archomrade

Calling them weird is effective because it makes them seem weak and gross to people who are compelled by him appearing dominant. Accusing him of sexual assault (while gross to everyone else) reinforces that image of male dominance that his base fuckin' loves.

Those two messages are working against each other.

The more you amplify ordinary behavior as somehow exceptional, the less people will actually listen to the exceptional behavior.

There's an endless stream of videos hyper-analyzing footage of Harris or Biden doing ordinary things, making them seem like egregious examples of derangement or ill-health. It's what the conservative base is exceedingly good at.

It's far more effective to make fun of them as obsessive weirdos than engage in the same petty psychoanalytic rhetoric as they do. The latter isn't going to move any voters and is only going to excite the weirdos on the other side.

Setting aside the seriousness of SA and the repeated examples of Trump committing it -

are we working off of the 2016 playbook or something? Between this and the rumored SA video, i'm getting strong 'grab her by the pussy' vibes. That didn't move any voters back then, why do we expect it to now? Hell, Tucker Carlson was just giving a speech where trump was "daddy", and he's "coming home to spank his children". They're aroused by trump manhandling women and children.....

All these stories do is get his core base excited; anyone who's disgusted by Trump's misogyny is already not voting for him.

Go back to calling him weird, that was so much more effective.

Of course not, but people don't think of tired sleepy old men as dangerous fascists.

The optics are mutually exclusive, even if the qualities themselves aren't.

What else is a debate?

well certainly not where you 'disallow' someone of their view, whatever the fuck that even means.

Lmao are you trying to debate me about whether you were debating people?

wtf does 'disallow them their view' even mean lol? Do you have that power? Woah that's crazy

You asked "is capitalism the problem" and everyone unambiguously said "yes".

And even now, you're saying, "nobody answered the question because they haven't agreed with my assessment 😣"

lmao, get over yourself bud. Few here -if any- are on that 'capitalism would work if that was what we had' libertarian bent.

the whole neck-and-neck race thing is basically clickbait for ads.

Yea, I kinda hate that attitude, too, honestly. True enough that polls are already like trying to read tea-leaves, and there's ample motivation to play games with the results to skew a particular way. But people tend to apply that analysis selectively so that they don't have to confront the possibility their candidate/political calculations aren't popular. When our media circles are being blasted with petty reporting about one candidate or the other taking a dookey on stage or whatever-the-fuck, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep expectations reasonably close to reality because you're ignoring about half the signs and granting too much weight to the signs you actually do see.

The race is neck-and-neck, by just about any reasonable projection. But the margin of error is something like +-3/4%, and that's assuming a healthy sample and is just a snapshot that is still weeks away from election day. A poll on the day of the election that has Harris -1 in Michigan could end up being Trump +3 or vice-versa, and that's completely within the margin for that poll.

But if you're not even hearing what's being said on the opposite end of the spectrum, let alone actually trying to understand what's being said, then you're gonna be completely taken for a ride come nov 6. For 6 months after the election, analysts and most Americans will be scratching their heads trying to understand what happened (win or lose) because people just have no idea what the other half of the country is actually feeling. And when people are sure they had it right, and then have those expectations flipped on the day, that's when you get people storming the capital or spending years prosecuting foreign interference that was completely out in the open the whole time.

Even if he was dead on his feet, how does that change anything? The only people who care about the optics of it are libs who already find him gross and disturbed... It makes dems feel better about their candidate's chances ("look, he's tired and on the ropes, give him the haymaker!"). If anything, him being a tired sleepy old man undercuts their message that he's a vindictive and dangerous fascist who's losing touch with reality. It wouldn't surprise me if his change in demeanor is an intentional choice to make him look more chill and reasonable.

You hear how republicans reacted to that town hall? They fucking loved it, they talk about it like it was a birthright trip or something.

It isn't open ended if the person is asking a question they've already made up their mind on lol.

An open-ended question is more like "are hotdogs sandwhiches or tacos?"

It is boomer-facebook level political cringe, is what it is.