I didn’t say “screaming and yelling.” I said louder. Never mind.
The opening and closing quote tags each have to be on a separate line. IOW a line break before and after.
Also when you highlight the paragraph you want to quote, a box should pop-up above it (or below it, I guess) that says "Quote– click on that and your quotation will magically appear in the reply window. Insert your cursor at the end and commence to argue reply. Hehe. Couldn’t resist. When the quotation does appear in the reply box, note the position of the opening and closing quote tags.[/PSA]
I’m afraid you’re right. We must not forget that these people voted for this asshole in the first place. They will NEVER believe that they were wrong. They will ALWAYS blame something else for their bad choices in ANYTHING in life.
Im not saying that the Democrats should be louder or “go low”. Have you heard the expression “sell the sizzle, not the steak?”.
Strong policies are good but you have to sell the vision. You have to convince people that the policies will be improve their lives and that means you have to sell people on how great their lives are going to be under your watch.
For example, don’t just describe the policy details of your health care plan and expect people to get excited about community ratings and pre-existing condition protections. Paint a picture of what a country with health care security looks like and the freedom that comes with knowing a health emergency won’t financially destroy you.
Republicans and their supporters are perfectly happy to help spread Russian propaganda and lies, as long as it supports the cause of shitting on people they don’t like.
I also think Democrats, and Biden in particular, should be far more hard hitting and pointed. Not screaming and yelling and fear-mongering. More like the ads being released by The Lincoln Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law and Republican Voters Against Trump. These are made by Republicans and are VERY pointed, accurate and mostly pretty short, too.
Democrats could save a lot of time and effort and simply buy some of these ads for use in the campaign.
But we kinda do that already. Dems pretty much said it would be the end of democracy if Trump gets re-elected. They also talked about police brutality and the pandemic - hard to get more fatalistic than that. Nothing wrong with playing up the negatives, but one thing that Democrats did not do effectively, IMO, was to attack Trump’s strengths. The messaging still seems aimed at urban and suburban voters, and much less so to rural America, which Democrats seem to have given up on.
Say what one will about the shit show that was the Republican Nat’l Convention, they went after Democrats’ strengths in at least talking to Black voters. They did so knowing that, at best, they will probably only get a fraction of that vote, but just by inviting Black republicans to speak directly to black voters was, I thought, effective. Democrats used people like John Kasich to send a message to traditional Republican voters, but surely there are white middle aged war veterans who own guns but believe in some form of basic gun control. And surely there are farmers in Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin who are getting screwed by Trump’s trade policies. I didn’t see a lot of them featured as speakers, though.
Crap, apparently trump’s relentless fearmongering is gaining some traction. Chris Wallace on the Fox Sunday Morning show (yes, it’s Fox, but Chris Wallace is a pretty straight shooter) showed a poll saying suburbanites thought trump was more likely to keep them safe than Biden would by something like a 42% to 22% margin.
The polls show Trump gaining some ground (about 2-3 percentage points depending on the poll). This is neither surprising nor alarming. Trump’s bad press was attributable to the fact that he was performing poorly in response to a pandemic. Now that the COVID summer wave has been baked into the cake, so to speak, the RNC was an opportunity for Trump to reset things a bit, which they have.
The unrest provides an opening for Republicans, who can use the chaos to their advantage, although I don’t think it will be as advantageous to them as they believe. I just think that Democrats really need to drive home the message that it’s not just leftist activists who are in teh streets and this is Trump’s America: law and order president, my ass.
If this were a baseball game we’d be in the 7th inning. These last few weeks, it will be about the president’s performance and probably not much else, which is really what this entire race has been about. We have an incumbent, and centrists and softer Trump voters who probably don’t like Trump but voted for him in 2016 are trying to decide if he’s so bad that they can’t be bothered to vote, or is he so bad that they might vote for Biden or a third party candidate.
I think that both COVID and the economy will be a focus and there is time for Trump to fuck up responses to both.
The violence that is happening is not happening in suburbia.
If Biden is elected, that won’t change.
If Trump is elected, it just might.
Honestly, if Trump is reelected, then I do think that what should happen is that protests move to the suburbs. Some marches round some cul-de-sacs and along the sidewalks of suburban neighborhoods that voted for Trump would be more effective than out of the way in cities that these fragile white suburbanites will never even visit.
His life is NOT being destroyed “because of the actions of violent anarchists”. Rittenhouse’s life is being “destroyed” because of HIS actions. No one else’s.
