I like every thing about this, including describing why it felt like the water line receded after the convention. I agree there’s ambient discontent, and that the Harris campaign needs to treat this like an allegation to outrun.
Gov. Dewine (I am in Ohio) has pushed back on the Trump/cat eating nonsense. When he was in the Senate, DeWine was a big supporter of Haiti -- there is, in fact, a school there named after his late daughter Becky, who died in a car accident not unlike the one that Trump and Vance keep harping on from Springfield. I am surprised he has not been a little more forceful about, given the personal connections, but DeWine does not like Trump and does love Haiti. I could not find anything online about it, but it would not surprise if Dewine had a hand in getting the Haitians connected to Springfield in the first place.
I'm glad to hear such positive feedback, and even Fox news grudgingly reported her coming out on top, but I'm not really convinced. Yes, she did well, but she could have done better, and to Matt's point, that's the mindset that matters.
She let him pound home his "failing nation" and "they're incompetent" lines without much pushback. - Where was Pete's "There's less immigration now than when Trump was President" arguments.
- What about pointing out that our economy is doing better than any other developed economy post covid AND we still need to do better.
- Why not point out the massive legislative wins that completely overshadow his failures?
Her defense of Afghanistan was outstanding, and shows that she can defend policies without being linked to Biden and his age.
Also, she failed to point out the severity of all his crazy fucking lies. Eating pets, murdering babies after they've been born... We might think it makes him look insane, but these are the things that justify dictatorships, if they were in fact true. We can't afford to laugh at it. Deadly serious.
Several points, related to Matt’s items 4,5, 10 & 16. The campaign has had to start almost from scratch after Biden’s withdrawal (ameliorated somewhat by the existing Biden campaign infrastructure), so a slow start on messaging has to be expected. Ditto for the limited media interaction: she’s had to redefine her image as the presidential, rather than the vice presidential, candidate. I think it was a smart choice to step back and strategize. The interview was a soft start; the debate was smoking! There are major multimedia campaigns coming, especially in swing states. I agree she needs to get more free publicity with interviews, but nailing the message first is critical, and there’s still time. It’s also important to peak at the right time, and absentee ballots will start to become available in about a month, so that seems like a good time to hit the crescendo.
I know the Harris campaign wanted the mikes to stay on so she could rebut him, and they had to scramble to retool her strategy when ABC kept the pre-agreed muted mikes in place. Honestly, I’m glad the Harris team lost this fight. Everyone thinks the way to beat Trump is to fact-check him in real-time, but all this does is exacerbate his gish gallop tendencies. And then of course she’d be struggling to finish a sentence when it was her turn to speak because he can never shut up. The end result would have been an incoherent mess of a debate that most viewers probably would have hated.
"Oftentimes, Democrats take the attitude that since Trump is both unpopular and in key respects uniquely awful, victory will naturally fall to them as long as ..."
huh?! outside of this *maybe* being leveled as a charge against HRC in 2015, this has never been the case after that!
its a core lesson from the incredibly rude awakening democrats got after nov 2016.
Loved the column. I was surprised by the number of football analogies you used in the column. I do not believe I ahve seen this many football analogies before. Are you a football fan?
This is the third Presidential election in a row where I'm voting for the lesser of the two evils and there's been the same evil person in all three elections. I think Harris has greatly benefitted from clearing the bar set by low expectations but she has huge liabilities as a candidate and as a quasi-incumbent. Although Hanania's trolling annoys me at times, I agree with him that Democrats are throwing away their advantage in being the party of elite human capital by embracing DEI and trying to pacify different identity based interest groups by not picking their best.
I cannot say that I like either party in terms of economic policy. I'm pro abortion and gay marriage but these are not the reasons why most immigrants move to the US. Most people are not personally affected by these issues either.
I think the fact that Harris is a gun owner was a surprise to me and I consider myself fairly tuned into political news. I hope she leans into that a bit in swing states. I'm not a gun owner. It's just something that rural/suburban voters care about based on what I read.
Regarding dissatisfaction with the economy, I cannot fully understand it other than the perspective of tech workers. I also realize that the tech industry had to be weaned off the teat of zero interest rates so it was inevitable at some point. I also don't understand the nostalgia for the Trump economy. It was fine but he artificially extended the growth with his tax cuts and Biden has continued to do the same with huge deficit spending. People keep sharing graphs of how great the economy is but it seems fake with such high deficits and accumulated debt. I do need to call out Matt for his absurd insistence that huge deficits didn't matter till now and should have been ignored under Obama. That's only true if you accumulate short term debt in low interest rate environments and can retire the debt before the interest rates go up. That wasn't true under Bush or Obama or Trump or Biden. All you have is this accumulated mountain of debt and you cannot retire any of that when the current deficit is so high.
I don't think Harris moved the needle much at all, unfortunately. Getting under Trump's skin might've been cathartic to liberals, but I doubt it was persuasive as Trump acted no differently than he has at any point in the past decade. Everyone has already seen his behavior and has made up their minds about how they feel about it.
But I think Harris really missed an opportunity to distinguish herself from Biden and make a compelling case that things would be meaningfully different under a Harris administration than they were under the unpopular Biden administration.
I also worry that we're going to see minimal public appearances from her going forward and most voters' perceptions of her are going to be based on the debate, her disastrous 2020 primary, and her very liberal Senate history.
Idea: Harris should do campaign swings through Texas and Florida and beat up on Govs. Abbott and DeSantis. Not because Harris is going to win those states — although that's not out of the question — but that's a way of getting some coverage focused on her and what she wants to do. Also those guys are jerks, and Kamala beating on jerks makes for good TV.
The safe play is Harris spends all her time in Pennsylvania but at some point that is not going to make the radar of the national news.
I was surprised you made no serious mention of the moderators given the role they played in the debate, substantially more active than their counterparts in the Trump V Biden debate.
There's just one point I want to quibble with, which is that a presidential campaign is not a football game. If a team is up by a field goal in the 4th quarter there's no doubt about what the current score is. Whether a presidential campaign is a 40/60 underdog or 60/40 favorite with 2 months left, a major component of uncertainty is whether they are actually currently ahead or not (due to polling error). This has a pretty big impact on the question of whether you should be taking risks or trying to run out the clock.
One place where I think presidential campaigns make a mistake is that the modern presidential campaign is just much closer than the vast majority of elections. And candidates should be laser-focused on optimizing their chance to win. This includes taking risks, but those risks should have positive expectation. Returning to the football analogy, that means you keep throwing the football at an appropriate pace, not just running it every down. It doesn't mean you take desperate 4th down gambles though.
But nothing I've seen a modern campaign due resembles a desperate 4th down gamble and certainly Kamala's approach to the debate, while carrying some downside, was a clear positive expectation play. And this would be the right approach for her whether she was a 40/60 underdog or a 60/40 favorite in the race at this point. Playing it conservative would make sense if she was a 90/10 or maybe 80/20 favorite. And the majority of elections have this characteristic, just not presidential ones. In presidential campaigns candidates should be taking more risks to improve their chances of winning across the board. Hopefully Kamala continues along that track and doesn't get complacent even if the polls shift 1-2 points in her favor.
Meanwhile, over on ACX, a commenter remarked that Trump was all negativity and anger.
Another commenter replied - I kid you not - "Considering that the populace is full of negativity and anger, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, have you seen how angry Hitler was in his speeches?"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, an ACX commenter literally used Adolf Effing Hitler as an example of a role model.
I swear to Flying Spaghetti Monster, 80% of the ACX commentariat is "smart, nerdy people often with interesting things to say," 15% "garden-variety right wingers spouting right-wing talking points" and 5% "Gaaaaah my eyes WTF did I just read." I like Scott Alexander, but I should probably limit my ACX consumption for my own mental health.
Haven't read the comment. But Hitler was a charismatic leader, and if anything I read this as comparing Trump to Hitler and the american populace tot eh German one of the 1930s or something. So it read as hyper-lefty as much as fashy imo (but again, mayble the original comment was more obviously neo-nazi)
I visited the Spy Museum in DC once (it's excellent, highly recommended). The section on propaganda had an actual recording of Hitler from shortly before the outbreak of WW2. I had never heard the real Hitler speak (as opposed to actors portraying him in movies), so I was curious to listen.
It was... well, I couldn't understand the words in German, but the tone? The tone was hideously off-putting. Like, he sounded like an actor, and a mediocre actor at that, told by the director, "You are ANGRY!!! Extremely angry!!! Turn up the anger to eleven! MORE ANGER!!!!" Like, it was so cartoonishly over the top that had I not known it was the actual Hitler, I would have laughed at him.
So... I mean, I take your word for it about Hitler being charismatic - he did get Germany to follow him, after all - but I just couldn't see it. Maybe that particular clip was not representative; I'm sure it's different when you're listening in a big crowd of people all of whom adore your great leader. But to me, he had anti-charisma. He didn't make me think, "Ah yes, he had evil ideas, but I see why people followed him," but rather, "Why would people have followed him? Whyyyyy?!?"
I don't know what clip you saw, but much of that in film I've seen is due to the difference between performance for a camera vs performance for a crowd of 100,000 people. What plays well to the back row usually looks dreadfully exaggerated in close-up.
We weren't there, nor share the linguistic and cultural context of his audience, but when nearly everyone who did (even people who hated his guts) said "Yup, he's really good at that", and the results bear that assessment out, I'm inclined to accept it.
Honestly, the ACX commenter in question is neither hyper-lefty nor fashy; he (I'm making an assumption here, but most ACX commenters are men) is aggressively nihilistic, like "lol nothing matters, morality/ethics is an illusion, it's all about how you play the game, and if you crush others on the way to winning, sucks to be them."
I just think it's painful to claim that tapping into people's worst instincts is good as long as it helps you win. I'm picturing the Emperor in Star Wars cackling, "Good... Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy! Let the hate flow through you!!!"
"lol nothing matters, morality/ethics is an illusion, it's all about how you play the game, and if you crush others on the way to winning, sucks to be them.""
That's at least half of the Democrats in this comment section right now.
Good morally or practically? You can offer a dispassionate analysis arguing why trump will win thanks to despicable methods, it doesn’t mean you endorse them.
I have to be very careful reading the comments and close the tab quickly when they go off the rails. OTOH, I find Deiseach oddly entertaining, if long-winded. She's mellowed considerably since the old Slate Star Codex days.
The theory is that either (1) there is some loophole by which non-subscribers are able to comment on unlocked posts or (2) people subscribe specifically to comment on an unlocked post they've spotted and then immediately cancel their subscriptions.
This is based on my observations that, if you need to be a paid subscriber to comment on unlocked posts, then the universe of potential commenters on an unlocked post *should* be identical to the universe of potential commenters on a locked post. However, it has become extremely clear over the last couple years that when Matt puts up an unlocked post, we get at least one and sometimes as many as several never-before-seen commenters on that post.
Now, that would actually be expected or at least be unsurprising; after all, a major reason for putting up unlocked posts is to attract new subscribers with the opportunity to get a "taste" of what Slow Boring is about! However, what's also noticeable is that such new commenters almost invariably are hostile to "Yglesias Thought," so to speak. They never say, "Wow, I'm so glad I discovered this Substack; I feel like I'm home at last!" or something positive like that, which is what I'd think would be the usual reaction for someone who just signed up to pay $8 a month for a niche political blog. Instead, they are always or almost always critical of Matt's position in a "softly" Trumpy tone -- anti-immigration, NIMBYish, anti-free trade, anti-Biden/Harris, etc.
But even that wouldn't be completely weird! I could imagine someone paying $8 a month to hate-read a blog and troll the blogger and the normal commenters. (Indeed, this is what it appears FdB does.) Where this gets strange is that these new commenters don't stick around. Like, S0001 is purportedly a subscriber to this Substack according to his profile, but I bet we won't even see a comment from him in the afternoon thread, let alone tomorrow or next week, even though you would expect someone who held attitudes like that to repeatedly find occasions to bring them up in the comments here.
What's the over/under on Freddie popping in to exclaim how Kamala's embrace of Cheney's endorsement and her support of Israel's right to exist proves that she's a soulless neocon sellout and all politicians in our rotten capitalist/imperialist system are the damn same?
The thing about Polish Americans in Pennsylvania and Poland being threatened by Trump's weakness in Russia was another good example of working it. It certainly hit home with me, hope it hit home with them too.
I like every thing about this, including describing why it felt like the water line receded after the convention. I agree there’s ambient discontent, and that the Harris campaign needs to treat this like an allegation to outrun.
I guess the Logan Act is kind a wonkish and esoteric thing to care about but is it just me or did Trump multiple times say he would violate it?
He said he claimed he would have the Ukraine - Russia war over in “24 hours” when he becomes President elect.
I think he actually initially said “when I’m President” and then corrected himself to say “no - when I’m President Elect.”
He did the same thing on the Israeli Gaza conflict.
It seemed crazy to me.
Gov. Dewine (I am in Ohio) has pushed back on the Trump/cat eating nonsense. When he was in the Senate, DeWine was a big supporter of Haiti -- there is, in fact, a school there named after his late daughter Becky, who died in a car accident not unlike the one that Trump and Vance keep harping on from Springfield. I am surprised he has not been a little more forceful about, given the personal connections, but DeWine does not like Trump and does love Haiti. I could not find anything online about it, but it would not surprise if Dewine had a hand in getting the Haitians connected to Springfield in the first place.
I'm glad to hear such positive feedback, and even Fox news grudgingly reported her coming out on top, but I'm not really convinced. Yes, she did well, but she could have done better, and to Matt's point, that's the mindset that matters.
She let him pound home his "failing nation" and "they're incompetent" lines without much pushback. - Where was Pete's "There's less immigration now than when Trump was President" arguments.
- What about pointing out that our economy is doing better than any other developed economy post covid AND we still need to do better.
- Why not point out the massive legislative wins that completely overshadow his failures?
Her defense of Afghanistan was outstanding, and shows that she can defend policies without being linked to Biden and his age.
Also, she failed to point out the severity of all his crazy fucking lies. Eating pets, murdering babies after they've been born... We might think it makes him look insane, but these are the things that justify dictatorships, if they were in fact true. We can't afford to laugh at it. Deadly serious.
Several points, related to Matt’s items 4,5, 10 & 16. The campaign has had to start almost from scratch after Biden’s withdrawal (ameliorated somewhat by the existing Biden campaign infrastructure), so a slow start on messaging has to be expected. Ditto for the limited media interaction: she’s had to redefine her image as the presidential, rather than the vice presidential, candidate. I think it was a smart choice to step back and strategize. The interview was a soft start; the debate was smoking! There are major multimedia campaigns coming, especially in swing states. I agree she needs to get more free publicity with interviews, but nailing the message first is critical, and there’s still time. It’s also important to peak at the right time, and absentee ballots will start to become available in about a month, so that seems like a good time to hit the crescendo.
I know the Harris campaign wanted the mikes to stay on so she could rebut him, and they had to scramble to retool her strategy when ABC kept the pre-agreed muted mikes in place. Honestly, I’m glad the Harris team lost this fight. Everyone thinks the way to beat Trump is to fact-check him in real-time, but all this does is exacerbate his gish gallop tendencies. And then of course she’d be struggling to finish a sentence when it was her turn to speak because he can never shut up. The end result would have been an incoherent mess of a debate that most viewers probably would have hated.
Agreed - the facial expressions and mouthing a few things worked pretty well without losing coherence.
"Oftentimes, Democrats take the attitude that since Trump is both unpopular and in key respects uniquely awful, victory will naturally fall to them as long as ..."
huh?! outside of this *maybe* being leveled as a charge against HRC in 2015, this has never been the case after that!
its a core lesson from the incredibly rude awakening democrats got after nov 2016.
Loved the column. I was surprised by the number of football analogies you used in the column. I do not believe I ahve seen this many football analogies before. Are you a football fan?
This is the third Presidential election in a row where I'm voting for the lesser of the two evils and there's been the same evil person in all three elections. I think Harris has greatly benefitted from clearing the bar set by low expectations but she has huge liabilities as a candidate and as a quasi-incumbent. Although Hanania's trolling annoys me at times, I agree with him that Democrats are throwing away their advantage in being the party of elite human capital by embracing DEI and trying to pacify different identity based interest groups by not picking their best.
I cannot say that I like either party in terms of economic policy. I'm pro abortion and gay marriage but these are not the reasons why most immigrants move to the US. Most people are not personally affected by these issues either.
I think the fact that Harris is a gun owner was a surprise to me and I consider myself fairly tuned into political news. I hope she leans into that a bit in swing states. I'm not a gun owner. It's just something that rural/suburban voters care about based on what I read.
Regarding dissatisfaction with the economy, I cannot fully understand it other than the perspective of tech workers. I also realize that the tech industry had to be weaned off the teat of zero interest rates so it was inevitable at some point. I also don't understand the nostalgia for the Trump economy. It was fine but he artificially extended the growth with his tax cuts and Biden has continued to do the same with huge deficit spending. People keep sharing graphs of how great the economy is but it seems fake with such high deficits and accumulated debt. I do need to call out Matt for his absurd insistence that huge deficits didn't matter till now and should have been ignored under Obama. That's only true if you accumulate short term debt in low interest rate environments and can retire the debt before the interest rates go up. That wasn't true under Bush or Obama or Trump or Biden. All you have is this accumulated mountain of debt and you cannot retire any of that when the current deficit is so high.
I don't think Harris moved the needle much at all, unfortunately. Getting under Trump's skin might've been cathartic to liberals, but I doubt it was persuasive as Trump acted no differently than he has at any point in the past decade. Everyone has already seen his behavior and has made up their minds about how they feel about it.
But I think Harris really missed an opportunity to distinguish herself from Biden and make a compelling case that things would be meaningfully different under a Harris administration than they were under the unpopular Biden administration.
I also worry that we're going to see minimal public appearances from her going forward and most voters' perceptions of her are going to be based on the debate, her disastrous 2020 primary, and her very liberal Senate history.
Idea: Harris should do campaign swings through Texas and Florida and beat up on Govs. Abbott and DeSantis. Not because Harris is going to win those states — although that's not out of the question — but that's a way of getting some coverage focused on her and what she wants to do. Also those guys are jerks, and Kamala beating on jerks makes for good TV.
The safe play is Harris spends all her time in Pennsylvania but at some point that is not going to make the radar of the national news.
I was surprised you made no serious mention of the moderators given the role they played in the debate, substantially more active than their counterparts in the Trump V Biden debate.
There's just one point I want to quibble with, which is that a presidential campaign is not a football game. If a team is up by a field goal in the 4th quarter there's no doubt about what the current score is. Whether a presidential campaign is a 40/60 underdog or 60/40 favorite with 2 months left, a major component of uncertainty is whether they are actually currently ahead or not (due to polling error). This has a pretty big impact on the question of whether you should be taking risks or trying to run out the clock.
One place where I think presidential campaigns make a mistake is that the modern presidential campaign is just much closer than the vast majority of elections. And candidates should be laser-focused on optimizing their chance to win. This includes taking risks, but those risks should have positive expectation. Returning to the football analogy, that means you keep throwing the football at an appropriate pace, not just running it every down. It doesn't mean you take desperate 4th down gambles though.
But nothing I've seen a modern campaign due resembles a desperate 4th down gamble and certainly Kamala's approach to the debate, while carrying some downside, was a clear positive expectation play. And this would be the right approach for her whether she was a 40/60 underdog or a 60/40 favorite in the race at this point. Playing it conservative would make sense if she was a 90/10 or maybe 80/20 favorite. And the majority of elections have this characteristic, just not presidential ones. In presidential campaigns candidates should be taking more risks to improve their chances of winning across the board. Hopefully Kamala continues along that track and doesn't get complacent even if the polls shift 1-2 points in her favor.
Meanwhile, over on ACX, a commenter remarked that Trump was all negativity and anger.
Another commenter replied - I kid you not - "Considering that the populace is full of negativity and anger, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, have you seen how angry Hitler was in his speeches?"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, an ACX commenter literally used Adolf Effing Hitler as an example of a role model.
I swear to Flying Spaghetti Monster, 80% of the ACX commentariat is "smart, nerdy people often with interesting things to say," 15% "garden-variety right wingers spouting right-wing talking points" and 5% "Gaaaaah my eyes WTF did I just read." I like Scott Alexander, but I should probably limit my ACX consumption for my own mental health.
Haven't read the comment. But Hitler was a charismatic leader, and if anything I read this as comparing Trump to Hitler and the american populace tot eh German one of the 1930s or something. So it read as hyper-lefty as much as fashy imo (but again, mayble the original comment was more obviously neo-nazi)
Re: "Hitler was a charismatic leader"
I visited the Spy Museum in DC once (it's excellent, highly recommended). The section on propaganda had an actual recording of Hitler from shortly before the outbreak of WW2. I had never heard the real Hitler speak (as opposed to actors portraying him in movies), so I was curious to listen.
It was... well, I couldn't understand the words in German, but the tone? The tone was hideously off-putting. Like, he sounded like an actor, and a mediocre actor at that, told by the director, "You are ANGRY!!! Extremely angry!!! Turn up the anger to eleven! MORE ANGER!!!!" Like, it was so cartoonishly over the top that had I not known it was the actual Hitler, I would have laughed at him.
So... I mean, I take your word for it about Hitler being charismatic - he did get Germany to follow him, after all - but I just couldn't see it. Maybe that particular clip was not representative; I'm sure it's different when you're listening in a big crowd of people all of whom adore your great leader. But to me, he had anti-charisma. He didn't make me think, "Ah yes, he had evil ideas, but I see why people followed him," but rather, "Why would people have followed him? Whyyyyy?!?"
I don't know what clip you saw, but much of that in film I've seen is due to the difference between performance for a camera vs performance for a crowd of 100,000 people. What plays well to the back row usually looks dreadfully exaggerated in close-up.
We weren't there, nor share the linguistic and cultural context of his audience, but when nearly everyone who did (even people who hated his guts) said "Yup, he's really good at that", and the results bear that assessment out, I'm inclined to accept it.
Fair point.
“Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing.”
Honestly, the ACX commenter in question is neither hyper-lefty nor fashy; he (I'm making an assumption here, but most ACX commenters are men) is aggressively nihilistic, like "lol nothing matters, morality/ethics is an illusion, it's all about how you play the game, and if you crush others on the way to winning, sucks to be them."
I just think it's painful to claim that tapping into people's worst instincts is good as long as it helps you win. I'm picturing the Emperor in Star Wars cackling, "Good... Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy! Let the hate flow through you!!!"
"lol nothing matters, morality/ethics is an illusion, it's all about how you play the game, and if you crush others on the way to winning, sucks to be them.""
That's at least half of the Democrats in this comment section right now.
🙁
Good morally or practically? You can offer a dispassionate analysis arguing why trump will win thanks to despicable methods, it doesn’t mean you endorse them.
I have to be very careful reading the comments and close the tab quickly when they go off the rails. OTOH, I find Deiseach oddly entertaining, if long-winded. She's mellowed considerably since the old Slate Star Codex days.
Agree on Deiseach. I enjoy her rants on The Rings of Power.
My theory about unlocked posts and commenters is looking solid (see, e.g., S0001).
What's the theory? I thought you still needed to subscribe to comment even on an unlocked post?
The theory is that either (1) there is some loophole by which non-subscribers are able to comment on unlocked posts or (2) people subscribe specifically to comment on an unlocked post they've spotted and then immediately cancel their subscriptions.
This is based on my observations that, if you need to be a paid subscriber to comment on unlocked posts, then the universe of potential commenters on an unlocked post *should* be identical to the universe of potential commenters on a locked post. However, it has become extremely clear over the last couple years that when Matt puts up an unlocked post, we get at least one and sometimes as many as several never-before-seen commenters on that post.
Now, that would actually be expected or at least be unsurprising; after all, a major reason for putting up unlocked posts is to attract new subscribers with the opportunity to get a "taste" of what Slow Boring is about! However, what's also noticeable is that such new commenters almost invariably are hostile to "Yglesias Thought," so to speak. They never say, "Wow, I'm so glad I discovered this Substack; I feel like I'm home at last!" or something positive like that, which is what I'd think would be the usual reaction for someone who just signed up to pay $8 a month for a niche political blog. Instead, they are always or almost always critical of Matt's position in a "softly" Trumpy tone -- anti-immigration, NIMBYish, anti-free trade, anti-Biden/Harris, etc.
But even that wouldn't be completely weird! I could imagine someone paying $8 a month to hate-read a blog and troll the blogger and the normal commenters. (Indeed, this is what it appears FdB does.) Where this gets strange is that these new commenters don't stick around. Like, S0001 is purportedly a subscriber to this Substack according to his profile, but I bet we won't even see a comment from him in the afternoon thread, let alone tomorrow or next week, even though you would expect someone who held attitudes like that to repeatedly find occasions to bring them up in the comments here.
TL;DR: Unlocked posts somehow consistently attract unique, low-level trolling efforts.
What's the over/under on Freddie popping in to exclaim how Kamala's embrace of Cheney's endorsement and her support of Israel's right to exist proves that she's a soulless neocon sellout and all politicians in our rotten capitalist/imperialist system are the damn same?
The thing about Polish Americans in Pennsylvania and Poland being threatened by Trump's weakness in Russia was another good example of working it. It certainly hit home with me, hope it hit home with them too.
I am a Polish American (not in Pennsylvania, sadly, so my vote for POTUS will be completely wasted), and that line put a smile on my face.