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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Harris is bad product with good marketing, so I continue to be near certain she ends up dragging in the polls when the honeymoon period ends and she actually makes public appearances.

There's not a lot of time to kill the honeymoon here. It's August.

And we don't have a media willing to force her to make public appearances, at all. Republicans don't have a candidate willing to do so either, since he's still so obsessed with crushing Biden he wants to just run off of that victory.

There's not a lot of time to kill the honeymoon here. It's August.

The irony is that there's not a lot of time to build up a campaign and a candidate's public image, but they're attempting it anyway.

Not sure how to react to the revelation that you DON'T necessarily need the 1 year plus leadup to the election in order to build public support for your candidate.

Why not have one month of campaigning, hold all the primaries on the same day in July, and then we can just have a 3 month race for president starting August. Much more efficient.

Not sure how to react to the revelation that you DON'T necessarily need the 1 year plus leadup to the election in order to build public support for your candidate.

You would, if "not Trump" wasn't enough to carry a boatload of people.

Trump is a weak candidate, helped once again by an even weaker Democrat. Now that Biden stepped away the problems inherent in that are rearing their head again

Political parties are mechanisms, at this point, for funnelling donations from the faithful into the pockets of campaign managers so they can run ads telling the faithful that their enemies are weird.

In this campaign, you don't need "public support", you just need "less public disapproval". Trump is at +8.3% disapproval right now; Harris has plummeted from a recent +17.4% disapproval down to a mere +5.5%. RFK is at +7.8% and Chase Oliver is at "Who?", so she's currently the most popular candidate not by virtue of being popular but by being less relatively unpopular.

If someone wanted to nominate a good candidate then their opponents might have to worry about having enough time to convince the public that their candidate is also good, but for some reason there just hasn't been much threat of that happening for the last decade.

but for some reason there just hasn't been much threat of that happening for the last decade.

I really wish I understood why, my only guess is that smart, well-rounded, virtuous people don't go into politics any more, because the level of media attention and frenetic partisanship make it totally undesirable for all but the most commited ideologue or the most narcissistic idiot.