This isn’t a federal case. But it’s pretty Trumpy and hilarious. So I thought I’d flag it since it’s got almost no attention. This ad from Trumps “Preserve America” PAC is on constant play in Michigan. It has the testimony of “Julie Willoughby RN”, who tells viewers that …
2/ she’s a nurse whos seen the hospitals in Arizona overrun by “illegals” w real Americans picking up the tab. Willoughby IS a nurse. But the ad leaves out that she’s a member of the AZ state House! Yes, incumbent. She was actually appointed after her predecessor was expelled..
3/ for bad acts tied to election denialism. She failed when she ran on her own. Now she’s running as an incumbent. In any case, like I said, not a huge scandal. But still pretty hilarious and strong Lolwut energy.
2/ from people who've responded to this tweet also seems to be on nonstop play in Wisconsin and PA and in parts of other states with media markets that hit parts of the Blue Wall states.
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As our fmr colleague Brian notes no major prez campaign has ever had to stand up campaign from scratch in August. The idea that Kamala is 'behind' or playing some kind of hide the ball is absurd. It is just as true that campaign & politics reporters generally show zero ...
2/ interest and little familiarity with policy or competence reporting on it. But as I explain in this piece Harris has actually been pretty clear on the policy directions she wld pursue as President. And this squabble between her campaign and the national political ...
3/ press illustrates something Harris is doing right. Democrats often operate in a space I like to think of as 'policy literalism', as though a presidential campaign is about policies and white papers as opposed to a conversation ... talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/harriss…
There's been a real hunger from the Post and especially the Times that Harris's momentum needs to end. And you can see that they've been very willing with these articles based on Trump campaign oppo to go after Walz's military service. The folks the Trump campaign gave them to talk are clearly big GOPs and the whole claim is that he retired not long before his unit deployed to Iraq. IOW, basically nothing.
2/ Note that the guy QBing Vance's attacks is Chris LaCivita, the guy who led the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry in 2004. The campaign is using Vance to make the attacks because he is also a veteran and did a stint in Iraq. But note that the Times waits till literally the last ...
3/ paragraph of their story to note that Vance's job in the Marines was writing newspaper articles about his unit. I mean, I'd prefer that safe gig too. But I'm not sure I'd be attacking other people's service.
So a bit of background on what the Trump campaign is dealing with on the ground. At the end of last week the Harris campaign announced a campaign rally in Detroit for Aug 7th (tomorrow). Over 24 hrs (last Thursday into Friday) they got 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000.
2/ That spurred a multi-day search for a new venue that could handle the demand. As Trump never seemed to grasp, crowd sizes don't equal votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy and a purchase into the broader popular culture that Biden ...
3/ never had and that Trump, despite his greater currency on social media, doesn't either. It's that disconnect between the attention currency of the two campaigns that is undoubtedly driving Trump's current meltdown and also leaving his campaign strapped for options ...
Both the Trump and Biden campaigns had real internal vulnerabilities. Trumps are coming into view now. Two years ago GOP political operatives were leery or Trump and the big money boys were done with him. But over the course of 2023 it became hard to argue that Trump was ….
2/ a sure loser when we was clearly winning. The numbers were the numbers. And everyone fell in line. Now over the space of about two weeks the national horse race has shifted something like five or six points in Harris’s direction. Meanwhile the Trump campaign hasn’t come up…
3/ with a clear line of attack on Harris even as the window on defining her in the first two to three weeks or her candidacy is drawing to a close. We could have some dramatic new development that shifts everything back again. But if we don’t it’s worth remembering ….
A quick note on headlines, following on the point in the other exchanges. Headlines are obviously important on a number of levels. The fact that they're individually ephemeral is meaningless. They're particularly important in digital news (which is to say the overwhelming ...
2/ majority of news as we now consume it) because a great deal of news we absorb is headlines only. This was much less the case in old fashioned broadsheet newspaper reading because the article, the content is right there. We page through the paper, seeing the headlines ...
3/ and the stories. If you have any interest, you breeze right into the story itself. Digital news is different since you need to take a new affirmative step to click through and go to the article. This is not a minor technical point. I have the unique role of having been ...
A key thing that's lead to JD Vance's unpopularity is his crusade against people who don't have kids. He wants to tax them more. He's even proposing diluting their voting rights. But the funny thing is that at least on the tax side our tax code is already replete with lots of ..
2/ of tax advantages for people with children. There's dependent deductions. There's the refundable child tax credit. There's public schools. Schools are usually funded by property taxes and you pay whether you have kids or not. In general people don't have a problem ...
3/ with this. Lots of people have kids and in general our culture is very pro-kid and pro-family (here I mean in the purely descriptive rather than right wing Christianity sense). But these programs are usually framed as helping offset the very substantial costs of raising ..