Trump not making a convincing argument for how he will evaluate information given to him by his DNI and make difficult national security decisions
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So it was definitely the Springfield in Ohio? 
It would all be funny if it was not simultaneously so important and so sordid.
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My interpretation of US politics is that itās more about inspiring your supporters to get out and cast votes than it is to win over new supporters, they are all too intrenched.
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The number of swing voters has shrunk, but they still exist and still are the demo who will decide the election.
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Modern journalism, eh?
BBC had six āon the fenceā voters and asked after the debate had it changed their viewpoint. Some said no, some said leaning towards Kamala and one said would vote for her. So its not done a lot, but even if we tip it 1% her way it could be enough.
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Yeah. The idea there is such a thing as an Obama-Trump voter confuses the fuck out of me, but they exist and they represent the majority of the uncertainty that still exists in this election. Turn out matters, but so does persuasion.
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Fantastic stuff from Collins
https://x.com/kaitlancollins/status/1833819725681262843
But hear what Vance is actually saying here - it doesnt matter if the claims being made are true because we already know immigrants are bad and so this is just representative of what they do. This is the pretext for mass deportations.
Also, under appreciated bit of this debate was Trump telling us that what Vance says is irrelevant as he is not the principal and they donāt talk about stuff. An effective press with their eye on the ball would be all over that.
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My BiL in Fla is one. He is a Musk fan too.
No idea what goes on in his head, but heās an entrepreneur and very business oriented. I realise it doesnāt make sense.
I think this is the right point
https://x.com/brianklaas/status/1833706435982598356
By all accounts Trump took prep for this debate far more seriously than he has any other one before. You could see there were moments that were bordering on positive for him that were clearly the result of debate prep. There was one moment in particular that looked very well planned where he was close to a table turning moment pointing out her interrupting him, but his world is filled with crazed lunatics that his unusually on script moments got drowned out by the insanity of the rest of the performance.
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Yes, and the tact that heās a raving narcissist means that he isnāt capable of recognising that he may have weaknesses.
Therefore he canāt address those weaknesses.
He treats it as a reality TV show.
The eating cats and dogs thing reminded me of Boris Johnson talking shite about painting model buses (or whatever it was). Itās a distraction so that people talk about the batshit stuff rather than the really dangerous stuff.
Incidentally, until I saw the comment from the studio presenter, I didnāt realise that Springfield was a real place. I just assumed that it was a made up āaverageā town on the Simpsons. Would the average US viewer know that it existed?
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It is a joke in the US that if you say Springfield no one knows where you are talking about because there are more towns in the US called that than there are states. That is precisely why the Simpsons used it as their home because it makes it both recognizable and unplaceable.
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Context for the āKamala is light on actual policyā crowd
https://x.com/emptywheel/status/1833744514181198136
He was also president for 4 years and made ārepeal and replaceā a key pillar of his run and never came up anything even remotely resembling a plan of what the replacement would be.
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He also went on about sacking people, like thatās a good thing. And you Kamala havenāt sacked anyone. But the point is if you sack people, theyāre screwing up, so youāve done a bad job, or your people have. Kamala hasnāt sacked her people because theyāre all doing a good job. Yet Trump views the number as the positive and number of people sacked = a good thing - just such a weird point of view.
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Especially for the āI only hire the best peopleā guy.
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I wonder how significant this might prove to be ;
āShe all but invited Trump to profess a remarkable neutrality between Russia and Ukraine, and then argued that with Trump in power, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv and then staring down Poland ā and that there just so happens to be hundreds of thousands of Polish Americans in Pennsylvania.ā - from Politico.
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I dont know if it is technically true, but it is often said about Chicago that more Poles live there than in any other city outside of Warsaw. But what the focus on Chicago masks is there are other similar large āPolishā communities in the neighboring midwest states. In Wisconsin and MI it is pushing 10% of the electorate of people who identify as being Polish Americans for whom anti Russian sentiment is in their blood.
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