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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29299 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Harris will show how well she can deal with a full volume Trump off-script. She doesn't have to beat him, but she has to perform in an environment and format that she is notoriously bad in. She has to put on her best performance ever for a tie. Again, woe to the campaign staff.

Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.

I think as long as Kamala keeps tacking to center she'll be fine. People are taking Trump seriously as a threat. There's little sense of "Ugh we're stuck with a centrist when we wanted Bernie" this year because no primary meant Kamala felt inevitable. That means the left wing of the party has less influence, and Kamala's free to appeal to the swing voters who really matter without risking mutiny.

But ultimately I agree, I feel like this debate will be consequential. I'm holding all my prediction market bets until the debate happens.

People are taking Trump seriously as a threat.

I mean, maybe? I imagine that for a lot of people who only have a surface view of politics, the narrative on Trump has moved from 'he's going to put black people back in chains' to 'he seems weird'. That's quite a shift in how big of a threat he is.

I think people have downgraded on how bad it will be if he does take office, but upgraded on how likely it is he'll take office, compared to 2016 and maybe even 2020

Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.

I suspect the people who say that are missing the point, from the Trump campaign's perspective. Perceptions of how Trump does in debates seem very polarized and, even moreso than normal for such things, watching him in debates mostly seems to intensify whatever the viewer already thought about him. And, a small minority are swayed by this charisma he apparently has (which is completely invisible to me) and do switch to him. Maybe not a lot, but it seems to be a lot more than I've heard of moving in the other direction, especially post-2016. So from his perspective they do their job regardless of who the Serious People think won.

Trump is not "bad at debate". Remember the Trump/Hillary debate where the sour grapes response was that if the sexes were reversed Trump never could have gotten away with that? Then they staged a simulation of it with sex-reversed actors and "female Trump" won even bigger against "male Hillary"?

Trump is pretty good at debates, but he is a little less spry at off the cuff comments as he’s aged. The debate is going to be both highly unpredictable as well as highly consequential. And honestly, helpful for voters!

That play was something else. I still watch the video sometimes. It's amazing how much I want to vote for Fem!Trump.

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