First, he needs to do SOMETHING. He needs a national media campaign and he needs it now. The entire nation is captive to their TV sets. Last night I was watching old sitcoms on an obscure high channel and I saw 3 Trump commercials within a 2 hour span. The number of Biden commercials I’ve seen on TV. Zero. None. Nada.
He needs a robust social media campaign. He also needs some better messaging.
The Democrats have better policies but they have absolutely no idea as to how to sell them beyond their bubble.
They need to tie their policy positions to a message of prosperity. Talk about how universal health care, immigration and more robust worker and environmental protections make our lives more productive and prosperous instead of expecting healthy people to care about strangers that can’t afford their insulin.
He needs to start with vision of what he wants America to look like and sell it. All while using scenes of Trump’s America as contrast. Mostly, he needs a strategy to target first-time voters, which means making yourself visible to people that don’t watch CNN. He also needs a bunch of Roger Stones and Karl Roves and dirty tricksters behind the scenes to counter the propaganda and fight fire with fire.
Seriously, he’s so inept it’s maddening. It’s like watching a Little League baseball team playing a MLB team in the World Series. No, actually it’s like watching a little league baseball team playing an NFL team in the Super Bowl, because these guys are so inept they aren’t even playing the game they’re in.
Like it or not, this has turned into the Year of the Pandemic, and this election will be the Pandemic Election. Every other issue - LGBT, abortion, immigration, etc. - takes a back seat to Covid-19 this year.
Democrats are fortunate that Trump has gifted them by utterly blundering his handling of the virus, and what may be 200,000+ American deaths by the time November rolls around. Had he handled the crisis well it would be a much stronger hand for him, but this year that’s all they have to run on - Covid, Covid, Covid - and it’ll topple Trump.
Not now, not yet. People are burning out on Trump’s blathering. There’s no need to make them sick of hearing Biden, too.
Right now, Biden’s campaign should be building their ground organizations. Making plans with Democratic governors, senators, and representatives. And fund raising, of course.
This election will be entirely a referendum on Trump. Specific policies are only going to lose him votes. The pandemic gives him a great chance to reset his campaign to a general election strategy. Better to run on a simple “Character Matters”, “I Work for You”, “Safe and Sound”, or similarly vague goal.
Talk in generic terms about stimulus and welfare - that’s a much easier argument to make now. I don’t care how philosophically opposed people say they are to “free money;” when they’re facing an existential crisis, philosophy takes a backseat to an empty refrigerator and an empty bank account.
Gotta agree - Biden doesn’t need to do anything right now. Let Trump be the center of the attention, and let it be a referendum on Trump’s presidency. Biden doesn’t even need to be charismatic or energetic, though it helps. I’m convinced that Obama succeeded in becoming the first non-white president in part because 2008 was viewed by many voters as a referendum on the Republican party, and they voted out the Rs in droves. I think Biden can win without even trying that hard - he just needs to not catch COVID-19. He should probably just live in a plastic bubble for a while.
I’m equally concerned not just about the presidency but the senate, particularly Mitch McConnell’s seat. This is an opportunity to win senate seats and I hope it’s not squandered. McConnell was only polling 3 points ahead of McGrath and that was back in February. I can’t imagine his stature has improved in the time since. Keep in mind that Kentucky voted for a Dem governor last year, so there’s a real chance McConnell could be defeated.
Biden must say this, of course, but trashing trump did not help Hillary at all. Biden has to say how he would be different and better. How the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT would be better and different. He has to run on more than being not-trump.
As others have said, maybe it’s too early to start pushing a specific message, but Biden certainly has to get his face out there. The focus group (I know: it was just one focus group) from Iowa that I cited in the “CV will finish trump” thread basically didn’t know anything about trump. Some of those people said trump was doing as well as anybody else would have, and “give him a chance to make good,” and other BS like that. But there are people who feel that way and don’t know Biden from a hole in the ground.
Yes. Democrats need to take the Senate. I should amend my earlier opinion that Biden should be planning with Democratic governors, senators, and representatives. That needs to include candidates as well. We need coattails up and down the ballot.
Biden doesn’t need to and should not trash Trump. This is where the governors, senators, and representatives (current and candidates) come in: they should be trashing Trump and tying their opponents to him. Explain in great detail how Trump has been bad for their constituents. How their opponent wants to help Trump continue to do bad things. Show themselves with and helping Biden.
Biden needs to take the Obama vs Hillary campaign lessons to heart: simple lofty goals win elections and complicated details do not. I wish it weren’t so, but that is the world we live in.
“His disrespectful Covid response consisted of first pulling American scientists from the China region who were part of the already established pandemic plan, denies it will affect us, says it will go away, tries to make himself money by selling hydroxycloroquine, and when people realize it’s more Trump-brand snake oil, he jokes about the thousands of deaths and ill-preparedness to the point of telling people to inject Lysol and drink bleach.”
I don’t think that’s a good idea at all, it plays right into the hands of the people who accuse us of spreading “fake news.” Trump didn’t actually tell anyone to consume poisonous chemicals - the fact that some idiots out there somehow interpreted his statements as such doesn’t mean he actually said it. Some might say “oh, come on, he’s such a horrible liar that it doesn’t matter if we’re 100% accurate with attributing stuff to him…” I disagree, I think it undermines critiques of him. That’s just my opinion.
I was just talking about this with someone the other day. We’d both received our stimulus checks. “Now that people have actually experienced getting a direct infusion of money from the government, Andrew Yang could totally swoop back in and say ‘remember when you got that stimulus check, how awesome it was?! Well, I’m going to make that happen again, and again, and again…vote for me!’ and totally win the election.” I was half-joking when I said it, but only half.
The truth is, a lot of people are really going to appreciate these stimulus checks, and now that they’ve had a taste of free money from the government, they are not going to want to go back. Now that it is no longer a theoretical abstraction but a reality, a candidate could win the election by just promising to give more money and sound extremely convincing while doing it.
I disagree. I don’t think the majority of the people are concerned about COVID at all, except how it has inconvenienced them, and certainly won’t be by November.
The media has gone crazy over it, for three reasons. First, because their main goal is always to push liberal views and support the Democrat party, and they think this will help get a Democrat elected in November. Second, because they overhype everything. Drama and crisis sells ad space. Third, because they are mostly based in New York, where COVID is worse than anywhere else, and they can’t or won’t look past what they see in their immediate area.
But most people aren’t really buying the hype. They see that the “lockdowns” have been essentially meaningless. Everyone has been out and about the whole time, going to Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, liquor stores, etc. They see very few or no cases in their local areas, and don’t see any reason why their bars and barbershops shouldn’t be open now.
Most people are just ready for everything to open back up, and that is happening. By November this “crisis” will be history and the majority of the voters will have forgotten about it. Most of them are over it already.
Timing is everything. It’s the situation more than the person.
There’s a golden opportunity for Dems and especially for Joe Biden in the sense that Republicans are eventually going to put their foot down and argue that we should stop spending money and if we’re still in this situation 3-4 months from now, people of all stripes are going to tell them to stuff it. Biden probably doesn’t have to go full-on socialist; he just needs to move a little further to the left than where he is now and he needs to commit to that message. No need to get into specifics.
Yeah I don’t see him getting anywhere with that claim. However, there is always the very real possibility that a campaign against globalization and immigration might work.
Trump’s problem is that his response to the pandemic is not necessarily going to be covered up by a xenophobic campaign. There’s growing evidence that people are differentiating between things they don’t like about China, immigration, and globalization on one hand, and Trump’s pandemic response on the other.
To that end, I won’t be surprised if there’s a misinformation campaign to promote conspiracy theories about the virus and Democrats’ response, and it’s possible that it could work. Suppose, for instance, Trump wants to push conspiracy theories suggesting that Democrats are deliberately trying to spread coronavirus to shut down industries and take them over. The “government is coming for you” conspiracy theories are the most dangerous ones, and I think we will see them - and it will get ugly.
The people I know online feel this way. The people I know in real life, the apolitical ones, really don’t keep up with what Trump is up to. But they do watch the ads served up during American Idol and Law and Order reruns.
I see Trump’s robust social media campaign working. I see my nephews friends and coworkers reaping reward points for getting their friends to text Trump. I see people that don’t follow politics disbelieving real information and buying into the Republican narrative. People out in the real world are blaming the Democrats and not Trump for the coronavirus response. All this wonderful and accurate reporting on the abject failure of the coronavirus response and the trashing of the rule of law isn’t reaching anyone that needs to see it. But the endless Trump ads are.
He’s winning, he’s kicking our asses right now. His campaign knows what they’re doing and they’re laughing their asses off at what’s going on inside the liberal bubble. It’s heartbreaking. I’m going to place a huge bet on Trump on one of the prediction sites. Thousands of dollars. That way if he wins, and he probably will, I’ll get a huge sum of money that will prevent me from literally going suicidal. If he loses, I’ll be so happy I won’t care that I lost 5K or so. It’s the only why I can survive the upcoming trainwreck that is a November.
This is how I used to gamble on sports. I’d bet against my favorite team so that I get a win-win either way: Either my team wins, or I earn money. It’s akin to buying insurance on your team.
Everyone needs to re-read this post. Because we’re at the point where, no matter what plans they have, no matter if they go high or go low, no matter if they run on Trump’s character or Biden’s character, no matter if they trash Trump’s record or explain how Biden would have done things differently, what their real winning strategy will be is “Just wait for things to get worse”.
There are a lot of people like the above poster who haven’t seen the problems hit them yet, and can’t learn from the example of those who have been hit already. They don’t appreciate the mathematics of a pandemic, all they can really understand is what they see in front of them. They’re convinced it’s all “Liberal hype” by people who “want to destroy the economy” or some such nonsense. So, they are going to re-open their neighborhoods, their cities, their states, no matter what anyone tells them.
It will only be after they can no longer deny that the predictions weren’t “hype”, that cases of COVID and deaths due to COVID actually did skyrocket just as predicted, that they will be able to see that they are wrong. And that’s the only thing that might even possibly change their vote.
This is what the trump team is promoting. Although if it’s not that serious and only affects New York City, why is trump getting tested every day and making everyone in the West Wing wear a mask? Sorry, I know logic doesn’t work.
:smack:
Horatius said: “It will only be after they can no longer deny that the predictions weren’t “hype”, that cases of COVID and deaths due to COVID actually did skyrocket just as predicted, that they will be able to see that they are wrong. And that’s the only thing that might even possibly change their vote.”
I have a feeling that even if COVID kills off everyone in their small-ish flyover town (including their mother in the nursing home), it will somehow still be the Dems’ and the media’s fault. Trump tried to stop it but the Bad Libruls were too bad to be stopped.
I truly do not know how a reasonable Biden fights this level of monumental ignorance and wrongheadedness. Becoming similarly unreasonable won’t work.