Sure, there are stupid people who will accept anything Trump says. But there’s not enough of them to win Trump re-election.
Trump should realize he can’t just replay his 2016 campaign. He was able to slide through that one because all he had to do was make outlandish promises of what he would do if he was President. But he’s now been President for over three years. There are going to be people - even among those who voted for him in 2016 - who will now being looking at his record.
In 2016, for example, there were people who voted against Trump because they thought building a border wall was a dumb idea. In 2020, those people will still think it’s a dumb idea and will vote against Trump again. But they’ll be joined by the people who voted for Trump in 2016 because they loved the idea of a border wall and are now disappointed with Trump because he never built it.
You have a faith in the American public which I’ve lost over the last four years, mainly because I’ve seen how social media has become such an effective political weapon. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Y’know what? I say if someone’s getting scared at signs and portents… good. BE scared. And do something about it - preferrably ensuring there IS a large vote against him.
Being assured that there was no way he could make it all the way was exactly how the other Republican contenders and the Democratic campaign failed to stop him early when they could have.
So act as if he CAN win. BUT do not panic, rather, as a consequence also act like you can prevent that. Organize, educate, get out the vote.
Perhaps I didn’t make my point very well. Yes, Biden has nothing to do with causing this unrest and certainly has no role in managing it today.
But the volume of motivated law-and-order voters is pretty well proportional to the volume of scary news. What Trump’s ad is saying is “If you want more of that, of those people being allowed, nay encouraged, to run wild in the streets, then let Biden be elected. If you want it stopped and stopped cold, vote for the rightists. Vote for Trump.”
It doesn’t have to be factually accurate to be persuasive to the people it’s trying to persuade. The more there is unrest, the more there is unrest loudly trumpeted on even the slightly-right media, the bigger Trump’s turnout will be. THAT is how that’s Biden’s Achilles Heel. Specifically, the volume of unrest and the media treatment is something he has almost no influence over. From his POV it’s an uncontrolled risk.
The second way greater unrest is harmful to Biden is he will be forced to take a position on it. And the more, and more aggressive unrest, the stronger a position he will need to take to keep his left wing on-side and engaged.
Note that “stronger” doesn’t mean more repressive. It means taking more account of, making larger promises over, making it more of a centerpiece issue in his advertising platform.
Unfortunately for him, it’s hard to imagine a platform that satisfies even everyone on the various shades of the left much less everyone on the various shades of the left while also avoiding riling as many or more rightists into a frenzy of R voting.
This race is all about turnout. Anything that scares whitebread suburban man & woman runs the risk of creating massive R turnout. While Biden is stuck trying to triangulate between violence excusers, legitimate racial grievants asking for a fairer future, and others looking for reparations. Plus a few other factions I haven’t mentioned.
It’s excellent for Biden’s chances that Trump is comprehensively mismanaging any and every challenge Fate throws at him.
It’s just unfortunate that this particular problem (racial unrest mixed with violent looting) is so neuralgic across the 4-square checkerboard of R vs D and W vs B. Threading a happy path through that minefield has challenged better natural politicians than Biden.
To the degree the unrest dies down and is replaced by almost any other challenge for Trump to screw up bigly Biden will gain.
The problem is, Donnie’s an even bigger pedo. The bigger problem is that voters are wise to the smear tactics that will be employed and people motivated to vote against Trump won’t likely care too much if Biden’s not perfect. There are some exceptions of course: if they can succeed in making Biden look like a rapist or a racist, then that could cause damage among his key constituencies.
Exactly. Remember the Bush dynasty, the Clintons? Trump beat both of them.
The Blue Wall?
This is a guy who for the last 5 years has taken conventional wisdom and fucked it in its ass, (without its consent, natch).
He can win. He has an uncanny ability to identify what enough people will support and buck trends. Attacking the Blue Wall was supposed to be laughable…yeah not so much. He is attacking Democratic-run urban centers and states, which tend to be the hardest hit by Covid. And unrest.
He is betting that since most peoples direct link with the Government is state and local and the hardest hit tend to be democratic (yes I know red states are being hit as well) then enough people might switch over to him, blaming the Democrats, like so much former industrial states voters supported him in 2016. The attacks on NYS and California being failed states are with major “only I can fix them” undertones.
It’s a risky bet, but he has made them before and won.
This is for chappachula too, if that was the case it does not explain why Trump polling did go into free fall while that is going, I will have to say that most of the people are figuring out that what the right is trying to do, to equate peaceful protesters with violent ones is backfiring and hard. This is because one should not forget that a lot of the peaceful protesters are more numerous and more people supports them, Trump and henchmen equating them with the most violent ones and his asinine default protection of confederate traitors and police bad apples is not really helping Trump.
Particularly when one has not to forget that Trump, being Trump, decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory from public opinion in the most despicable of ways:
Too bad that that is what Trump claimed to be the best at, Trump is not fixing things, he is making things worse and the opening of schools is bound to become another nightmare for Mr. ‘I don’t take responsibility at all’.
There are all sorts of possibilities for Trump to win this election, but your analysis here is devoid of any relationship with the current reality. Democratic-controlled states are the ones hit hardest? Have you even been following the news for the past few weeks?
Here is a list of states that, according to Harvard University’s statistics, have the highest infection rates over the last couple of weeks:
State
New Cases/100,000/day
Arizona
49.6
Florida
42.3
Louisiana
32.2
South Carolina
30.4
Texas
26.8
Georgia
26.7
Alabama
26.4
Nevada
24.6
Mississippi
23.1
Idaho
22.7
Tennessee
21.9
California
19.2
Arkansas
18.8
Utah
18.5
The national 7-day rolling average for the United States is currently (July 11) at 16 new cases per day, per 100,000 people.
By my count, of the 14 states that have infection rates above the national average, 12 went for Trump in 2016, 11 have Republican Governors, and those same 11 also have a Republican-controlled state legislature. Six of the top seven states are completely Republican dominated at the state level.
Here are the 12 states with the lowest new infection rates over the last few weeks:
State
New Cases/100,000/day
Vermont
1.0
New Hampshire
1.6
Maine
1.8
Hawaii
2.0
Connecticut
2.3
New Jersey
3.1
Massachusetts
3.2
New York
3.3
Rhode Island
4.1
Michigan
4.8
Montana
5.2
Pennsylvania
5.4
Colorado
5.4
Wyoming
5.4
Quite a lot of blue states right there, and at least a couple of really important swing states with Democratic governors. Tell me again how blaming the state governments for the coronavirus crisis is going to help Republicans. Hell, even plenty of New York Democrats thought Andrew Cuomo was a douchebag six months ago, but his popularity ratings have gone through the roof since March.
This is exactly right. People are forgetting that Trump’s numbers fell hard the first few weeks after George Floyd’s death (during which most of the riots happened). They was still very very low compared to even 2 months ago. People blamed Trump for the issues going on. And importantly, independents blamed Trump by a wide margin.
I may be optimistic where I shouldn’t be but I don’t think the mainstream media that Trump has derided and sicced his followers on wil be as quick provide the false equivalence between Donnie and Biden that they did with Hillary and Donnie.
No, that plan is not going to work. Because when Trump says he will stop the riots cold, people are going to look around and ask “Then why do we still have riots? Why haven’t you stopped them?”
Every day there’s rioting, it shows people that Trump cannot stop rioting. And the bigger the problem gets, the worse Trump’s inability to do something about it becomes.
As I’ve already said, Trump can’t act like it’s 2016. He can’t just make promises. People expect to see results by now.
Yeah, I never understood the idea that good polls make people less likely to vote. When I think my candidate has a good chance to win, I’m excited to vote for him. When I think he’ll probably lose, I still vote, but I’m not enthusiastic about it.
Politico is suggesting that the Republicans have an advantage in voter registration, as in a pandemic environment voters who tend to support Republicans are finding it easier to register.