1. Had a few of you ask me to respond to @Edsall's well-written & thought out column on less thought of aspects of the status of the election- here if you haven't read it. 1st- I want to remind you long-termers- for months, years, I've been talking about nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opi…
2. @parscale's strategy, his ONLY strategy since persuasion of Indies w Trump as your candidate is not an option, has been to hunt down, via social media, non-political white, working-class (men primarily) who share interests (hunting, Nascar, etc) w their voting WWC men but who
3. hadn't previously been voting- get them to register & then get them to turn out to vote. So this registration phenomenon in PA, WI, MI, etc, this is just that- coming to fruition. And if anything, these numbers are smaller than I feared they might reach though what makes them
4. problematic is the fact that the virus paused the registration efforts on the Dem side so they are further imbalanced by that. That said, you can see the realignments in these data, white, non-college-educated people are becoming Rs- these are former union Ds, the unions are
5. gone, yes- by the decline of manufacturing, but get this- also bc they were intentionally murdered by "Right to Work" laws passed by the GOP w this very goal in mind- to decrease the power of the Dem Party! God they're so great at strategic, long-term planning. Its really
6. quite beautiful- in a Dracula is also kind of beautiful as he's eating you kind of way. So yes, kill the unions- once the union is dead, white, working class people don't have that tie to the Dem Party & can be pushed to the GOP using negative partisanship/culture war stuff
7. that @JoeNBC was just talking about-filling the airwaves of local talk radio esp of people like Rush that over-hype the concept of PC culture and feminazis and bullshit like that to make these people, who are still members of the dominant caste in the U.S. believe they are
8. aggrieved AND even more critically- blame people they share more in common with than the people enacting the policies that are screwing them over. In fact, they end up empowering the people that are screwing them over. Talk to virtually any Trump voter & they will tell you
9. that they love him bc he was the 1st politician that represented them, that heard them, that saw them. They don't know that its all a facade, just rhetoric and that in terms of policy, Joe Biden's platform is 1000% better for them than Trump's. Its the marketing that matters.
10. Trump is for them bc he says he is. He is a successful businessman because he claims to be. He is fighting for the working class because he says he is. It doesn't matter that virtually nothing he's down in office has helped the working class- and of course, he's not facing
11. a top-notch messenger in his opponent who understand you don't have to attack the man, you have to attack the myth to go after Trump. Keeping in mind though, like mothers with their kids, its not necessarily possible to convince a Trump voter that believes Trump is a titan of
12. business that he is actually a failure & a fake. When people don't want to see something, they can be quite adept at cognitive tricks to avoid accepting the info. Parscale's strategy was always to add new, white non-college-educated people to the voter rolls bc he knew there
13. was never any hope of increasing Trump's appeal in the middle of the electorate & as I've reminded people many times, Trump is a plurality president: his 2016 win in the battlegrounds were all well under 50%, less than 1pt, and contingent on protest "3rd party" defection
14. that was not likely to replicate in 2020 due to negative partisanship. That is why other analysts "sneers" at their digital operation, in my opinion, was short-sighted, bc the digital ops were meant to achieve a few things that we've seen evidence of it working. One shave off
15. at the margins some modest support for the Dem nominee from black and Latino voters by targeting especially these voters under 30 and especially these voters under 30 who were non-college edu men, ads hostile to Dems and try to activate politically non-political whites who
16. interests with their politically engaged non-college-educated white Trump voters like hunting, fishing, NASCAR, things like that which actually isn't that hard to do bc of social media when you have time and $ and they had both. So that is where most of the Trump money went
17. And unlike others, I expect it to work- I expect we will see an increase in turnout among Trump voters, always have expected that esp since I saw their prototype work in the 2018 midterms which, BTW, saved them a couple of senate and gov races. But it only really matters in
18. very close races. And it can be offset if Ds are also findings and activating their own new or bench voters which is why I constantly beg Democrats to invest heavily in turnout efforts. The GOP does- they know if they hit 70% turnout of R voters in the file in a district,
19. stand a great chance of winning that race- even if Indies don't break their way. So they hound the hell out of R voters and make sure they actually vote. Ds should do the same. This doesn't mean you don't spend any money on the middle of the voter file, of course you do- but
20. BTW- you can read my OG 2020 forecast- released July 1 2019, to see how well it is aging. cnu.edu/wasoncenter/20…
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