Life would be so different and so easy if you could just make a living being as stupid as the consultants who came up with this plan.

Link to the article here

(I’m very bored at work today so have included optional commentary to entertain myself about the article below. Please feel free to skip it if you’d like.)

NEW YORK (AP) — A Democratic group is rolling out a new $140 million ad campaign that aims to chip away at Donald Trump’s support among one of his most loyal voting blocs: rural voters.

The ads, from American Bridge 21st Century, will begin airing Monday in the northern battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are aimed at swing voters in smaller media markets that are less saturated with political advertising and where they hope to reach people, especially women, who may be on the fence.

commentary

Yes! Fantastic! We have eaten away at Trump’s margin in Nowhere, Upper Peninsula by 15%! We have gained an entire 23 statewide votes compared to our 2020 result! Now Trump only won the county by 10%!

“We should compete everywhere,” said American Bridge co-founder Bradley Beychok, who said Democrats have too often shied away from rural counties as they have focused on turning out base voters in more urban and suburban areas. In the states that are likely to decide November’s election “Margins matter,” he said.

commentary

Margins matter, which is why we will not work nearly as hard to mobilize the massive, concentrated groups of populations which historically support our party.

The ads, part of the group’s broader $200 million effort to defeat Trump, target exurban and rural areas like Erie, Johnstown and Altoona, Pennsylvania; Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, Michigan; and Wausau and Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

They feature testimonials from voters sharing their concerns about a second Trump term. The first round focuses on abortion rights and health care access. In one, a nurse who’s a mother and grandmother bemoans the overturning of Roe. v. Wade and highlights Trump’s own words on the issue. In another, an OB/GYN shares a heartbreaking story of having an abortion late in pregnancy after discovering the child she was carrying had a fatal abnormality.

Future ads will focus on issues like IVF and democracy and freedom as they try to help voters who are turned off by politics and may not be paying close attention to the election understand the stakes this November.

commentary

This chauvinist “THEY just don’t understand the stakes this November.” is so pathetic and emblematic of how democrats treat rural people and why the dems lost the rural progressive vote. Instead of offering rural people any real, tangible solutions to their social and economic hardships, dems double down on the “You just don’t understand what’s good for you.” politics that get them labeled as elitists.

American democracy has overcome big stress tests since 2020. More challenges lie ahead in 2024. “People are afraid of Trump. And in some cases you have to remind them why,” said Beychok, who said first-person testimonials are the most effective way to reach voters, given the electorate’s broad distrust of politicians.

commentary

Literally the paragraph before this was talking about focusing on ads about freedom and then go and tell people that because of the way they voted or who they support, they must not like freedom. It also says they are targeting people who are turned off by politics and then goes on to say that you should be afraid of politics. Masterful gambit, epic sir.

People “want to hear from voters that look like them, that have similar stories,” said Eva Kemp, the group’s vice president of campaigns. She said they spent years recruiting participants via door-to-door canvassing and other outreach, identified over 1,500 potential voices across the three states and interviewed hundreds.

commentary

Holy shit. 1500 testimonials across all of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. How much do you genuinely think was spend over the past few years on this campaign that is absolutely oozing with consultants to acquire 1500 testimonials about being a regular person who lives in one of these three states?

They include Lori Cataldi, 57, a nurse who works for a local community hospital in central Pennsylvania and speaks in her ad about abortion rights. “If we reelect Trump, what are women going to lose next?” she asks.

commentary

If you re-elect Biden what are women going to lose next? Abortion rights went away under Biden, not Trump.

She said she was contacted by the group after her husband wrote a letter to the editor that was published in their local paper and hopes her ad will catch the attention of other women who may be undecided or turned off by the current political climate.

“I’m hoping that it just touches people who might be frustrated, who might be tired of it all. I really hope that it resonates in a way that makes them take pause ... and say, as tired as they are, ‘I really should look close at this,’” she said.

She called on voters to look past what she called “extraneous issues” like the candidates’ ages or their alleged crimes. “Women need to pay attention to what’s important to women. And I’m hoping that it speaks to other women who are just like me,” she said.

commentary

Ok but if you look past the extraneous issues like the fact that both candidates are senile and that both candidates are criminals, they really aren’t all that bad!

Trump’s dominance in rural countries has been critical to his success. Some 60% of voters who live in small towns or rural areas voted for Trump in 2020, versus 38% who voted for Biden, according to AP VoteCast.

That trend continued in this year’s Republican primary contests. In the early voting states, between 58% and 66% of voters from small towns or rural areas supported Trump, the data show. He was less popular among suburban and urban voters.

Swing voters represent a small sliver of the electorate, especially in a year when both major party candidates are so well known.

commentary

No shit? Biden will have been listed on a ballot for presidential election for four of the last five elections, and this will be Trump’s third in a row. Everybody knows who these clowns are already and has had no less than a decade to form an opinion on each.

But the Democratic group has identified several million swing voters it says fit into four broad categories of potentially persuadable voters: soft partisans, volatile voters who readily switch between parties, anti-MAGA conservatives turned off by the more extreme elements of the Republican Party, as well as “double doubters,” which is the name that has been given to voters this cycle who are turned off by both parties’ candidates. Voters in those groups, they say, are predominantly women and from rural and exurban areas.

commentary

Very cool made up categories, but have you considered that the volatile voters, anti-maga conservatives, and double doubters have already had 6 years to decide between these two candidates, and also already had the choice between the two in a presidential election? What are you doing differently?

“Democrats should have learned by now that since Trump was elected in 2016, women have saved democracy election after election,” Beychok said.

commentary

Beychok also mentioned that their DMs are open btw ladies 😏😜

Another ad features Susan Pryce, 74, a retired nurse who lives in Derry, Pennsylvania, and got involved with the project after she lent her neighbor a laptop to record a follow-up interview during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She offered a litany of reasons why she does not support Trump, from his comments maligning the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, to his history of bragging about sexually abusing women.

commentary

Well that was nice and neighborly of her to share her laptop, but why is it tossed in here like an unsolicited piece of information in a conversation with any person over the age of 65?

“…and I’ll take two pounds of the Boar’s Head Honey Ham… You know once I found two half dollars stuck together? I never could get them apart.”

Anyway I’m starting to think this Biden outreach campaign was distributed via AARP snail mail.

“I feel like this is the most important election that I’ve ever voted in,” she said, choking up as she described her family’s extensive military history. Her father was a POW in Germany for 21 months during World War II and her husband is a disabled Vietnam War veteran.

“I want to honor everything that they sacrificed,” she said, and make sure “there’s a democracy for us here.”

“I want my grandchildren to know that a good leader seeks that office to serve, not for personal gain or personal power,” she went on. “I want them to know a good leader respects the Constitution — Constitution that all their relatives who served took an oath to ... that no one is above the law. That every one of us, including the people at the very top, have to have respect for the rule of law,” she said.

She also voiced concern about women’s rights, describing how women once needed their father’s or husband’s permission to have certain medical procedures or to get a credit card.

“When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I just felt that I had suddenly become a second-class citizen,” she said. “I’m really worried that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that we’re going backwards.”

commentary

flag-gay-pride first-time

She said she lives in a rural area that’s very conservative, but noted a neighbor had recently put up a “BYEDON” sign, giving her hope.

commentary

Drumpf will never recover from this.

“I really believe just from the last year, from interactions with people that there are more people that feel like I do but are just quiet and going about their lives,” she said. “We’re going to make our voices heard with our vote.”

    • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      7 months ago

      DEADASS. The Biden team could literally have set up a food pantry in every single county in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (222 counties) with almost a $1000000 budget for each. That would almost certainly move the needle significantly in a few rural counties.

      • Moonworm [any]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Can't do that, that's just buying votes markkks-juggalo

      • Beaver [he/him]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Food pantries in rural areas are not only a much-needed service, but they're an opportunity to talk to potential voters who have a lot to gain from direct government intervention. Huge opportunity for the Dems to associate themselves with helping people out. Instead, they're going to spend all that money and effort on... billboards and TV ads? People aren't stupid, they think billboard ads are corny and TV ads are annoying.

        • Adkml [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          True but it's less effective than you think.

          Work food pantry in upstate new york.

          Here's a typical experience.

          -retired person on Medicare who got a pension for working for the town garage for 40 years comes in and gets a bunch of free food through state policies that are in place because we haven't been run by republicans for decades

          "How you doing today sir"

          "Be doing a lot better if it weren't for all the lazy slurs taking my tax dollars because they don't want to work."

          this person has literally not seen a non-white person for years

      • wild_dog
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        deleted by creator

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    i mean, if you won't materially do anything to assist people in the geographies your political project abandoned 50 years ago, it's probably a great idea to inundate their media consumption with annoying interstitials where you pretend fucks are given. worse case scenario, those people hate you even more, but the media companies will appreciate the revenue coming out of depressed demographic blocs and that's the real end game here anyway: big media buys.

    • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      7 months ago

      Don’t forget to also scold people for not caring enough about democracy and freedom! People in general, but especially conservatives, take really kindly to that!

    • wild_dog
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        7 months ago

        i just finished Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel, a critical-geographer / communist raised in a mobile home near the mountain border of oregon and california. it's incredible.

        Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead.

        Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production.

        it's a very quick read and very engaging with a distinctly material analysis of the geographies of dislocation and capital in the US and their impacts on communities and their relations/ideologies, etc. he draws distinctions within the "rural", to create a "far hinterland", very remote places of single resource extraction and "near hinterland" the boundaries of the peri-urban/ex-urban/suburban fringes that were once affluent 40 years ago, but after multiple national crises and collapses, become the contested sites of immigrants looking for cheap housing and white working class trying to "hang on" to former aspirations of comfort.

        he paints a picture of the far hinterland's slide toward reaction as non-ideological, but rather that there simply is organizing going on there by the right with minor provision for material safety and civic improvements, the people simply regard them as legitimate while antipathy towards the failing state institutions grows. he talks about how in afghanistan, many villages do not agree with the taliban and its religious extremism... but the taliban mediates disputes and makes provision to secure water, electricity, etc, so people are like, "i guess they're what we have to work with.... so why fight them?" when there is no alternative, what choice is there? he does a much better job of talking about the programs right wing groups push out there, but i want to say it was like drug addiction, church food banks, and some others.

        it truly paints a picture of these places and the people there who are having everything taken out from under them by the faceless forces of capital under naked extraction, and the democrats can't even bother with the most minor of civic accommodations, so the people there either check out completely or casually acknowledge whoever is around doing stuff as legitimate. failing to have the support of rural america is the most penny wise, pound foolish self-own in american politics given our electoral system. never before have so many places been alienated by refusal to provide so little while so much is being stolen from under their feet.

        • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]
          ·
          7 months ago

          Hey! I'm on chapter two of this book, glad to see it mentioned. Growing up in the country I'm like "damn, I know these people" when reading it. It really hits hard too when it feels likes it's describing your family and people you grew up with. I need to finish it, but glad to see it discussed

          • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            7 months ago

            yeah, it's a no-punches-pulled read. i like the way he shines a personal, human light on these complex places.

            i literally only finished it maybe 96 hours ago, so my brain is still marinating with it.

  • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    7 months ago

    "We should compete everywhere. Margins matter."

    WTF that's like the one thing that DOESN'T matter in the US electoral system. If it was popular vote, sure, broadcast away, but since it's all district-based there's absolutely no point to trying to reach voters in districts that are going to go for the other side!

    • Adkml [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      It literally explicitly by deffiniton does not matter.

      There's 2 states that award proportional delegates and they both have like 4 EC votes total.

      Imagine if a sports analyst tried to argue it's better to spend all your effort losing a game by 2 points instead of 5.

      That's the democratic party.

  • kfc [they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    For an ideology that comprises entirely of electoralism and le epic decorum, liberals suck absolute horseshit at winning elections

  • Pentacat [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    The Democrats mistakenly believe that Republican voters want the government to function. If they did, Biden would be a perfect candidate: he’s drilling for more oil, he’s caging more immigrants, he’s owning the libs by going full police state on critics of “Israel,” he’s even conducting a genocide on a predominantly Muslim country (way more manly than a travel ban). The problem is, Republican voters aren’t paying attention to things that happen. Kinda like Democrat voters, who will think all the above things are bad again in about 9 months.

  • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    She offered a litany of reasons why she does not support Trump, from his comments maligning the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, to his history of bragging about sexually abusing women.

    Equating mean words (very tame ones, too) with sexual assault

    Stick to the big stuff, don't get bogged down listing every single grievance.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    it's times like these that you realize we have no emotes for President Benjamin Harrison, who served a term between Grover Cleveland's two.

  • Adkml [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Live in very rural upstate new york.

    2 kinds of people around here, frothing at the mouth fascists who will happily tell you about their plans to go down their kill list the first chance they get, and apolitical people who have completely written off bith parties because nothing has improved for them for 20 years regardless of who is president.

    Until a pay check actually covers the cost of living they are not wasting their precious time and money to drive 30 miles to the polling place to try to vote for somebody they correctly figured out decades ago does not give on singular shit about them only to discover they've been purged from the voter rolls for a fourth consecutive election (ask me how I know).

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    It's a 200 million dollar ratchet effect, that's all. Controlled opposition, whatever you wanna call it

    • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      I’m sure some dems probably aren’t completely soulless and felt genuinely bad when Roe was overturned, but you know their second thought was immediately how much they could fundraise on it.

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Maybe some of them, but folks like Pelosi and Biden aren't even Pro-Choice. They probably had to wear sunglasses for a week to hide the dollar signs in their eyes.

  • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Should we focus on swing states where the distance between trump and Biden was marginal? Or maybe stop finding a genocide?

    No, let's pay for ads targeting the "lock her up" demographic

  • Blottergrass [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    It's kind of nice Florida isn't a swing state anymore. Everyone here knows Florida will vote for Trump , reelect rick scott, etc. It'll be chill down here. Michigan and Wisconsin will have to bear the brunt of the spectacle this time.

    • Adkml [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      Wonder if liberals are gonna say Texas is about to go blue for the 6th presidential election in a row before losing every race in the state by 30 points.

  • footfaults
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    deleted by creator

  • MaoTheLawn [any, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Imagine spending 200 million on actually doing something for people. People like it when you improve their lives.

  • Pentacat [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    If he wants their votes, Biden should be talking about how he is coming for the first amendment to protect the second amendment.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    I don't, but if I did donate to the DNC this kinda shit here would compel me to stop.

    There are 2 "lost cause" myths in the USA. The first is the infamous confederate bullshit. The second is the white pmc establishment Democrats obsessed with winning over other white pmc establishment Republicans.

    • CrispyFern [fae/faer, any]
      ·
      7 months ago

      I've personally helped convince multiple family members to stop donating to the DNC by telling them about the pied piper strategy. im-doing-my-part

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
        ·
        7 months ago

        rat-salute

        It really is a shame that Hillary didn't cry herself to death after losing to that dang cheeto