Post-primary season: How would you grade the Trump campaign so far?

[Woody]

title

[Mr.Bakari-Sellers]

F FOR POLLS All these useless polls keep giving us Trump 2)5 leads over Biden and we haven't voted yet

The key swing states are WI, PA and MI and Biden leads in PA

[Redban]

All these useless polls keep giving us Trump 2)5 leads over Biden and we haven't voted yet

The key swing states are WI, PA and MI and Biden leads in PA

Yes, but how would you grade the Trump campaign so far?

[Mr. Third-Wayist]

C range. He’s done well at coalescing his base, which was expected but hasn’t really made an effort to go beyond that.

[Adjective-Statement]

Anemic. The 2016 spark's been gone for some time and, considering that Biden and most other potential candidates have co-opted much of his platform (protectionism, China bad, progressive social causes and economic policies bad), it sort of feels like the world's moved on without him since his Elba exile to Truth Social. I'd say this election is his Waterloo but it's more like his Ludendorff offensive, where both sides are metaphorically close to exhaustion.

[Consuming is good, it's what we're made for]

F for Facing 91 Felonies

[The Economy is Getting Worse]

B, but that is enough for beat Biden who is running a F campaign.

[Progressive Pessimist]

It's hard to say because his campaign could have been nothing but him doing prop comedy and he would have done exactly as well in every primary.

[Mr. Smith]

C-, will be F is he loses.

[Averroës]

He doesn't have the magic touch that propelled him to victory in 2016, but he's compensated for that by building a highly effective campaign and rebuilding the party's operations in his image.

I don't think it matters much that he's not personally using Twitter or Facebook anymore. Social media has changed quite a lot over the past eight years: People are not engaging with politics as much on these platforms. And, with the concurrent decline of traditional media, their usefulness as a bullhorn for shaping news coverage has faded in importance.

It's an interesting flip from 2016, when that personal connection was what drove a lot of his enthusiasm. What most works to Trump's advantage this time is just how little a lot of prospective voters are following political news.

[Zohranism is OUR future]

D. He really hasn’t made strong movements and isn’t exactly putting his message out.
Luckily for him Biden’s campaign is so bad that it breaks the grading scale.

[South Dakota Democrat]

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How would you grade your ability to leave for a year?

[HisGrace]

F. Even if he somehow backs into winning that doesn't mean he's not a f*****g idiot like how you can get points on the SAT for spelling your name right and not answering questions.

[Rat]

Pretty terrible so far. He's always had the primary on lock because the primary electorate loves him, but the fact that he's leading in polls against Biden is mostly due to Biden's weakness as a candidate, not Trump's strength as one. He's only come off more unhinged and polarizing as time has gone by, and I fully expect him to just choose a loyalist as VP rather than someone that will broaden his support base or instill confidence in those of us concerned or skeptical of him becoming President again.

[darklordoftech]

Social media has changed quite a lot over the past eight years: People are not engaging with politics as much on these platforms. And, with the concurrent decline of traditional media, their usefulness as a bullhorn for shaping news coverage has faded in importance.

If social media and traditional media are both on the decline, how are people getting news these days?

[Don't Be A Carrot Vote For Garrett]

Social media has changed quite a lot over the past eight years: People are not engaging with politics as much on these platforms. And, with the concurrent decline of traditional media, their usefulness as a bullhorn for shaping news coverage has faded in importance.

If social media and traditional media are both on the decline, how are people getting news these days?

They aren't. Most people have tuned out due to exhaustion from the past 8-9 years. We're the exception.

[Averroës]

Social media has changed quite a lot over the past eight years: People are not engaging with politics as much on these platforms. And, with the concurrent decline of traditional media, their usefulness as a bullhorn for shaping news coverage has faded in importance.

If social media and traditional media are both on the decline, how are people getting news these days?

They aren't. Most people have tuned out due to exhaustion from the past 8-9 years. We're the exception.

Exactly. I keep reflecting back on two pieces.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/the-2024-election-will-be-an-informational-nightmare.html

The Nowhere Election

RFK Jr. does incidentally raise an interesting question, however: Where, if not in America’s podcast apps, will the 2024 election be “decided,” in media terms?

Consider one possibility: nowhere. As the election looms, the media — old but also new, niche but especially mainstream — is falling to pieces. It seems not only possible but likely that this will be the first modern election in the United States without a minimum viable media: a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/30/2023/the-fragmentation-election

The Fragmentation Election

2024 is shaping as the first election of the age of fragmentation. Every legacy broadcast medium is in decline. Cable news is steadily shrinking. The few winners in subscription news — the Washington Post and New York Times — are struggling to hang on to news subscribers who signed on during more exciting times. Facebook has largely pulled itself out of the business of news and politics, while Twitter remains a real, but diminished, force.

But the audience that had centralized on those big platforms is now migrating to an array of small and medium sized ones — including, for Republicans, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, Tucker Carlson’s nascent media business, and a vast array of smaller outlets.

There is still a vast universe of political programming, but none of it reaches a wide enough audience to shape the culture. The accessible stuff is mostly tendentious, bottom-of-the-barrel commentary and analysis for political obsessives. If you're interested in elections in themselves, most of this is irrelevant, because it tells you next to nothing about what the campaigns are doing or what most voters are thinking.

[Shaula🏳️‍⚧️]

B, he's running an effective and really streamlined campaign, whether you like it or not.

[darklordoftech]

Social media has changed quite a lot over the past eight years: People are not engaging with politics as much on these platforms. And, with the concurrent decline of traditional media, their usefulness as a bullhorn for shaping news coverage has faded in importance.

If social media and traditional media are both on the decline, how are people getting news these days?

They aren't. Most people have tuned out due to exhaustion from the past 8-9 years. We're the exception.

Exactly. I keep reflecting back on two pieces.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/the-2024-election-will-be-an-informational-nightmare.html

The Nowhere Election

RFK Jr. does incidentally raise an interesting question, however: Where, if not in America’s podcast apps, will the 2024 election be “decided,” in media terms?

Consider one possibility: nowhere. As the election looms, the media — old but also new, niche but especially mainstream — is falling to pieces. It seems not only possible but likely that this will be the first modern election in the United States without a minimum viable media: a placeless race, in which voters and candidates can and will, despite or maybe because of a glut of fragmented content, ignore the news.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/30/2023/the-fragmentation-election

The Fragmentation Election

2024 is shaping as the first election of the age of fragmentation. Every legacy broadcast medium is in decline. Cable news is steadily shrinking. The few winners in subscription news — the Washington Post and New York Times — are struggling to hang on to news subscribers who signed on during more exciting times. Facebook has largely pulled itself out of the business of news and politics, while Twitter remains a real, but diminished, force.

But the audience that had centralized on those big platforms is now migrating to an array of small and medium sized ones — including, for Republicans, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, Tucker Carlson’s nascent media business, and a vast array of smaller outlets.

There is still a vast universe of political programming, but none of it reaches a wide enough audience to shape the culture. The accessible stuff is mostly tendentious, bottom-of-the-barrel commentary and analysis for political obsessives. If you're interested in elections in themselves, most of this is irrelevant, because it tells you next to nothing about what the campaigns are doing or what most voters are thinking.

This makes me afraid that there will never again be a time when people are getting news about politics.

[I love MAGA, don’t send me to the camps]

I mean, is there really much of a campaign or formal strategy? It’s just going to be 8 months of trotting Trump out, him saying weird sh*t in front of his cult followers, and repeatedly mobilizing every GOP official to call Biden a senile old fool across all forms of media.

I do question if the mass Gaza spam comments across Biden socials, etc, is partly/mostly inorganic and a result of global troll farms that may or may not be coordinating with the GOP, a la the 2016 social media warfare. There have been too many examples of this in past Trump cycles that I gotta suspect some astroturfing to sway/demoralize soft groups (this year young people, past included Spanish/Chinese speakers, etc).