And then there’s this nice bit from the Schadenfreude thread.
Who is it who is “exhausted”?
Woo hoo!
Seriously, I’ve had a completely unsupported hunch that the Trump tribe must be getting a little tired of the watching the same old movie over and over. Yes, the hardcore subset will follow him over the cliff. But there has to be some material percentage of the “faithful” who’d prefer a little peace and quiet.
I imagine some of them have got to be tired of all the losing. Watching Trump lose time and time again in his various court cases, watching all the money they sent to Trump for re-election being thrown into the gaping maw that are his personal legal fees, etc., etc. Their feet ought to be wet by now because Trump is swamping their boat threatning to take everyone down with him.
For some of them, the sunk cost fallacy must be wearing very thin indeed.
Yep. Talk about exhausting. We hear Trump say something stupid like “cofefe”, and we just think, “Man, that guy is stupid”, and move on with our day. But the MAGAts? They have to tie themselves in knots trying to convince themselves that he’s not an idiot, that this is actually some kind of five-dimensional chess move that everyone else is too stupid to understand. And then there’s never any pay-off. The never get The Big Reveal where Trump explains how “cofefe” actually prevented WW3, or whatever. He just moves on to the next stupid thing, and they have to do it all over again.
Maintaining that kind of cognitive dissonance in the face of everything they see with their own eyes must be exhausting.
Yeah they’ve been explaining what he “really meant” for all the crazy stuff he says for nigh on a decade now. For someone who they claim “says it like it is”, he sure has a hard time being clear about what he really means. It must be exhausting. Reality keeps punching them in the face and the conspiracy against Trump has grown to the vast majority of the human race at this point. Literally everyone who isn’t hardcore MAGA is in on it now, it seems. That kind of thing must be really hard to maintain psychologically.
Yes! At some point doesn’t the shine wear off of the invincible, omnipotent strong man if he keeps fucking losing?
I posted this somewhere, that if every time he loses he recites his greatest hits (“They cheated!” “It was rigged!” “The Deep State!”), doesn’t that get tired to the peanut gallery?
Okay. If I’m wrong, I’m glad to be wrong about that. I do think fatigue has depressed these figures from what they could have been.
I have an NYT account, but the article seems to be gone.
Well stated!
I couldn’t get past the paywall to read, but it sounds like more horse race-fluffing shyte from a paper I absolutely have no respect for in the first place.
Currently, I am more enraged with the enablers (the entire GOP) than with Trump, who is clearly melting down before our eyes. They are not going to win; in fact, they are going to lose so hard it hurts forever.
What is this in response to?
Probably the referenced NY Times article.
But yes, been hearing and reading a lot around that does seem to have a certain odd fatalism that somehow we are doomed if something exciting doesn’t happen soon.
@Gorsnak would have to confirm, but I understood that “article” to be tongue-in-cheek — that even if Biden smoked Trump in the general, the “liberal media” would still spin it as “Biden’s in trouble!!!”.
Sounds like 2016, when Trump won while Clinton outspent him by almost 2 - 1.
It depends on specifics of how a campaign is set up, but political consultants often get a percentage of the advertising buy. Do they sincerely think all that spending helps the candidate? Yes. As Upton Sinclair famously said, It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Ads won’t change my vote here, but, in the past, I have voted against candidates because I disliked their negative advertising.
When Biden advertises, he is reminding Trump voters to vote, and vice-versa. Compare and contrast to Coke and Pepsi ads. Pepsi ads have the side-effect of reminding people to buy competitor colas. This side effect doesn’t hurt Pepsi — all they reasonably care about is their own sales. So Pepsi marketing makes sense. By contrast, political campaign spending can easily backfire.
P.S. Another way campaign spending hurts is that the candidates make gaffes during fund-raising speeches — remember the deplorables.
P.P.S. Relevance to the thread is that if solid Biden voters become less militantly anti-Trump, that’s harmless to Joe’s chances.
Why do you assume Biden will spend his funds on advertising? Phone banking, door knocking and letter writing campaigns are far more effective. Biden knows this.
Here’s a link shooting down your idea regarding Biden’s spending priorities. But my link could be wrong.
I know little about political phone banking and door knocking, and nothing about letter writing campaigns. Of the three, the last one sounds least annoying to the targets — although I have no idea how campaigns spend money on it.
Articles I have read on campaign spending effectiveness, like this one, do not break down by type of spending.
I’m wondering about the phrase “far more effective” in your post. I’m not telling you what to post, but I do wonder about whether such a claim has data behind it.
The big problem I see with direct voter contact is training. The first part might be active listening — itself hard to train. And when active listening elicits, from low information voters, some belief or priority that isn’t congruent with Biden’s positioning, what then?
Alternately, you can just ask if they plan to vote for Joe, and help to do so if told yes. This has been done in the past and should be done again.
When I was an activist, it was always drummed into us that you don’t waste time trying to convert the opposition, you’re trying to identify firm supporters (to be reminded to turn out) and undecideds (in case they can be persuaded later). Each of those would (in a sufficiently well-resourced campaign) have a separate follow-up operation.
“Has Biden’s record landslide victory created expectations that he won’t be able to live up to?”
TBF they’d ask that of any Democrat who won the election.
Liberal-chattering-class pessimism is quite something.