I’m just going to lay this down now so it’s on record:
Trump’s campaign has used the exact same strategy it used in 2016: smear his opponent; attempt to demotivate their base; and actively attempt to prevent or obstruct them from voting.
In 2016, didn’t win because he made a winning case to a big enough population.
He won because his opponent’s turnout was pushed down by a full-court press that tapped everything from misogyny to poll tampering.
2/
He is trying to run the exact same playbook against Biden.
But it isn’t working because:
1) We now understand it
2) Many who were effectively suppressed last time have had four years to see what that cost
3) Biden isn’t susceptible to the same illegitimate biases
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And 4) Many people who first engaged with politics because of Bernie are now well past the “...or Bust” vibe of 2016 and are now solidly active progressive voters
The media, pundits and analysts never fully reckoned with the extent to which Hillary’s vote was just suppressed.
4/
Instead, they overestimated Trump’s strength.
Trump only won by smothering just enough of his opponent’s support.
Some of the voters who that succeeded with in 2016 are vehemently un-smotherable this time.
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And what is left is an electorate that will look quite changed since 2016 in ways that are all bad for Trump.
Trump is a one-trick pony: depress the other guy’s votes. It worked in 2016. The whole system helped.
The media loves to hate Hillary too much to fully admit that.
6/
It not only isn’t working in 2020, it has ignited a vigilance among some who were taken in by it.
Trump is going to lose. It isn’t going to be a nail-biter.
And the post mortems will go right on missing the fact that Trump never, ever held the backing of enough ppl to win.
7/
I am already pre-annoyed by the breathless post-election analyses of the “startling” extent of Trump’s defeat, the “unpredicted weakness” in his support.
It was always right there to see.
8/
I did the same yelling into the abyss about Bernie’s hard ceiling in the primaries while David Plouffe and the other professional talking heads were swooning over momentum that wasn’t.
Whenever Trump is facing a public embarrassment he sees coming, he first doubles down on all of the stupid shit that put him in that hole to begin with. He has no other tools.
Then he frantically spins like a lawn sprinkler desperately spraying unhinged nonsense.
2/
The worse the pending embarrassment, the more unhinged the nutbaggery out of his mouth.
See: the past week.
It has been just a firehose of industrial-grade batshit.
3/
This is the moment in the polling cycle I hate the most.
I worked with consumer data for years and years. That requires some science but also some judgment and wisdom.
When you see someone adamantly defending the science alone, take their judgment with a grain of salt.
When a poll is an outlier, there will be a pool of people who rush to defend the methodology, the pollster, the business of polling itself...
And there will be a pool of people who dive into the poll to look for reasons why it was an outlier.
Listen to those latter people.
I find Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) to be very good. My type of analyst. Provides sound macro-level and dives into the specifics when helpful to illuminate the data.