Jump to content

Ghost of LL

Certifiably Surly
  • Posts

    6628
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Ghost of LL

  1. I think there's very little indication that rallies have any effect on polling. There is an exception for swing-state rallies held during early voting or right before Election Day, with the theory being that you generate excitement about voting for that candidate and remind people to vote. But that's not really in play in August. But that's not to say that rallies don't have value. There are a few good reasons to go ahead with them: 1) They're an organizing tool. The campaign is going to identify everyone who goes to a rally, because those are your 10/10 certain to vote for that candidate. So you put them high on your list of calls to make during early voting to make sure they have gone to the polls. And you contact them to see if they can give money or volunteer. And for those who aren't registered to vote, you register them right there. And, let's be real honest about the state of our democracy 2024--you run their contact information and make sure they haven't been scrubbed from the voter rolls. 2) It gives people the sense that there are other people with me who are voting for this person. That was a huge deal for Trump in 2016. We've often lamented on this board how all these people who never voted before came out of the woodwork to vote for (of all fucking people) Donald Trump. And the rallies were a part of that. People went out to these rallies for a show, and they saw that there were other people like them who agreed with the deplorable thoughts they had. And that energized them and motivated them to actually vote. In previous years, they would have rightly assumed that their ideas were noxious, that the Republican candidate would distance himself from them, and that there was no point in voting for a candidate that didn't share their ideas. They'd still show up in the polling as supporting the Republican candidate, but they wouldn't show up on Election Day. By the way--this is very much the same function that yard signs and bumper stickers have.
  2. It would've been merely rude if they had simply heckled her at the rally. But they had met with her immediately before the rally, and she heard them out and expressed some agreement with their position. And right after having (what sounds like was maybe) a productive meeting, they go out and heckle her at her rally? That's not just rude, that's downright dickish. I mean, seriously--fuck them. No, they don't get a public meeting in the future (very public or even just kinda public). She shouldn't reward that behavior.
  3. I don't think it's a "raid." I think it's more what you would describe as a "reconnaissance-in-force." It seems more designed to obtain information on Russian dispositions and reaction as a prelude to potential future offensive operations than a mere raid would be. I also can't help but think that it's an effort to draw Russia's ground-attack aircraft into battle on a predictable front for the Ukrainians to test out the air-to-air capabilities of their new F-16s.
  4. In an earlier era, this was what was known as a "Sister Soulja Moment." It's where a candidate publicly flogs a part of his/her base to ease concerns of moderate independents. Now, when Bill Clinton did it, it was contrived and premeditated. And frankly, it should have given Democrats a lot more pause about Clinton and Clintonism than it in fact did. But it was effective in causing some people who otherwise would've voted for Bush (or Perot) to vote for Clinton. This was much more organic. They came to her and heckled her. But it has the same effect. Look--their position isn't popular in America; it's particularly unpopular among swing voters. So telling them to shut the fuck up in a public setting is probably good electoral politics.
  5. Jesus Christ, I’m starting to wish Pimphand would come over and derail this thread, because I don’t love the track you just put us on.
  6. I think it's a lot simpler than that. He's scared. And I actually don't really blame him for that. Less than a month ago, he came within a few inches of having his head blown off. I don't think it's particularly surprising if that was in his brain when thinking about whether to do another rally. He only does the rallies for fun, anyway. I'm not saying that there isn't a campaign benefit associated with a candidate's rally, but that's not why he does them. He does them because he thinks they're fun. But worrying about getting shot in the fucking head isn't very fun. And if they're not fun anymore, then he's not going to do them.
  7. I wonder if it's not so that lab results can come back before the medals are handed out. That way you don't have another instance like what happened to our figure skaters, who just got their gold medals yesterday from the Beijing Olympics after the Russians were disqualified.
  8. I don't think I've ever seen a runner gritting his teeth like that in a winning effort. Just incredible.
  9. I'm just going to observe that, even assuming that the necklace did cost $62,000, her husband was a fucking partner at DLA Piper. Yeah--I think he can afford to buy his wife some nice bling.
  10. I like it. And irrespective of what you think of it on its own merits, it's a fuckton better than the previous flag and better than any of the alternative proposals.
  11. I mean, for real--the only reason everyone isn't moving to Minnesota is (a) the winter and (b) the cuisine.
  12. As much as we are fan-girling over Tim Walz right now, let's not lose sight of what Kamala Harris just did. She picked a running mate who can easily be seen as upstaging her. And that's tough for any politician--Donald Trump could never do it. A lot of people have alleged that was part of what was behind Bush's choice of Cheney rather than McCain. And I imagine that has to be particularly tough for a candidate who didn't go through the primary process and is herself still introducing herself to the voters. But she put her ego to the side and made the best pick for the campaign and for the country. Yeah, fellas--we got a winner on our hands.
  13. I think it's an under-studied phenomenon that the Olympics may tend to benefit an incumbent president/party in power. And I think it's an interesting coincidence that the two times the United States didn't participate in a Summer Olympics in a presidential election year (1980 and 2020) were two of the three times in the postwar era that the incumbent president lost his reelection bid (the other being 1992). Is there a causative relationship there (or at least a contributory one)? I don't know, but I think it's worth considering.
  14. She's not losing Pennsylvania.
  15. You don't need to sway a single rural voter. And that's not the point in appealing to them. You still have to put on the show of appealing to rural voters for two reasons: 1) Suburban and (particularly) exurban swing-ish voters are frequently not far removed from rural/small-town existence. A voter in Frisco or Conroe is quite likely to have grown up in Longview or in rural Austin County. And so while we write off those people on this message board as "hopeless" and their communities as "dying," those voters take it as a personal insult when that view is expressed, even if they privately would concede the truth of it. So part of appealing to those suburban and exurban voters is making the show of trying to conciliate their friends and family who are still in rural areas. 2) I've shared the experience before of my first campaign, when I had the conscious thought "well, the country will survive if Bill Clinton becomes president." And it was at that moment that I knew Bush would lose. Because I knew that if I was having that thought, other Republicans were, too. And at least a certain number of those Republicans would be so consoled by the thought that they wouldn't vote. So yeah--you don't have to sway any rural voters. But if you can persuade just a small number of them that it wouldn't be the end of the world if Harris and Walz won, then you not only hurt Trump, but you also hurt Republicans straight down the ballot.
  16. I'm dead serious--the campaign needs to do whatever it needs to do to get him in as the guest picker for College Gameday from Ann Arbor on September 7.
  17. I'm shocked; I'm stunned, it's Mack Brown Tim Walz.
  18. You joke, but some real talk here--for a lot of the country up until about 2010, a DUI was just the cost of doing business. Outside of New York or Boston or San Francisco, if you wanted to go to a bar, then your options for getting home were pretty fucking limited. There's no mass transit in most places. And outside of a major city center, good fucking luck getting a cab at 2:00 AM. And let's just be honest--for much of the year walking even short distances in Minnesota could be fatal. In the age of smartphones and Uber, I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who gets a DUI. That's pretty fucking dumb. But pre-2010? Yeah--there but for the grace of God . . . .
  19. I gotta say--I don't love this post from a man in your line of work.
  20. I don't agree with your dismissal of a geographical impact, though sometimes it's not as obvious as "X will bring his/her home state." In the case of Al Gore, it was that simple. Gore won Tennessee for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. But in other cases, it's a bit more attenuated. Kamala Harris definitely helped with Black voters, and in Georgia and Wisconsin that may have been determinative. And Joe Biden helped with the white conservative Boomer population that were critical to Obama's win in Pennsylvania (which neighbors Delaware, and which shares a major media market with Delaware). And I definitively don't agree with that. I think Mike Pence was definitely a positive for Donald Trump. I know this is hard to remember, but evangelicals were really very skeptical of Donald Trump. Pence was pretty significant in getting them to swing over in his favor. And as pointed out above, Joe Biden was a major positive for Obama. There were plenty of white voters who were very iffy about a Black guy, particularly in the critical Upper Midwest states. Biden was pretty important in shoring that up.
  21. I mean, seriously--presumably the Turks built them with the agreement that the corvettes get to pass through the Straits once to reach their home port? Or perhaps they're not warships until they're officially commissioned at Odessa? Or maybe they'll just roam the seven seas as commerce raiders, which would be fucking awesome. By the way, can the Ukrainian Rada issue letters of marque and reprisal? Because maybe I want to be a pirate privateer when I grow up.
  22. Question on this--on what side of the Straits is the shipyard? If it is on the Mediterranean side, are the Turks going to let it pass through the Straits into the Black Sea notwithstanding the restrictions of the Montreux Convention? Or, alternatively, are these two corvettes just going to go out into the world on commerce-raiding missions to take Russian oil tankers as prizes?
  23. Weird. Creepy. Cringe. That's the progression.
  24. I think this is a very astute and accurate take. And it's exactly what Harris digs into with "We're not going back." It's not just about abortion rights and gay rights and voting rights, though that's definitely the intellectual and policy part of it. But it plays on a more emotional level. We're not going back to the stress-inducing and emotionally exhausting era of watching Trump spew shit on our television every fucking day for four fucking years. Joe Biden hasn't been perfect. But I'll say this for him: for most of the days of his term, I haven't even thought about who was in the White House. Who the president is or what he is doing isn't a thought that even crosses my mind most days. And I--and I suspect most people--like it that way. We're not going back. Let me tell you something as a former Republican: The Democrats are fucking ruthless when it comes to failing candidates; the Republicans are not. We just saw it with Biden. But before that we saw it with everyone who wasn't Biden in 2020 two days before the South Carolina primary. And before that you saw it with Bernie Sanders. And I can go back to Gary Hart and, ultimately, to LBJ. If you're not going to win the White House, and particularly if you're going to do so badly that you're going to threaten Congressional and state-level Democrats, the party establishment will slit your fucking throat at the drop of an uneaten hat. The Republicans don't do that. That's how Trump got the nomination in 2016--they couldn't force Rubio or Cruz or any other non-Trump candidate out of the race. They couldn't force Palin to withdraw from the ticket (even when she had a pretty good built-in excuse of having to deal with her family (i.e., her teenaged unmarried daughter's pregnancy)). And they sure as shit couldn't do to Bush or Dole what the Democrats just did to Biden, notwithstanding the fact that it was equally apparent that they were going to end up how Biden would've ended up. Instead, Republicans just distance themselves from the disaster so that they can say later that others fucked it up and they would've run a better campaign. The recriminations often begin well before Election Day--just remember back to 2008 and all of the strategists pointing fingers at one another over Palin and McCain's stupid idea of suspending his campaign when AIG failed. Because--and this is the important thing to keep in mind--Republicans are rats. And rats will always flee the sinking ship.
×
×
  • Create New...