So darned unfair

For Schadenfreude, it's hard to beat about 90% of the election post-mortems in the last 5-6 weeks, but this Salon piece is a truly virtuoso performance in Looking Glass world analysis. Apparently Trump unfairly skunked the Democrats by sticking to big-picture themes and speaking about them consistently to national audiences. At the same time, he employed a "divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition." Harris, for her part, micro-targeted to splinter groups, which was apparently better because it had more details.

On the other hand, Trump unfairly micro-targeted those same splinter groups with ads that purported to praise Harris's position on just the issue each group would hate. He targeted Muslims with her pro-Israel positions and Jews with her anti-Israel ones, or alarmed oilfield voters with her threatened ban on fracking, which she didn't even mention while she was campaigning this time! Evidently the ads implied they were from Harris fellow-travelers if not the Harris campaign itself, which research shows makes voters more receptive, again very unfair. It seems Harris's splinter groups were bored by her targeted message, assuming they believed a word of it, while the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.

Salon quotes the NYT's lament that people don't seem to believe experts any more, and they couldn't hear Harris's message of joy/brat/whatever because they were so angry about feeling broke. Evidently nothing can be done to improve this state of affairs except for Democrats to stop playing so nice and try to dominate the culture that is upstream from politics, which they've never tried before and certainly didn't succeed at for decades by capturing most institutions from the press to the justice system to public schools to universities.

10 comments:

Grim said...

"divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition."

That's a neat trick, when you think about it.

Grim said...

"Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost because they were fighting the last war. By comparison, Trump and his MAGA movement won because they were (and are) fighting a war for the future."

I don't think that's true at all. If you look at Trump's closing-argument video, half of the graphics are from Reagan's America. There's a scene of the Duke boys jumping stuff in the General Lee. Hulk Hogan spoke in character at the RNC.

Sure, Musk is the wave of the future, and with Trump-Musk we're going to Mars. That's awesome. But what Trump was promising was to make America great "Again." It was a reversal of all the intentional decline, the let-America-get-small-and-weak-compared-to-the-EU-and-China stuff that Clinton and Obama were all about, and that Bush did almost nothing to reverse.

E Hines said...

Trump's rehashing much of Reagan America and MAGA again, are very much back to the future. Aside from the necessity of remembering the past, some parts are a necessary bridge to today's future, which includes going off planet in numbers and in permanence, and it includes continued American dominance of our current planet.

Especially not doing the latter--which the Biden administration and too many Republicans are bent on--will only leave our enemies in charge and our own freedom lost.

Eric Hines

E Hines said...

And, to T99's point, don't forget how stupid, immature, and inadequate the average American is. The salon article could have been written by Herb Croly.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

A lovely summary, Tex.

Christopher B said...

While I understand that I might be influenced by the more recent Trump campaigns, I remember Reagan's campaign themes being equally rejuvenate. His campaign in 1980 was often a direct rebuke to the Limits to Growth and Malaise of the Carter era. The first line of his famous ad in 1984 was "It's morning again in America" (emphasis added).

Assistant Village Idiot said...

This comedian is likely quite liberal, but he captures a certain aspect of this quite brilliantly with his crowd work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2bvdZWRK1k
7 minutes

Gringo said...

the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.

The Trump campaign pointed out to Muslim groups Harris's pro-Israel messages, and Harris's anti-Israel messages to Jewish groups. That wasn't nice. The Salon article called such efforts "disinformation...propaganda."

douglas said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
douglas said...

The MAGA Slogan is straight from Reagan- "Let's make America great again" was a 1980 Reagan campaign tag line.