Tuesday, March 05, 2024

MAYBE DEMOCRATS SHOULD PUT A TEAM ON THE FIELD WHENEVER REPUBLICANS DO -- WHICH IS ALWAYS

A couple of days ago, when The New York Times published a poll showing Donald Trump with a 5-point lead over Joe Biden, many liberals complained about the methodology. There were only 980 respondents! The poll was weighted in favor of the GOP!

Then when the Times published a follow-up with more results from the poll, under the headline "Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective," liberals griped:
The NYT commissioned this poll; they refuse to commission a poll asking Trump voters whether the rapes he’s committed make him an ineffective leader or could cost him their vote. Which obviously means the NYT thinks age is more disqualifying than committing multiple sexual assaults.
Or maybe it means that Democrats don't even try to force the issue of Trump's sexual violence into the national conversation -- or are waiting until summer or fall to do so. "Relax! It's only March!" seems to be the Democrats' watchword. And then they complain when the Times and other mainstream media outlets focus on the subjects Republicans want them to focus on. How hard are Democrats working to give them an alternative?

On the subject of Trump's sexual conduct, has any prominent Democratic officeholder, candidate, or official ever used the words "Trump" and "rapist" in the same sentence? And yet a court of law has determined that Trump is, in fact, a rapist. But hey, maybe Democrats will make note of this fact after Labor Day.

I'm with Oliver Willis:
The current media environment is a mess of anti-Biden/Democratic narratives that the right has laid down for longer than the time Biden has served in the presidency. They didn’t just come up with the notion overnight that Democrats are open borders leftist extremists who answer only to coastal elites. It wasn’t this calendar year when the right decided that Biden was either too old to live another day or a Machiavellian socialist/communist/Marxist/mafia kingpin. They have always been in the mode of selling these ideas, no matter how detached they are from reality. Some of them work, some of them go too far and are immediately dismissed by the public at large, but the right is always selling something.

Democrats wake up from their slumber in February or March of election years, madly in a panic, looking around as if surprised its an election year again. They slowly crank up the creaky electoral machine as if it had been frozen in amber since November of 2022 (it mostly has) and it spends the summer months ratcheting its way back up to full strength (they hope).

Sometimes it works out just fine. Democrats did great in 2020, outperformed expectations in 2022, and crushed it in 2012. But even when things work out fine, they are more of a mess than they need to be.

The official Democratic Party drives its diehard supporters to the edges of madness every cycle because the public is buried under a pile of right-wing excrement amplified by the mainstream media. There are few, if any Democratic/liberal counternarratives because there isn’t the pressing desire to make it happen. They can’t be bothered to deal with that until the last possible moment....
Willis is right. the Republican National Committee has been pushing "Biden is too old to be president" since 2019, and didn't put the campaign on pause after the 2020 election:


Do you want to know why we're talking about Biden's age? Because of these clips, and many, many others like them, which, of course, continue to this day. They go viral. Republicans don't say, "Why bring it up? People don't pay attention to politics until Labor Day of the election year." They just keep campaigning.

Democrats don't, and Greg Sargent reports on the consequences:
Some new polling from a top Democratic pollster finds mixed news for Team Biden ... Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution....

The survey—which was conducted by veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country ... polled 400 voters in each of three swing states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.... It omitted respondents who voted for Trump in 2020 and also said Biden didn’t legitimately win.

In short, the poll was designed to survey voters who are genuinely gettable for Biden. The poll asked them about ten of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above; Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol; his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause; his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more.

Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo accompanying the poll concluded.

The good news for Biden is that when respondents were presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge” jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points, and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.
Democrats could hit this subject harder. They could "work the refs" the way Republicans do, demanding more media attention to these issues. But what's the use? It's not even spring.

Maybe the Times poll isn't methodologically flawed. Maybe it reflects the state of play Democrats have chosen, with Republicans putting points on the board while Democrats don't even have a full team on the field.
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