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Assessing Democrats’ Campaign Strategies
I want to make a couple observations about the Democrats’ campaign strategies and then hear from you about what you’ve noticed.
First, in still photos and videos of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, they’re almost always wearing masks, whether they’re indoors or out, alone in front of a microphone or physically distanced from others. I think the optics of this are terrible; it makes them look weak and afraid. Definitely not leadership material for the most important position in the free world.
Now, maybe they’ve painted themselves into this corner with their mask mandates and Nancy Lugosi getting caught out in daylight, but it seems poorly thought out as a campaign strategy. What do you think? Will it work?
Also, I stumbled onto a campaign ad for John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado and Democrat presidential primary candidate who is running to unseat Senator Cory Gardener. Over the orange haze of wildfire smoke, it says, “John Hickenlooper will fight climate change.” To which my first thought was, “And he will lose.” With wildfires roaring through the western states causing loss of property (my cousin in Oregon probably lost his home) and loss of life, will people really vote for someone who promises to lower the average global temperature by 2 degrees C in a century? When we’re not running for our lives, we’re choking on smoke out here and Democrats are pushing windmills and carbon offsets? I dunno, it doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.
Worse than that, though, is how typically cynical and exploitative of tragedy the “climate change = wildfires” narrative is. I think it’s possible westerners will actually be turned away from Hickenlooper and his Democrat colleagues by this despicable politicization of devastating wildfires.
What do you think? Is anything Democrats are doing working to get them elected? Is there anything we can do to help them fail?
Published in General
No idea. I have to admit that I am nowhere near to being the average voter.
I wouldn’t assume that their campaign strategies were… oh, how should I put this… carefully planned and executed. I’m guessing that their party organization is not running like a well-oiled machine right now. (Ever since they ran 29 people for president.)
So what you’re seeing might not be intentional.
namlliT, you gave a strong opinion about… was it twitter comments? on Land of Confusion, and their relation to popular thinking. You had a pretty optimistic view of the election results. Could you briefly go over it again?
Except masks are worn mostly to protect other people.
Not wearing a mask doesn’t communicate bravery, it communicates selfishness.
Or that’s what it looks like to me.
Perhaps you should check with a friend who is (1) American and (2) voting Democrat to get a more accurate feel for that?
Depends on what the other side is promising, probably. With the same caveat as above.
@flicker , remind me; what did I say?
I do have a very optimistic view of the election results. A while ago I said that I believed that President Trump will win by over 100 electoral votes.
And now I’m even more optimistic. And I’m also optimistic about the House and Senate. Heck, we’ve already flipped two congressional districts, CA-25 and NJ-2.
That said, I also believe that there will also be a lot of voter fraud.
Oh, perhaps perhaps you are referring to when I said that the view counts of YouTube campaign videos are a better metric than polls. For 2016, I noted that the Trump campaign events had 1 or 2 orders of magnitude better view count numbers than Hilary’s.
Not if you don’t have the ‘Rona.
Yes, I think you were measuring “likes”. Can you go further into that with this 2020 election?
I’ve no idea if I do or not, I only know that I have no symptoms.Count me persuaded.Trump, and I assume Biden, are tested daily. That makes it theater.
Okay…
I was measuring “likes”, “dislikes”, view counts, and positive vs. negative comments.
In 2016, both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump had many rally events. And all the rally events were available on YouTube.
Trump led by at least an order of magnitude, literally 10 to 1, in view counts. And in likes vs. dislikes. And in the comments sections.
Assuming there are not too many bots involved, I believe think those metrics are more accurate than polls.
Sure, but what are the communicating? The OP is talking about optics.
Also – will arguing the point with people who don’t already agree with you convince them to vote Trump?
Yes. Thanks.
The two metrics that count are 1., ‘Rona deaths per capita, and 2., use of limited hospital resources.
‘Rona deaths per capita is way down. So low that we have to distinguish between deaths directly related to the virus, vs. deaths with co-morbidities, vs. folks who had the virus but died for unrelated reasons. Like George Floyd.
And hospital resources are fine at this point.
So the optics of not wearing a mask is that the curve has been flattened, and that our response to the virus has been successful.
And wearing a mask at this point is Hygiene Theater.
The other interesting-but-not-scientific metric that’s been talked about is yard signs. Here in Texas, I know before Beto came within three points of beating Ted Cruz, you saw a ton of O’Rourke yard signs around the state, including in places you normally wouldn’t expect to see them. In 2020, even now almost a month after Biden selected Kamala Harris as his running mate, you’re not seeing very many Biden yard signs, while there are a ton of Trump signs out and about.
Considering lots of the polls either show Trump barely ahead in the state or even Biden with a slight lead, that would point to a heretofore unknown ‘Shy Biden Voter” phenomenon in the Lone Star State. Maybe all those yard signs will show up in the next 50 days, and maybe the yard signs are out and about in other parts of the country. But the displays of open support for the two candidates here does not seem to sync with the polling of the two candidates (and that includes Latino-majority parts of Texas, which you’d assume would be one of Biden’s strongholds).
On the basis of optics alone, Trump should win: all republican events – flotillas, truck parades, rallies, conventions – show people having fun. FUN. No fun to be found Anywhere around Biden.
Oh, I don’t know. I bet those rioters and looters are having a ball. Every riot is a Biden rally.
Especially if you’re outdoors separated by at least six feet like Joe Biden was at his “labor summit” (with four or five labor leaders), or, like I saw Kamala Harris last night, seated at a conference table behind a microphone alone. There couldn’t have been anyone within twelve feet of her, even the camera man. It doesn’t look considerate to me. It looks ridiculous.
A mostly peaceful Biden rally.
The wearing of masks is fear-mongering. It says look at what that evil Trump is doing to us. Mask wearing is a joke. If they helped there would be 100’s of government agencies regulating them and telling us which ones are best.
As for climate change, just listen to this man who puts the dumb in dumba$$:
He gets one thing correct – the US will become a disaster like CA if Biden and the Left win.
I consider trump to be boring and inane, but the carnival atmosphere around Trump is great! The jokes and music videos in the 2016 campaign were great, because they were organic.
He is putting the happy and the warrior back into the happy warrior.
I have a bad cold today. Not a life-threatening situation but an astounding one given the number of upper-respiratory-contagion control measures I have taken and have been surrounded by. :-)
My daughter and son-in-law were visiting all last week, and I also had a doctor’s appointment in the Boston area. I had extra errands to accomplish while the kids were here. So I was in a lot of places where I could have picked up a cold, but in all those places people were wearing masks and remaining socially distant.
In theory, I should not have gotten this cold.
To me it’s a way of making mask wearing mandatory forever. We will never be free from mask wearing if Biden/Harris win.
OMG!! Where’s his mask???!!!!
I guess Dems can only promote one hysteria at a time.
I’m trying to relate this to the last few re-election efforts. You really have to go back to Clinton in ’92 and Reagan in ’80 to find the last times challengers to the incumbent were really enthused about their candidate instead of simply hating on the guy in office. Mondale, Dole, Kerry and Romney all ran based not on some groundswell of love for them, but on dislike of the guy in office.
So then it comes down to the question of whether people hate Trump so much much more than they hated Reagan, Clinton, Bush ’43 or Obama that they show zero passion for the challenger, don’t attend his rallies, watch his YouTube videos, or display his yard signs, but are simply hell-bent on voting for whoever is running against Trump. I know people say there had never been a presidential election like 2016 before, but has there ever been one where the majority of people want to dump the incumbent from office show no desire beforehand to tell others what they plan to do (which goes back to my earlier post about the heretofore unknown “Shy Biden voter” phenomenon, where people without cancel culture to fear from saying they’re voting for Joe won’t say they’re voting for Joe).
The thing about “climate change” in a season of devastating wildfires (besides the cynical exploitation of tragedy) is all the would-be solutions are remote in space (how do we control China’s and India’s CO2 emissions?) and time (it’s going to take decades to find reliable power generation without fossil fuels apart from nuclear), but the wildfire is here and now — in my backyard!
I get that people who believe the world will end in 12 years will find this convincing, but they were already voting Democrat. How are the fence sitters — especially the ones within reach of the fires — going to react? I would think they’d be much more interested in fire mitigation forestry management and additional fire fighting resources (bring the Chinooks back from Afghanistan) than the imposition of more greenie power shortages for a supposed long term solution (to a fictional problem).
Okay, let’s (all of us here) try an experiment.
Find a YouTube video of a Biden rally, and choose a good one, and compare the numbers to an equivalent Trump rally, and report what you find. Views, “likes”, “dislikes”, tone of the comments.
I’ll go first…
Um, hold on… I’m actually having difficulty finding a positive YouTube video of a Biden rally. If I just search (anonymously) for “Biden rally” most of the top results are for Trump.
The best I can find is Yahoo Finance: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden gives a speech in Michigan, 14,465 views, 106 likes, 864 dislikes, 636 comments, none of which appear to be positive, starting with “You can tell he wants to go back to his basement.”
There *must* be better Biden YouTube videos out there.
It would be fun to plant stories in the press that scientists now believe you need to wear *two* masks for safety. C’mon 4chan, you can do it!
Let’s compare to Hillary…
Huh, it appears that most of Hillary Clinton’s rally videos from 2016 have been scrubbed from YouTube.
YouTube, search for Hillary Clinton rally, anonymously, filter longer than 20 minutes, sort by view count.
The top one is Michelle Obama, only, at a Hillary rally.
The next one actually has Hillary with an intro from Labron James. It has only 184,288 views, 2300 likes, 5300 dislikes, 2317 comments, possibly all negative, the top comment is “it’s sad she relies on celebs to fill her auditoriums”.
So, yeah. That’s my metric.
Barack Obama lied. Hillary really wasn’t likable enough.
Yeah, that seems to work for 2012, too. I searched “Romney rally 2012” and found views of 3.4K, 4.6K, and 5.9K. “Obama rally 2012” gets us 320K, 240K, etc. Two orders of magnitude. Not going to check to see if all three top rallies are comparable, but that seems a pretty big indicator of an enthusiasm gap.
Thanks for this. I was looking at the 538 site and feeling down. FWIW, here’s the page with their snake graphic. NC, FL, AZ, and PA do seem winnable for Trump, and the rally views and comments support that.