Excellent analogy. Emphasis on the ANAL part in the case of DeSantis.
The problem with pundits is they see everything through their very informed and slightly (or very) jaded eyes. They are trying to objectively asses (“so-in-so made a good point here, this one looked uncomfortable there”), but how they judge is not necessarily how Joe and Suzy Sixpack judge.
I am always reminded (I’ve mentioned this before) of the first Obama-McCain debate. Pundits mostly scored Obama’s performance as pretty meh-worthy and thought McCain ended with a slight edge. The public reaction was very much the opposite. Come to find out that people who had never heard Obama speak (most voters) were impressed with how level-headed, calm and reasonable he sounded. That Obama sounded calm, level-headed and reasonable was absolutely no surprise to political junky pundits who had already heard him speak a zillion times before, so they never factored that in to their ratings. But to the voting public it was a minor revelation.
Each and every one of us is prone to falling into that trap of assuming how you perceive the world is the same or even similar to how others do.
For the “debate”'s primary audience of Reactionary Wacko Traitor true believers, I wonder how much any of the style points matter versus the “substance” of what was said.
If DeSantis’s delivery is shifty and awkward and fake, but said he’s deport all the brown people, and especially those born in the USA, would the audience key off the shifty fake, or the racist red meat?
My bet is the pundits would be all about shifty, and the audience would be all about racist red meat. Neither would be paying much attention to how actually factually doable the candidates’ contentions are.
Hence a national audience that thought DeSantis did well amidst pundits (& discerning Dopers) who thought he did badly.
I’m not military, but I wonder how other veterans feel about him bragging about his military service (roughly, “I deployed to Iraq with the Navy SEALs and it’s all about focusing on the mission above all else, that’s what I’ll do as president”). I read up on his Navy career back when he ran against Gillum in 2018. My understanding is that he served in the Navy… as a lawyer, spending a few months at Gitmo before being assigned to Iraq as a legal advisor for a SEAL captain. I got the distinct feeling that DeSantis was hinting that he served in a combat role or something where he was expected to face combat.
Wrt the SEALs, like it was his job to advise them if the mission was legal. Sort of the opposite of putting the mission above all else, if he did his job right. Or maybe I have that wrong.
I thought he also said something about volunteering due to 9/11 but looking at the wiki, he got his undergrad degree from Yale in 2001. Then spent a year teaching history and coaching at some school in Georgia. Then he went to law school at Harvard, and didn’t enlist until 2004, to train as a judge advocate for the Navy while finishing up his law degree.
~Max
Which brings a question to my mind: does the typical conservative audience, live or on TV, ever question the candidate’s willingness to deliver on the red meat? I ask because it seems to me that if the shiftiness makes them wonder if the candidate has any intention of even trying to enact racist policies, then the two lines mentioned above would intersect, right?
As I understand the mindset second hand, from the POV of the audience, they are delivering. See all the TX / FL laws against LBGQT+, drag, being tough on (non-white of course) criminals, exporting of immigrants. Sure, a some of the stuff eventually gets minimized or thrown out in the courts, but that happens much, Much later, and then the politicians can claim they did what they promised but were thwarted by the groomers/commies/deep state.
So they’ll pass a new, barely different piece of legislation, or something targeting yet another group with small numbers to continue the endless “war”, while simultaneously using those minor defeats as an excuse why they should have ever more power to overcome “them”.
Not to go back to our ongoing dispute over the flavors of authoritarianism and fascism in the US, but it’s a tried and true tactic from those playbooks.
I strongly suspect that DeSantis’ success in this poll is largely a function of his lead in the primary polls.
If you are a DeSantis supporter, then you are going to think that DeSantis won the debate. Probably the relevant statistic would be the extent to which each candidate over or under performed relative to their rankings in the polls.
Continuing the discussion from What if we went back to early 20th century immigration policy?:
My recollection is not, as The Hill claims* and PhillyGuy seems to imply, that DeSantis’s expressed support for unilateral military action in Mexico (such as we did in Pakistan for Bin Laden).
My recollection was that this remark was made in the context of cooperation with Mexico. I think Gov. Huchinson had just mentioned working with Mexican authorities to take down drug lords, and then Ms. Maccallum’s question to Gov. DeSantis was a continuation of that theme, like ‘what do you say to that, would you commit to sending U.S. special forces into Mexico?’. I may be misremembering.
~Max
*edited after actually reading the whole Hill article, not just the quoted blurb.
AMLO isn’t going to cooperate with this (ALMO doubles down on hugs not bullets), and his morena party seems to be comfortably ahead in all of polling for next June’s election. The idea that U.S. forces can fight the Mexican cartels, in Mexico, with Mexican government cooperation, is deserving of a fact check.
However, I agree that the GOP push for war with Mexico hasn’t gotten to the point of the search for Bin Laden, or the Iraq Liberation Act. It is just going in that direction.
Trump reportedly plans to visit Detroit rather than attend the next debate.
Detroit says, “We don’t want you here!”
Prediction: Trump will chicken out of going to Detroit, and blame Antifa/Biden/The Deep State.
Where on earth do you get these wild and crazy predictions? 
I don’t think he’ll have any problem drawing a rapturous crowd. Whatever Fain may think, there are plenty of UAW members and their families that are pro-Trump.
I wonder if his parents intentionally named him Shawn, for the joke.