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I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.
It's like a guy adding a 17th Harris/Walz yard sign to a yard that already has 16. It doesn't make his neighbors want to go vote for Harris. It just makes him look like a crazy person.
It's the same mistake that mass media outlets like ABC make. You can make a choice to burn a small amount of credibility in exchange for partisan politics. But at some point, the credibility is gone and then your endorsements actually hurt the candidate.
Democrats who look at the front page of Reddit will say "holy shit, what a bunch of crazy people" and think "maybe I'll stay home on Tuesday".
Yeah, not quite sure what the strategy is here. Targeting non-politics subreddits / the global top posts to get exposure to Reddit users that aren't looking for political news could possibly be doing something. Maybe they're expecting Reddit users to repeat the messages to non-Reddit users, and giving them more talking points increases the chance that will happen / it will be effective? Or maybe they're concerned that even /r/politics posters might be too apathetic to vote?
Of course, there's also the possibility they're looking for
their keysvotes under a streetlight. That is, it really is the waste of effort it looks like; they're targeting Reddit because they know Reddit, not because it's actually a good target.More options
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Republicans 100% believe that there are democrats who can be convinced to vote Republican with the right pitch(and that Trump did this), although often holding that non voters are mostly people who shouldn’t be voting anyways.
At least some of the post-mortem analyses and interviews with swing voters I've seen make the case that Trump did this on trans issues specifically - there's a reason "Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you" was statistically and anecdotally their most effective advertisement.
I think trump did it on more than just trans issues(which are one of the half dozen or so most unpopular positions in the American political sphere). He moderated on abortion, he wants no taxes on tips and overtime(both giveaways to working class Americans). In general the Republican party’s approach of actually addressing concerns with their platform and trying to reach out with policy benefits has been quite effective.
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