Look, I despise Trump. But last night, Biden looked and sounded far older.
Both men have age-related issues, but:
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Only one man’s opposition has spent years circulating the narrative that the other guy is too old to be president. If the Democrats were to start saying that Trump was too old, they’d be dismissed.
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Only one man’s main drawback is his age. With Trump, his age has to get into a long line of defects.
Logically, each candidate should be assessed on their merits, but logically, this race is no contest—Biden is clearly superior to Trump. It’s not the people who are assessing the race logically who need to be persuaded.
I dunno, I just feel like all that will go “in one ear and out the other” of every 35-and-under voter in the country.
It doesn’t quite have the ring of “Russia, Russia, Russia” but in my opinion they need to hammer home “abortion, abortion, abortion” over and over again. The handful of times I’ve seen VP Harris interviewed she seems to be trying to get the message across, but I feel that that needs to be front and center of every campaign ad (granted, I’m an old guy so I’m not the “target audience” of the abortion debate anyway, so what do I know).
Because you know front and center of every MAGAt campaign ad for the next 130 days is going to be “look at the 100 bajillion scary brown people who have crossed the Wide Open Borders and sneak into your homes at night and watch you sleep”. I don’t think the rebuttal to that is “well, the other guy sucks because he lies a lot and he’s a detestable blowhard”.
This is the right tack to take. What’s done is done. Take the lumps, admit that he’s not a youngster anymore and pivot to making the case against Trump. While hopefully demonstrating through his continued public appearances that he does have the energy and focus to execute the office.
I agree. Smart response by the campaign on that messaging and great job by Biden (in front of a friendly crowd, it must be said) nailing it in that speech.
364 days trump acts senile, one day Biden looks poorly.
Yeah – the one day everyone in America could see him side by side with Trump.
“I may be old, but you know who else is? Thomas and Alito.”
I’m still waiting to hear back from Biden’s campaign team.
Ah yes, I like it! I hope you make a million bucks off the royalties.
Everyone should sit down for a minute, take a deep breath, and imagine your life, and this country, in 4 months. Do you really think you’ll be thinking about this debate, and do you really think many people in this country will be thinking about it? Even if they’re thinking about politics, are they going to be thinking about this debate, or the 2nd debate (if it happens), or Trump’s continued prosecutions (wherever they are), or the latest awful and anti-American thing Trump has said or done, or a million other things that happen in 4 months of politics?
One debate in June isn’t the end of the world. The election isn’t over. In fact, I just made my first political donation in several months. Apparently so did many other Biden supporters. If we have to better, then let’s do better. It’s not over.
Earlier on I had expressed my hope that Biden would go into the real election season as the underdog, that only the imminent reality of Trump likely winning would get certain groups of voters off their collective asses.
Damn be careful what you wish for.
Maybe Biden just had a very off night. Still as someone who historically has loved Joe Biden that performance has me voting against Trump still but not for Joe. A president should be able to “on” even when they have a bad cold. That Biden last night might not have been even able to pass the dementia tests Trump was bragging about.
The election of course comes down to a relative handful of relatively lower information voters in a small handful of states. Maybe, possibly probably, most of them didn’t even watch last night. He’s put himself in a deep hole now but the lower information voters won’t really be paying attention for a while yet.
I appreciate that Biden buys into the personal mythology of getting back up after being knocked down. I was taught that too. But he was not knocked down; he threw himself onto the canvas boxing an idiot.
I don’t know which is the real Biden at this point. A huge number of people are now sure the weak old confused doddering husk we saw last night is the real Biden.
It is a long road up to convince enough voters otherwise. I have a hard time believing that the person we saw last night can climb that road.
But he won’t step aside
For kicks though - would the Battle Royale that would ensue if he did fracture the party or energize it?
Nope, there will be a couple more debates. We shall see,
Biden has out-fundraised Trump by nearly 2-to-1 in the last 24 hours.
I frankly doubt both of them. These “24 hour” totals are unsubstantiated and may or may not include money donated to the RNC/DNC, various PACs, etc. They’re also gamed by campaigns getting major donors to cut big checks now that they would have given later in order to goose the total.
I don’t know about anybody else, but this panic has indeed kick started my motivation to give. Yesterday I gave a very large donation, much larger than usual, to the Biden campaign.
We’re doing the same.
You’re never gonna keep him down.
And here we get the power of marketing. The Trump message that resonates the best is a simple one, repeated endlessly: Biden is to old, Biden is too old, Biden is too old!!! Every an utter moron can remember that; “Oh, why aren’t I supposed to like Biden? Oh right, he’s too old!”
The anti-Trump message is just too much. Every time someone starts to talk about why Trump shouldn’t be elected, you get a laundry list of reasons, too many reasons for anyone to remember all of them. Listing his defects is like pulling weeds out of a garden: No matter how sure you are that you got them all, there’s always one more you missed.
That makes marketing to the moron above very difficult. He’ll remember “too old”, but all the rest will wash over him, leaving nothing behind.
The Democrats need to research which one or two anti-Trump arguments work the best on key voters, and then hammer those points as hard as they can, for the rest of the campaign.
Biden has a really bad debate - his fundraising goes up.
Trump is convicted of 34 felonies - his fundraising goes up.
Ain’t America grand?
I did also, pretty much tripled my previous donations.