I really didn't believe this one until I watched the video. For more context: a reporter from OANN asked if the administration is looking into charges of immigration fraud against Omar due to the rumors that she married her brother.

His full response was: “Well, there’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother. You’re asking me a question about it. I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s somebody who will be looking at that."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... ut_it.html

Let me clarify this a bit. There is a substantial part of the voter base that only sees anti-racism through the lens of Fox News style media, i.e. the extreme SJW type, so it all looks like hysterical overreactions to everyday occurrences. They never see the dilapidated schools or the kids who are honest and decent and try to get jobs and are rejected because of their hair. It's invisible to them so they think it's a lie used to shame them into compliance with the progressive agenda ("socialism" lol). So when trump says things like this, and it's not the first time he's been outright bigoted in his speech, it doesn't matter to large parts of his base because the issue has no effect on them so it appears made up.

The Reuters poll I suspect you’re referring to...I believe the only major presidential favorability poll completed since racism became the topic of the day, had his approval up with Republicans (which is what everyone started talking about) but also showed him down TEN points with independents....which, if it were to hold, would make re-election a near impossibility.

Add to that the USA Today poll on how his statements were viewed, and it’s not great.

No one will care in a year.

It’s a weird and new experience for me, to have more faith in people than another person does.

The video clip of the overwhelmingly white audience chanting this while Trump soaks it up is chilling.

I know he’s not a Trump fan but if this clown even comes out against it you know it’s wrong.

Also. And this is fucked up. Both nominees for British PM have refused to saw it was racist. It was just racist-like comments.

This is a good representation of data that I had encountered in disparate pieces, seen a trend in, and wanted to bring up here but was too lazy to collate for myself.


The idea that “Trump was a dick before and he won, so being a dick now doesn’t matter” is so wildly incomplete a picture. He barely won against one of the most disliked candidates in modern history, after months of articles reassuring people that he’d never be as bad as his words suggested, after the FBI announced an investigation into his opponent, at a time when his unfavorability score with independents was 15 points higher than it’s been at any point in his presidency, and was almost 30 points higher than it is now.

Isnt this his play for 2020 as well? Tie the blue team to "the squad" and make people vote against Omar vs. the actual candidate?

Leaving aside that none of the four have as high of unfavorables as Hillary, I think this play will find significantly less success when there's a Dem nominee.

“Tie a political party to an unpopular leader” sometimes works as a campaign strategy, although:

A. Trends show it has the opposite impact if the alternative candidate is more unpopular. IE if I am an independent voter with a negative opinion of Donald Trump, Donald Trump running a campaign on someone else's favorability actually makes me statistically less likely to vote for Donald Trump. Presumably this is because he is just reminding me how much I don’t want to vote for someone I dislike. It’s hard to say for sure. The trend is easy to document, the causes are not.

Case in point, when Nancy Pelosi’s favorability plummeted among indies in 2018 Republicans spent half the race trying to tie their local opponents to her. “Pelosi Democrat.“ It failed miserably. In the places where they pushed this message the hardest, they saw the biggest drop among independent voters.

B. Upwards viability of negative attitude doesn’t really exist in political messaging. People imbue the political party with their attitudes towards the presidential candidate, because the presidential candidate is the perceived leader of the party. It doesn’t go the other way. If it is 2014, you can get somewhere by calling someone an “Obama democrat.“ You can’t get anywhere hitting Obama as a “Chuck Schumer Democrat.”

Consider: Obama put Hillary Clinton, one of the most reviled politicians of her time, in his cabinet, but Republican strategist still didn’t think it was worth the money to push him as a “Clinton Democrat,” because they knew it wouldn’t stick. He was the leader of the party, not her.

C. If this is his plan, he is doing it in the most disastrous way possible. By framing it as “you have to choose between supporting this group of socialists and supporting racism,” he is immediately and significantly losing independent support. A sudden ten point drop is stunning. Polled independent voters call his messaging racist by a factor of 2 to 1. Nothing short of a full throated apology by Donald Trump would take the racism angle out of this story now, so it will be there staining his messaging on the topic right up until election day...even if he and his audience never utter a single additional racist word in public again (narrator voice: they will).

^^Better than I could have put it.

My earlier post felt intuitively correct, but I didn't have the exact numbers to back it up, so I went looking: Hillary in 2016 had a -15 in favorability with 56% of voters disliking her. AOC and Omar are underwater on favorability as well, but by both a smaller margin (-7 to -10%) and by a smaller overall share (they're both in the 30-40% unfavorable--the majority of poll respondents just don't have an opinion). Trump, on the other hand, is also -10 on favorability but much more like Hillary than the congresspeople--he sits at around 54% unfavorable. All of which is to say that McP is most likely correct--the "squad" isn't going to sink anyone's campaign. To be fair to Trump, though, it really might be his only gambit--Hillary's reputation and her shitty campaign probably won the election for him more than anything else. He just doesn't have the broad support he and his supporters like to think he does.

Which is not to say that the Democrats won't fuck this one up.

oh that

One thing I am sure of for Nov. 2020 is that Trump will be against a better campaigner than last time.

Now that I think about it, the two big messaging weapons of the Republican Party in 2018 were “Pelosi Democrat,“ and “the caravan is coming.“ Basically the same strategy as now....nationalist xenophobia as panic, and tie Democrats to an unpopular woman.

It didn’t help them with independent voters at ALL, and the drag factor of open racism wasn’t even there yet to complicate matters.

Heard.

i know when im unhappy with something i arrogantly smirk and have the look like i just came in my pants

It’s a remarkably poor attempt at a cleanup, but it will also be negated at the next rally when they start the chant and he smiles down at the crowd and teases “oh, boy, they don’t like us saying THAT, do they?”