren’t similar to one another. But both can be super effective in the modern hyper-speed, no-guardrails political news cycle.
Taking a step back. The Democrat’s overall strategy in 2024 is going to change not only because their thesis will evolve over the next 4 years…but with a post-Trump Republican party the competition could be totally and completely different. Will the next GOP candidate inherit the cult-like slavish devotion that Trump garnered from the deplorables? Will the GOP fracture with Trump loyalists going one way and the Paul Ryan style repubs making a comeback? If that’s the dynamic in the other side, how does this change the Blue strategy?
Brilliant!!!Umm. what’s so hard to understand about this, Democrats do not keep running moderates, moderates keep running, and winning the Democratic Party’s primaries.
I don’t know; I give up. What’s hard to understand?
There is no such thing as “winning by insufficient margins”. Biden has won. He beat a incumbent, which is rare in modern politics and has only happened once in the Presidential races in memory (Carter). And the Dems dont keep running moderates, as Kerry, Dukakis , Mondale and McGovern have shown. All of whom lost- big time.
Next “the Democrats” dont run anyone. The voters choose the candidate.
Overall, the Democrats have done quite well in winning elections. Going back to JFK, about half the Presidents have been Democrats.
You post made it clear you dont understand that.
Has the election been officially called for Biden yet?
Clinton in 1992?