The best thing to do is shut up and sit still, advice people like Hillary refused to take. Pretending that you’re cool (when you’re objectively not) is an election death sentence. Harris would do herself a HUGE favour by not trying to be Obama at all— she does not have his charisma or swag to go on every talk show/interview in the visible universe. She does not have the balls to deport more people that every other president combined, which Obama did. Obama was a GREAT Republican president.
this is it right here. The debate will be remembered for trump talking about eating pets (which will be memed to death) and Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala. I will say to Kamala's credit, not that it really matters and is extremely superficial, she did look Presidential last night.
I didn’t watch the whole thing but I tuned in later. It was as expected - Trump saying everything is shit and he’ll make it awesome, Harris saying we need to move on and make things good for everybody. The “everything is shit” message has been run into the ground. however, it is all performative. Harris did have an obviously scripted zinger moment when she said “and this fff….former president wants to…” but I admit, it made me chuckle. Swift fans were starting to get antsy and annoyed about her hugging Brittany Mahomes, who supports Trump, and saying nothing about Trump’s joke with her AI picture saying to vote for him. Her endorsement comes in, timed live after the debate to get reaction from Walz. Their website has friendship bracelets for sale. It’s a momentum boost planned out between her and the campaign.
I sometimes think it would have just been better for Trump to have won the 2020 election. We’d have moved on from his bullshit. He’d be in his lame duck period as we speak and the GOP could have moved on with a primary by now. Even a Trump acolyte would have settled things down naturally by virtue of not being Trump. There would have been no way he could have seized power or ran for another term. That’s all just fantasy. Now we still have a 50/50 chance of having to deal with him for another 4 years instead of him just being done and over. He really has noticeably fell off in his focus. His speaking pattern has always been 98% puffery with 2% specifics. In 2016 he at least had some platform specifics wrapped up with huckster pitches “we will build the wall and Mexico WILL pay for it!” He could at least conjure up a “we need health insurance to be sold across state lines” to make a point. Now it is 100% ramble. I really don’t buy the narrative that he’s somehow selling a better policy platform over Kamala’s “hope and joy” pitch. It’s all “I did the absolute best on X topic and we’re going to do even better, maybe the best of all time” it is flat out substance less. This all being said he looked bad in the debate but not Joe Biden dump him from the ticket bad. Kamala came off good but it wasn’t a campaign defining win. So we are back to 50/50 and like you I’m just sad I watched it.
I think you nailed it. The debate setup didn't give him the time to go off on one if his more lunatic tangents...Haitians eating pets is about as far as he went and unfortunately he never had the opportunity to double down on it. Based on social media postings I'm seeing this morning, neither candidate did enough to make those who have already decided who their voting for to reconsider. If anything, I think they're just pushed further into supporting who they already planned to vote for.
It never was going to. The debate (and really the entire campaign at this point) is about convincing those last undecided 2-3% of voters in swing states that will comprise the margin of victory (or defeat) in those states. In that context, the debate went well for Harris and poorly for Trump.
The same people who believe that yes, black ops is going to storm your house and take your guns are the same people who believe Trump is going to have black ops storming houses to grab illegals.
What do y'all have to say about the accusation that Kamala wasn't fact-checked? Because she definitely did make some false statements.
They only fact-checked the most egregious stuff, and well, Trump said all the most egregious stuff. There were plenty of lies Trump told that went unchecked as well. I think I read that they fact-checked him 5 times total, when he definitely lied way more than 5 times. If it was even in the ballpark of opinion or interpretation, for either one of them, the moderators let it slide. edited to add: I looked it up and the five things they fact checked were: Trump's claim that you can legally execute babies in Democratic states Trump's claim that he won the 2020 election Trump's claim that immigrants in Springfield Ohio are eating people's pets Trump's claim that crime is "through the roof" since he left office Trump blaming Pelosi for Jan 6 (this was more of a "the question was about you, not Pelosi" check)
What false statements? Maybe she wasn’t fact checked because she didn’t make fucking asinine claims like immigrants eating everyone’s dogs and cats.
I think some people are wanting to two-sides this shit, when one side is saying things like migrants are eating pets and people are having post-birth abortions. There's only so much time, so you gotta go for the most egregious stuff, and, well....
It's all those god damn liberal arts students at Wittenberg. I had a random hookup with a girl from there many years back and she brought a whole box full of newborn puppies over and tried to force me to make stir-fry for her from them.
The fuck are you talking about. There is fucking photographic evidence, not some AI bullshit, of an illegal alien eating a household pet. It is a graphic image, so I am putting it behind tags. Spoiler
That's pollster talk. The real juice to squeeze are the millions who did not vote. By and large, I assume most of them are just in a place where their vote is presumed irrelevant: "Yay, I'm the 5th Harris voter in Alabama! I gets a fart-icipation trophy!" For most folks, there's nothing in the down ticket races to get excited about, so it's all about this main event. Black women voters are pretty unanimous in who they are voting for, and there's your deciding voting bloc in places that are not considered swing states, and T. Swift's endorsement wraps up just about any other woman voter. Trump's threat that Swift will "pay a price" for her endorsement is....Jesus, that's stupid. The people she's trying to convince are folks who normally stay home, and the target isn't all that absurd. If she can get anywhere north of 5-6% out of new voters, that map looks WAY more purple than it does right now. To do that in a debate, she stays clean and hits the high points: abortion and J6. The economy is blurry, that's not getting folks off the couch, so she promises everyone money, because I dunno what a tax rebate is, but I know what $10k looks like. Anything else is just making silly faces at Trump, ensuring it's impossible to take him seriously, and he fell right the fuck into it. I kept thinking this would be a stage for her as a prosecutor, but instead she stuck to the ridicule, and I think it worked for her. If she came out hard and swinging, there'd be backlash in the form of more violent rhetoric. The face she made when he was rambling about 'the television said Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, whatever the city manager says" did more to discredit his schtick than the moderator, facts, a Hatian vegan activist dick-punching Tucker Carlson on live tv....etc. Clowning beats a bully, and it sounds like she nailed it. And then, to sew it all up, T. Swift promptly endorses her to 283 million instagram followers after the debate. Trump then says Swift will "pay a price" for her endorsement, which....I cannot fathom the stupid where you threaten someone who's already suing you, and that someone is Taylor Fucking Swift, billionaire, pop idol and America's sweetheart. Put this another way: a former president threatening a celebrity for an endorsement is pathetic. The fastest way to make it meaningless is to ignore it. Threatening T. Swift is PR suicide for ANYONE, including Trump. He poured gasoline on the fire he's standing in, and Swift's clout is otherworldly. This isn't another White Stripes suing to stop him from using a song at a rally, this is arguably the world's biggest celebrity and he faked her likeness for a false endorsement. Her real endorsement is the tip of the iceberg, with his response, she can (and should) sue, and the damages due would be astronomical. I'm not a legal expert, but the damages from him using her likeness, claiming it as an endorsement, and then threatening her after she released an actual endorsement would be determined by her actual reach as a celebrity. If it's Honey Boo Boo's mom, it's probably not more than $10m, which isn't nothing to this campaign or herd of idiocy. It's the biggest pop star on Earth. She's a billionaire by virtue of ONE tour, which had it's own isolated impact on the US economy as a whole. T. Swift isn't just a celebrity, she's a billion-dollar enterprise made up of celebrity, and Trump just defrauded it, lied about it, and threatened it.
I would consider people who are choosing between voting and staying home as in that "undecided" bucket as well. Point is it's a small audience that is going to be swayed one way or another (whether it's between the candidates, or between a single candidate and not voting) by comparatively small things.
I know she's a billionaire, changes local economies with her concerts and put Travis Kelce on the map, but I just can't wrap my head around a female voter, sitting there wondering who they're going to vote for, see Tay-Tays endorsement and that being the deciding factor. I hope I'm wrong.