Are people talking about it much? Not really. But the good news does seem to have caught up with some voters at least. Cathrine Rampell at the Washington Post writes: How good is the U.S. economy these days? So good that Republicans are pretending the numbers are fake. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has long held a lead over his Democratic rival on economic issues, but lately the gap has narrowed. In the spring, when President Joe Biden was still on the ticket, Trump held a roughly 12-point edge on the economy. Today, Trump remains ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris, but she’s cut that margin in half. Some recent surveys have even found the candidates in a dead heat on economic issues. A recent Cook Political Report poll of swing state voters, for instance, found Trump’s advantage on “inflation and the cost of living” had evaporated completely. This is remarkable. For most of the past decade, voters overwhelmingly trusted Republicans more on economic issues.
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Amplify what moves people You all know about The Lincoln Project. Unlike traditional Democratic messaging, these former Republicans go for the gut, not the head. They released an ad this morning voiced by actor Ed O’Neill that caught me by surprise. See what I mean. Like Barack Obama said last night (I’m paraphrasing), when did nonstop shitposting about America become a Republican campaign theme? When did lying to hungry, desperate hurricane victims become okay? I’ve also mentioned the messaging team behind Amplify ads, tested for being able to move voters and free for you to customize. On Thursday, they sent the ad below. Here’s their description: Hi Friends, Tuesday marked 4 weeks until Election Day! Forget PSL. It’s all about GOTV! To mark that milestone and power together for the homestretch push… Announcing our new 30 Day Content Countdown– join our Signal chat and check out the calendar here to make sure our message-tested content is visible to voters in this home stretch! Invite your communities to join the Signal chat, let’s get LOUD!
I know most of you don’t punish yourselves by going on Truth Social. I do it so you don’t have to. Considering all that’s going on in the election I thought you might wants to know some of what Trump’s talking about when he’s just with his cult. I’ve just cherry picked a few from the last couple of days. Sure, he sounds totally stable. A perfect person to handle the nuclear codes. Update. It gets worse:
Vance is interviewed by the NY Times and he will still not say if the 2020 election was stolen. Instead he carries on about censorship again. Even the dumbest cultist can see that this weird dodge doesn’t make sense. But he’s committed. I wish they would have asked him about this, however. It’s in their own paper: After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account. That’s right. Elon Musk censored material about Trump in coordination with the Trump campaign. You can’t make this stuff up.
In every losing campaign’s postmortem the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida and I’m sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it’s a general rule of thumb that in close elections, the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the electoral college. So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado in the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. And yet Trump will be wasting time in these other states for reasons that are obscure.
This is a terrific ad from Brownaddrssing that grotesque ageism and misogyny from his opponent Bernie Moreno: I know that nobody likes to see older women — except older women. Many of them probably aren’t crazy about the right’s recent decision to deman them as completely useless except as nannies for their grandchildren. Bit mistake. They vote. A lot.
Those of you who read this blog know very well what Trump’s obsession is all about and it’s eugenics, not “genes and genetics” and it’s Nazi stuff. What in the world is going on there? They are producing some of the best work ever, like the Trump and Putin story I wrote about yesterday. And then there’s this. It’s mystifying. It’s not as if they don’t know the stakes: How to explain this????
He did it again: Can a reporter please, please please ask Trump to explain what he means when he says that NATO countries are “delinquent?” He clearly believes they are supposed to pay money to the “club” or maybe to him and doesn’t understand that the financial commitment is actually to commit a certain percentage of GDP to defense. The truth is that he is hostile to Europe and has been for decades. They’re “laughing at us” and they gave him trouble with his golf courses. Europeans make him feel inferior. But clearly “NATO has to pay its dues” is the only policy idea he’s ever had so that’s what he’s gone with and nothing has changed in 8 long years. And, it’s also clear, that his phone pal Vladimir Putin, has been telling him for years now to withdraw from NATO. As we know, Trump believes him over his own experts and staff. BTW, only 8 out of the 31 countries are not currently meeting or exceeding their commitment and all of those are very close. When they fell short in the last decade it was largely due to the Great Recession caused by the financial crisis.
The weirdo once again says something that’s easily fact checked: Ok: There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth. It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Speaking of lying: I think he may be a worse liar than Trump. He is the future of MAGA.
Trump has “a woman problem” And worker problem (The New Republic): It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all. The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry. It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry. Trump’s entire M.O. has been fake it till you fail at it and Daddy bails you out. But Daddy Fred is long gone. Trump plans to steal this election when he fails to win again.