In the final hours of his final campaign, can President Trump win more undecided voters, or are all the rallies and advertising designed to do little more that turn out the base who are already all aboard the Trump train? Should he target those who are searching Google for “can I change my vote?” or “how do I change my vote?” If the focus is merely Get Out the Vote (GOTV), will the base be enough, when virtually all polls show Biden up?
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Bill Whittle Network · All Aboard the Trump Train: Can He Yet Win the Undecided, or Just Turn Out the Base?
22 replies on “All Aboard the Trump Train: Can He Yet Win the Undecided, or Just Turn Out the Base?”
Excellent Scott ….. Just Excellent!!!
I have read reports that a sizable percentage (10%-20%) of those attending Trump rallies are registered democrats. If true, that tells me that there are many folks who are not exactly excited about Biden (I call them Trump Curious). Once those dems get to the rally, I imagine they have a good time, as they would be warmly welcomed to participate in the fun and enthusiasm of the crowd. And maybe have some compelling conversations.
And I agree that the organic, grass roots car/boat parades are encouraging; there is courage in numbers…My house is surrounded by Biden yard signs (yeah, Maryland), and I don’t want my car keyed. But I would happily join a car rally if one was organized nearby.
Off topic: I was going to wait until Tuesday to vote, but Zeta brought some heavy rain today so I decided to vote in person, thinking the line would be short. In and out in 15 minutes. I was given a choice of a paper ballot or touch screen. It was like “paper or plastic?” I went with paper.
I have been trying to figure out who is possibly undecided at this point. DJT has been on the national scene for decades and has now been POTUS for almost 4 years.
Joe Biden has been a Senator / VP since 1973 and has run for POTUS 3 times.
Neither of these guys is unknown so there should be no undecided.
But then it hit me listening to this episode. As Scott noted GOTV is focused on the 3/4 and 4/4. I think DJT is trying to move the 0/4, 1/4, 2/4 people. Given that even last time’s “historic” election had only 130Million votes cast, there are still a lot of people who could vote that didn’t.
My brother actually voted last week (early, in person, I think at a courthouse) for the first time in decades. Although a conservative/libertarian, he was always before a “pox on both their houses” who believed that his vote didn’t count. (And, to be fair, he did live in the bluest county in Texas, Travis County, i.e., Austin.) (He used to get really mad at me when I told him he had a duty to vote anyway to go with his privilege of expressing his opinions.) He is such a contrarian that I would not have been at all surprised if he had turned into a never-Trumper, but while he concedes that Trump has done well, he is still voting against the Democrats rather than being enthusiastic about Trump.
I think that, as we approach a post-Trump world over the next four years, we need to shift the attack on the left from individuals to ideas. Rather than the ad hominem “Crazy Nancy” method, we should use, with just as much venom, a “crazy socialized medicine” method, if you will. If we can place leftist ideas back in the “That’s insane!” box where it used to be, we can develop in the electorate a long-term adherence to or, at least, defense of the better ideas that we can present.
I say “shift the attack” because that’s what’s happening. This is a war for our very survival. If we don’t want to end up eating our pets or, in the end, our children, we must show how and why the things that the left pushes are the evils that they are. Then we must provide the proper alternatives along with the reasons why they are proper. The left loudly and proudly proclaims that their side is the moral and practical side, vilifying anyone who questions them as monsters – we need to do the same to them because they are the true monsters.
While some of Reagan’s approaches may not be valid today, the ridicule in “there you go again” and in “it’s not that liberals don’t know anything, it’s that so much of what they “know” is wrong” may still have a place, if said in a jocular fashion. A lot of people need re-education and/or a deeper education about our history, civics, civility, economics, even “science”, etc.
Telling people “you are stupid” may not work as well as “you have been seriously misinformed and mis-educated; perhaps even indoctrinated and propagandized, so please consider the alternative that I am proposing… ”
and yet “you can’t reason a person out of a position if they were never reasoned into it in the first place”. No telling how many whacks with a 2×4 it will take for them to realize “Reality Is Not Optional”, and that their “reality” was/is deeply flawed.
Unfortunately “salesmanship” has not been one of my success factors in my life and career, compared to other features that do play to my strengths. I might be better at analyzing someone else’s sales plan than actually executing that plan myself. Hope the rest of you are up for the sales task!!
Oh, Lawd, if I had to sell for a living I’d starve. No talent I’m that direction at all.
And you misspelled “clue-by-four.” 😉
I will admit it took two clue-by-four whacks by the IRS to my noggin, with penalties and interest, before I realized they wanted me to make quarterly estimated income tax payments for my rental income, rather than just paying all that I owed at the end of the year.
BTW Dan Bongino has been saying all along that this is a base election, and Trump’s strategy is correctly focused on bringing out the base, and that the number of undecided voters isn’t enough to make a difference in the outcome of the election. He may be right, but my instinct is that there are still people out there that haven’t made up their minds and can be motivated to turn up to vote for Trump.
And given the amount of fraud, I don’t think that it’s possible to overstate the importance of every single legitimate vote in close states this election.
There are definitely people still out there to be persuaded, both who to vote for and to bother to vote. The ONLY issue is getting past the censorship of the mainstream media and Big Tech so that they will hear the message.
There are a lot of people who still haven’t heard about the Hunter Biden story–or who when they do, say, “okay, but they’re all corrupt.” There are people who are just trying to live their lives and get through this year, and have bought into the fear of the virus and support their local Democrat dictator because they think she “cares about people.” These people believe that it doesn’t matter who wins the election because they don’t think it will affect them personally.
Even in an ordinary year there are always people who haven’t made up their minds a week before election day.
I was out for lunch yesterday and saw (but did not hear) some political ads on a TV in the restaurant which was tuned to the local noontime news show. I saw one that was an attack ad against a black Republican (don’t recall his name, but it was probably one of the candidates in Dan Crenshaw’s superhero ad). They kept showing his picture next to President Trump’s picture with the words “I’ll stand with Trump.” They then used that to claim that he would vote to eliminate Obamacare. Then they went on to falsely claim that Trump and this candidate wanted to end “protections” for people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes.
I think this ad will backfire. A black man running for Congress supporting Trump, shown several times. A black man saying socialized medicine is bad. The main point of the ad appearing only once and being completely false. Granted that this ad was aimed at people who don’t know that the last claim was a lie, but just like the Kim Klacik ads, the message of the visuals is more powerful than the text. And I think that was an ad that will make people want to vote for the candidate the ad was attacking.
What! You actually went out to lunch! To have some sort of life?! How dare you!!
And when we think about it, it seems so simple to make opening up the economy a reasonable path. We know how to prevent/ minimize flu transmission and similar approaches should work for COVID, so reasonable disinfection of contact surfaces, masks, social distancing, plastic shields, better interior ventilation and filtering, etc. are not that onerous to implement (and were being executed very quickly by the free market once it was clear that was what was required). And protecting the more at risk seniors et al. is not that big of a deal either: food delivery, visiting via Zoom, dedicated staff with minimal staff rotations, etc. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how any of these things (beyond better ventilation systems) would have cost more than 10-15% more than before.
Agree on all counts, except that the virus is much, much, much smaller than the holes in a fabric or paper mask, so they hardly protect against viruses. (All the “experts” were saying that masks don’t work early on, until they suddenly reversed course.) And FWIW the airborne transmission of this virus has not yet been scientifically proven and many experts consider it to be the least-likely vector of transmission.
The place I went to for lunch added plexiglass between all the booths and interior open window-like spaces very early in the pandemic. It allows them to seat people in every booth rather than every other one. Turned out to be a good investment!
Your comment triggered the thought that I am surprised someone hasn’t already conducted a well tracked and measured experiment with bars and restaurants. Probably best to go with localized neighborhood ones with a fairly consistent local clientele who would not mind being contact tracked, etc. Pick (say) 4 places, two that religiously follow the protection rules, and two that don’t. Then track all patrons as to who gets COVID and how and when, etc. for each situation. The patrons would either agree to the tracking or wait for a later opening. And possibly also agree to largely self isolate aside from visiting that bar or restaurant — to minimize extraneous infection vectors/ sources?
Unfortunately I suspect that unless the results were clearly different, say 90-10 or 80-20 better with protections than not, that someone would complain the results were distorted by “X factor” and thus “this study doesn’t prove a thing!”. Not so easy to do after all — darn!
They’ve done that sort of detailed interviews of patients tracing mask wearing, and found that there was no correlation between whether someone wore a mask religiously and whether they caught it. If anything, a slight correlation showing that wearing a mask makes you more likely to get it.
Great close, Scott, on the selling of Conservative principles. We can’t let the GOP fall into the same trap the Dems did of relying on outsized personalities running for president. The last time they won the presidency without one was Carter, and that was with some big help from Nixon fatigue. If ever there were a time to sell Conservatism it’s now
It is amazing how some people with almost no real personality still manage to rise to being “qualified” to run for high public office. We don’t need “outsized” cultish personalities, but we do need good conservative communicators that also convey their native honesty and integrity, and some level of knowledge and competence. I agree that selling conservative principles is important, but it will require undoing a lot of bad prior exposure (see my comment at 8:15 PDT). And not all of us are as skilled at it as we might like.
We know/suspect Trump is not perfect in that regard but he is miles above the alternative R’s and D’s on offer right now. I find it hard to understand why that form of the argument doesn’t register more highly with more people than it does (see the 3 recent essays “For”, “Against”, and “Maybe” by Williamson, Ponurru, and Cooke at NRO).
The first thing is you have to show up, so we have people like Ryan* and Biden and AOC who go directly into public office at young ages with minimal real world exposure. But they do actually run for said offices. By the time better experienced and worthy candidates might consider running, they don’t like what electioneering may require of them in public exposure and facing down other’s dishonesty (see Mitch Daniels vs. the MSM, etc. a few years ago) .
The other thing is how do they persuade the major donors to get on board their train, when maybe they don’t think all that highly of said donors in the second place. I would think a campaign based on “I would rather get $500 from a million of you voters than $1M from 500 big shot donors” would have some sort of resonance among the electorate and also show wider public support, thus getting a few big donors also on board even when their preferred agenda might not be promoted. As a lot of smaller donations in fact gives a candidate independence from the big shots and “party leaders”. I think it was Fareed Zakaria who mentioned some years ago that today presidential campaigns are essentially small businesses run separately from the major party, so the candidate wags the party rather than the other way around, at least as long as they appear to have a large public following.
*I liked Ryan as a fiscal policy wonk, but during the 2012 campaign he said we (Ryan, Romney, and Repubs) had to show leadership about the fiscal cliff ahead of us. But when push came to shove they did not speak up about the nearer term pain needed to avoid the longer term collapse. Very disappointing – although it may have been Romney who held Ryan back on that score??
End rant to the choir!
Completely agree with that last paragraph, and it’s also why we’re not hypocrites on not screaming about the increasing defecit under Trump. We had a referendum in 2012 and were told to go f*** ourselves. Until I find a single Democrat ready to have an adult conversation on the subject I’ve got bigger things to worry about.
Democrat… Adult conversation…
…
YOU’RE BABBLING, MAN!!! YOURE NOT MAKING ANY SENSE!!!
LOL!
I had the same thought, that we don’t want to be where the Democrats where with the vacuum formed by Obama’s withdrawal from the scene, and his ego with it.
That vacuum was made even stronger with Clinton’s loss. Look at what it sucked in to fill it: the metric ton of 2020 Dem presidential candidates.
(BTW, a group of political candidates is called a cacophony.)
We are in a back alley, no holds forbidden, brass knuckles fight for our republic and our civilization. If you want to continue to live and thrive, you have already made up your mind. If you don’t believe you are worth being alive, do nothing. if “they” win, you will get your wish.
Collectivism in ANY of its forms can only destroy. It cannot innovate. It cannot think. It cannot choose. It cannot act. Only individuals can do those things.
Without freedom and liberty, individuals cannot even think. Then, even if they manage to think and since a collective demands a collective decision, they must ask mother may I before action. Hence, no individual decision or action is to be permitted. Total collapse is the only option.
The mountains of bodies and rivers of blood consequently follows. It is only a matter of time.