Donald Trump is proving he’s racist and stupid with his latest post.
In a Truth Social post Thursday morning, Donald Trump appeared to suggest, again, that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t really Black, ramping up his identity-based attacks to the horror of those in his party who consider racism a losing electoral strategy.
Earlier in the week, many GOP strategists, including in the Trump camp, worried that attacks on Harris’s race and gender—which seemed all but inevitable considering Trump’s history of racism and misogyny—would pose a serious liability for the campaign. “We hope he doesn’t act like a crazy racist and sexist person, but we can’t control him,” a source close to the campaign told The Washington Post.
These hopes were quickly dashed in the course of Trump’s interview with the National Association of Black Journalists Wednesday afternoon, in which the candidate claimed that, for years, Vice President Kamala Harris “was Indian all the way, and then suddenly she made a turn and she became a Black person.”
The base isn’t going to be put off by it, but that’s not who they’re worried about. Every election is divided by independent swing voters and yes, some of them do care.
The 33% that constitutes Trump’s base probably likes him more after every racist outburst, but they alone don’t win national elections.
I’ve seen a lot of people raise doubts about whether there really are significant amounts of swing voters this time 'round, and I’d sort of tend to agree – if not for any other reason than it seems bizarre that somebody could be vacillating between Trump and Harris
Totally, Trump’s not really trying to win any more voters, everyone has already made their decision. He’s mudding the waters and hoping he can discourage people from voting in general to hurt Harris.
The only way he can win is if a majority of people don’t vote. If you don’t vote, it’s accepting a second Trump presidency.
If everyone voted, and especially if everyone under 40 voted, the Republican party would lose in a landslide. There’s a reason that the Republicans are so big on voter suppression.
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Campaigning these days is not about convincing anyone to vote for one candidate or the other. Everyone who might conceivably vote will have known who they’d vote for before the campaign season even began.
The campaign is about convincing the people who would vote for you that they actually should show up to vote instead of staying home or just going about their day. As a bonus if you make your opponent look like a big enough clown, maybe you can demoralize the opposition’s voting base so they don’t bother showing up to vote.
This is a big part of why Republicans always want to make it as hard as possible to vote: The people who tend to vote Republican have perverse incentives (lower taxes, ban abortion, etc) so they’re generally much more motivated to get out and vote despite barriers than the typical Democratic voter who just wants a sane government but probably feels like sanity is never delivered on no matter who wins.
That might be true but democrats do have perverse incentives to vote this time. Women weren’t an out group last election.
There are enough swing voters to deliver a Democratic victory in 2012, Republican in 2016, Democratic in 2020, and either way in 2024.
I agree with you that it seems ridiculous. The policies and personalities are completely different so it’s difficult to imagine people who can’t decide between the two.
But I think you have a lot of people who are disaffected with politics in general, who think all politicians are the same, who probably don’t pay too much attention to the news, who make up this bloc. And they probably vote in a reactive way, if at all - a referendum on a bad economy or whatever news breaks through to them. Maybe it’s only 10% of voters, but that’s the margin that decides all these elections. And they are potentially swayed by a constant drumbeat of negative Trump news, especially that he now no longer faces an opponent with their own significant visible flaws.
There are far more ignorant people than you could ever imagine.
I didn’t think there are undecideds, but there are fringe people on one side that he can lose and some on the other side who will secretly vote for him.