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Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Yesterday, Kamala Harris continued her uplifting message by going to a Black church in Detroit and channeling the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by saying the nation was "ready to bend the arc of history toward justice." Meanwhile, Donald Trump held a rally in Lititz, PA where he threw out his prepared speech and adlibbed it, attacking the polls as fake and the Democrats as demonic.

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The speech was full of lies, but that's not news, so we won't even bother listing them. He did say that he shouldn't have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, despite Congress having finally certified the electoral vote late on Jan. 6, 2021. This kind of language is something new, even for Trump, basically, that elections don't matter anymore and the peaceful transfer of power is for weaklings. According to the Constitution, once Congress has certified the electoral vote, the show is over, even if there was fraud"and over 60 court cases showed that there wasn't any to speak of.

It is hard to know if Trump is going so dark intentionally or he is just losing it due to all the stress of the campaign and likelihood he will go to prison if he loses, given all the criminal cases against him. Does he think that going so dark at the end is going to get him more votes? His base is going to turn out, no matter what. What we are thinking is how is this ending going to affect the Nikki Haley voters who are planning to vote in person tomorrow? Surely some of them are going to say "this is about six bridges too far."

When former Alabama governor George Wallace ran for president in 1968, he famously said: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican parties." Even accounting for inflation since 1968, we think that if Wallace had observed how the two campaigns are ending this year, he might have raised that to $100. (V)

#1 | Posted by Hans at 2024-11-04 02:41 PM | Reply | Newsworthy 1

Trump is terrible.

But if he wins, its because idiot Harris can't message.

Pollsters, including internal Dem pollsters, continue to find inflation, price gouging, house prices, protecting Social Security, expanding Medicare as the biggest issues. Small business tax breaks are the lowest priorities.

So Harris throws out random ideas rather than a coherent message of "I'm for workers".

Yes yes, "its on her website" and "she mentions it." Who cares?

It's the vibe. It's the meta-narrative. It's the story that low information voters perceive. And guess what many of those low information voters perceive? Trump better on economy, better for seniors, better for jobs, better for crime.

Trump has an enemy he can beat on all day long: the current White House. Harris doesn't because Trump isn't in office. It should have been a party message of taking on corporate America and Wall Street for the average worker. Sadly that message never became a focal point.

#2 | Posted by Sycophant at 2024-11-04 04:47 PM | Reply

- But if he wins, its because idiot Harris can't message.

Here. I think that this bud's for you....

drudge.com

- It should have been a party message of taking on corporate America and Wall Street for the average worker.

That's been in every speech, every rally, every commercial, repeated by every pundit.

#3 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-04 05:39 PM | Reply

It should have been a party message of taking on corporate America and Wall Street for the average worker.

No, the most salient message was for men to stay the hell out of women's lives when it regards their personal health and reproductive decisions just like no law compels men to do or not do anything regarding the same through force of law.

The numbers of GOP women voting for Harris is going to boggle the mind this time tomorrow when the first exit polls start trickling out.

If not, I'll be here to eat crow but the only bird I'm looking forward to is the one America is going to fly in Trump's face when he's finally humiliated beyond measure.

And JD Vance just called Kamala Harris "trash" in his stump speech just minutes ago. They simply don't get it, do they?

#4 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-04 05:45 PM | Reply

If the Democratic party wasn't so beholden to corporate America they would do a whole lot better than they are. Sadly the moneyed elite has poisoned the Democratic party.

#5 | Posted by LauraMohr at 2024-11-04 05:47 PM | Reply

Sadly the moneyed elite has poisoned the Democratic BOTH parties.

And Citizens United is to blame, which Democrats fought bitterly against and proposed numerous fixes to McCain-Feingold, which were rejected by Republicans.

Money is the root of electoral success, period. And you can't get money from people who don't have any. So if you want to win - even if you abhor the system - you do what you must, because change can only happen from within the political system. Change isn't going to happen by those pissing into the tent from the outside offering nothing in the fight against oligarchic kleptocracy.

#6 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-04 05:57 PM | Reply

#3 | Posted by Corky

Here. I think that this bud's for you....
drudge.com

Your message about her winning elections is literally all about San Francisco and California elections. This isn't those favorable elections.

But the main message is the problem for low information voters.

The news media is all about stupid things Trump says. The ads are all abortion or Harris awesome unity stuff. I've yet to see a commercial about taxes, labor, healthcare, or inflation, and only one about Social Security. Definitely nothing on Trump's Epstein issue, his rape case, his felonies, his fraud either.

That's been in every speech, every rally, every commercial, repeated by every pundit.

Do you honestly think the average voter is watching her campaign events or the pundits? No, seriously, do you think the average voter is going to her events or watching them on Youtube or something?

You can say whatever you want about what she stands for and believes. She's a fine candidate there.

But WHAT MESSAGE IS GETTING OUT?

We don't need her preaching to the choir. We need the message to make it outside the church doors. And except for abortion, a cogent message hasn't done that!

Trump on the other hand has. It's ALL anti-immigration (because immigrants bad apparently) and tariffs to protect workers (which it won't) and low taxes (even though it's less for workers than Harris' plan). That message is out and about for 10 years now, walking the streets, shaking hands, and is in people's heads.

Trump's ideas are TERRIBLE for the country if you understand them. But what do they represent? Trump wanting to protect America from crime, protect American jobs, and make sure workers take home more pay. The idea BEHIND those policies resonate even if the policies will fail completely. And low information voters don't understand those policies will do the opposite of what they want.

Low information voters are still the norm, Corky, and for ----- sake, you know that. And she hasn't reached them very well and I pray to God that it doesn't cost her the election.

If I'm wrong, why the hell is the election so close?

#7 | Posted by Sycophant at 2024-11-04 06:06 PM | Reply

- We don't need her preaching to the choir.

She's dragging around ---- Liz Cheney for F's sakes!

And the rwinger who coined the term, 'alt right' a true and famous neo-Nazi is supporting her online.

And she's the only actual Christian in the Race.

/
And the election may be so close because Trump looks so much like:

drudge.com

Which, in the end, could turn out more than oK eventually.

Just sayin'.

#8 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-04 06:25 PM | Reply

#5

This is true, Laura.

But Corporations paid for the laws to make it so a politician can't run without Corporate and billionaire money... and only a vast minority of Dems would vote against a Public Campaign Financing of what are supposed to be the People's reps, not the Oligarchs minions.

Financed and supported by the people who already pay for the air time and the media who get the money.

All the GOP would prolly vote against that.

(I miss Dethspud... anyone heard from him, her, them?)

#9 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-04 06:31 PM | Reply

"and only a vast minority of Dems would vote against a Public Campaign Financing"

LOL

#10 | Posted by eberly at 2024-11-04 07:30 PM | Reply

That's not a factual argument, Bev.

Because you don't have one. Citizens United and the associated Corporate Personhood laws were fought by Dems before they became SOP for money and dark money in politics thanks to the GOP.

Dem Bill for public financing of elections:

pfluger.house.gov

Find me the GOP version of public financing of elections.

#11 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-04 07:54 PM | Reply

I wasn't making an argument. Neither were you.

I was laughing at you.

#12 | Posted by eberly at 2024-11-04 08:18 PM | Reply

I was laughing at "vast minority"

#13 | Posted by eberly at 2024-11-04 08:22 PM | Reply

im looking forward to trump losing. he can start a new grift and call it OnlyKlans.

#14 | Posted by Alexandrite at 2024-11-04 08:24 PM | Reply

I was laughing at "vast minority"

Not a term I have heard before, but viable.

#15 | Posted by REDIAL at 2024-11-04 08:25 PM | Reply

It has a history.... I've seen it used and used it before:

www.grammarphobia.com

also...

open.spotify.com

#16 | Posted by Corky at 2024-11-04 08:46 PM | Reply

@#12 ... I was laughing at you. ...

Why?

What, exactly are you laughing at?



#17 | Posted by LampLighter at 2024-11-04 09:08 PM | Reply

Some of Trump's own campaign people hate him:

Tim Alberta
@TimAlberta
Re: my comments on CNN and MSNBC this evening... yes, there are Trump staffers who no longer much care whether he wins or loses. Not exactly breaking news. Hard to overstate how terrible morale is inside of this campaign"and how much anger/resentment is felt toward the candidate.

x.com

Alberta is the author of:

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump's Campaign
"What's discipline got to do with winning?"
www.theatlantic.com

#18 | Posted by Gal_Tuesday at 2024-11-04 10:25 PM | Reply

"yes, there are Trump staffers who no longer much care whether he wins or loses. Not exactly breaking news. Hard to overstate how terrible morale is inside of this campaign"and how much anger/resentment is felt toward the candidate."

This most likely explains why we didn't see Ivanka and Jared on the campaign trail and only saw Melania a few brief times.

#19 | Posted by Gal_Tuesday at 2024-11-04 10:38 PM | Reply

Low information voters are still the norm, Corky, and for ----- sake, you know that. And she hasn't reached them very well and I pray to God that it doesn't cost her the election.

Not true at all.

The Billion-Dollar Plan To Make America Pay Attention To Kamala Harris

One of the most important ads of the 2024 presidential election is only six seconds long.

"Donald Trump wants to cut taxes for these guys," a narrator says as images of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the second-richest and richest man in the world, respectively, appear on screen. "Kamala Harris wants a tax cut for middle-class families."

Why is a six-second ad, barely long enough to say the names of both candidates, so important? Because unlike most ads on YouTube - and a lot of other social media platforms - the viewer is not allowed to skip it, which is important in a fragmented media environment where viewers rarely have to watch anything they don't want to watch. And the low-information, low-propensity, disaffected voters who may end up deciding the 2024 presidential election don't pay attention to politics and don't want to pay attention to politics.

"Those sort of annoying ads that people see where they have to watch until you get to hit skip?" said Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager on Harris' team who oversees paid media. "That's the good stuff. You make sure you get that."

Or as Ishanee Parikh, the creative director at FF PAC, the super PAC behind the aforementioned ad, put it: "Any avenue where we can put paid media and get someone to have to watch something, we're there."

Parikh and Fulks are among the leading figures in the sprawling effort - costing more than a billion dollars, involving hundreds of operatives and staffers, and resulting in a potentially uncountable number of ads - by the Democratic Party and other allies of Harris to solve one of the biggest problems they faced at the beginning of the election cycle: Disaffected voters, hammered by inflation, felt particularly disaffected toward the Democrats and the party's 81-year-old incumbent candidate, Joe Biden.

Just because you don't know what the Harris campaign was doing/has done, doesn't mean that they don't understand exactly what you noted about reaching voters where they are - outside the normal streams of political content.

When the story of this election is ultimately told the highlight will be what a remarkable job was done by Harris' entire team in taking her from a largely unknown VP to the presidency in 105 days.

#20 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-05 11:51 AM | Reply

More from above link:

The Harris campaign, in order to reach out to young men, advertised the candidate's immigrant story during La Liga soccer matches and ads about how Trump inspired anti-Asian hate on the gaming website IGN.

The Harris campaign would occasionally deploy so-called "brain rot" techniques to grab viewers' attention, for instance by running a clip of Subway Surfers gameplay alongside otherwise-normal advertising content. But most of their attention-grabbing techniques were more mundane: making sure ads used different angles, or making sure the person delivering the message changed what outfit they were wearing, so viewers wouldn't just assume they were seeing the same ad for the second or third time.

Once they had their attention, it was about getting a message out quickly - like, really quickly. "What does your ad say in the first three seconds?" Fulks asked, referring to how long the campaign has to convince a viewer to watch the full spot. The campaigns tried to keep their message simple - something Democrats gave the Trump campaign credit for with his "no tax on tips" messaging - and tried to make sure it required almost no background knowledge about the two candidates.

Both the campaign and its allied super PACs focused on basic economic messaging - hitting Trump on his tariff proposals and contrasting them with Harris' support for an expanded child tax credit, for instance - and on savaging Trump over abortion rights. Those messages tended to perform the best in the extensive message testing now endemic to Democratic political campaigns.

"We're not slicing and dicing the electorate or seeing big differences in the issues people care about," Parikh said. "Because even people who care deeply about specific issues, their number one issue is still their wallet."

There were some audience-specific messages: The Harris campaign, for instance, launched geotargeted digital ads aimed at college campuses to tell students Republicans were threatening the Affordable Care Act's provision to allow children to stay on their parents' health insurance until age 26.

#21 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-05 12:00 PM | Reply

- We don't need her preaching to the choir.

She's dragging around ---- Liz Cheney for F's sakes!
And the rwinger who coined the term, 'alt right' a true and famous neo-Nazi is supporting her online.
And she's the only actual Christian in the Race.

And the election may be so close because Trump looks so much like:
Which, in the end, could turn out more than oK eventually.
Just sayin'.

#8 | Posted by Corky

Corky, you are smart and I respect you.

But my concern is that on actual issues, her message isn't reaching the right people. Plain and simple.

Issue polling is backing this up.

We've moved a long way from "I'm with her" thank god but I don't know if we've switched enough to "She's with me" on economic issues.

#22 | Posted by Sycophant at 2024-11-05 12:12 PM | Reply

#20 | Posted by tonyroma

And is it enough?

Again, this election shouldn't be close. Trump shouldn't be winning on economic and tax ideas. But he is.

#23 | Posted by Sycophant at 2024-11-05 12:13 PM | Reply

Trump shouldn't be winning on economic and tax ideas. But he is.

No he isn't according to the latest polling. Harris completely flipped the script on him.

There are signs the push may have worked: New York Times/Siena College polling has consistently found Trump dominant among the slice of the electorate that did not vote in 2020 - as good a stand-in as any for low-propensity voters. In May, the survey gave Trump a 48% to 33% edge.

But in the newspaper's last round of swing state polling before the election, Harris led among 2020 nonvoters, 48% to 43%.

www.huffpost.com

#24 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-05 12:17 PM | Reply

Harris also is ahead of Trump by 9 points, 51%-42%, on which candidate better looks out for the middle class.

Trump holds double-digit leads on which candidate better handles the economy (51%-41%) and deals with the cost of living (52%-40%).

www.nbcnews.com

The above is kinda paradoxical. First, Trump never had to deal with cost of living issues during his presidency having inherited positive metrics from Obama and then rode the status quo. If you take his economic policies offered this election, they would markedly harm American families far worse than pandemic inflation did.

But it seems the message that Trump cares more for himself than American families seems to have stuck, and hopefully it will drive enough voters to Harris promise of putting our concerns first.

#25 | Posted by tonyroma at 2024-11-05 12:23 PM | Reply

Personally I don't think this has helped her campaign:

" One thing is clear about Vice President Harris' intent to stick to her old liberal views or govern with new centrist thinking: She doesn't want voters to know.

Why it matters: Harris is the "no comment" candidate " purposely and strategically. She has calculated that it's safer to be vague on policy matters than lampooned as a flip-flopper or left-winger.
Zoom in: Harris and her staff have refused to detail her position on more than a dozen of her previous stances the past three months in response to questions by Axios. The response to those inquiries: No comment.

This makes her actual governing plans a mystery even to many Democrats " given her past liberal record and current promise to govern from the middle.
If she wins, this will be seen as shrewd, thread-the-needle politics.

But if she loses, she and her team will be blamed for leaving voters foggy about her true views and self. And President Biden will be blamed for backing a candidate with such a liberal track record"

www.axios.com

#26 | Posted by BellRinger at 2024-11-05 12:41 PM | Reply

"Trump shouldn't be winning on economic and tax ideas. But he is."

Trumpy should not be winning in anything.

But it speaks volumes about the integrity and intelligence of those Americans who think he should be winning though.

#27 | Posted by donnerboy at 2024-11-05 12:50 PM | Reply

Trump shouldn't even be allowed to run for anything much less be elected to the Presidency.

#28 | Posted by LauraMohr at 2024-11-05 01:04 PM | Reply

-She has calculated that it's safer to be vague on policy matters than lampooned as a flip-flopper or left-winger.

Because it IS safer. The voter doesn't really give a crap about policies in a campaign they don't understand anyway.

So don't put yourself in a position to lose on it.

#29 | Posted by eberly at 2024-11-05 01:05 PM | Reply | Newsworthy 1

-But if she loses, she and her team will be blamed for leaving voters foggy about her true views and self.

But there was no other way......

#30 | Posted by eberly at 2024-11-05 01:07 PM | Reply

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