Anti-Trump attack ads might actually be helping him, Democratic group finds
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/...elping-him
EXCERPTS: . . . The outfit, called Fellow Americans, was launched without public fanfare in early 2020 [...] In June, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Fellow Americans released a digital ad condemning Trump’s now infamous march across Lafayette Square, using scary clips of tear gas and the sounds of flash bangs as Trump held a Bible aloft outside of St. John’s Church. The spot changed almost no minds about Trump or the protests, according to testing responses among various voter subgroups.
“We assumed it would be a mover spot, and it just wasn’t,” McIntosh said. The video had the adverse effect of pushing away not just moderate voters, but also many Democratic-base voters, particularly young people, who find politics tiresome and irrelevant to their lives...
[...] What did resonate? A spot called “Protest & Vote.” The video featured upbeat music, brightly colored graphics, and images of nonviolent protests, with former president Obama urging activists to both register to vote and take to the streets. The ad made no mention of Trump or Biden. The spot worked, its creators said, because it adopted a series of themes and images that have been shown to resonate among young people, African Americans, and a subgroup of disengaged voters they call “struggling skeptics.” It was optimistic, showcased diverse faces, tied current fights to historical struggles, and avoided the Beltway political debates that consume a news media growing ever more detached from the voting public...
[...] Fellow Americans partnered with two firms -- Civis Analytics and Swayable -- for what it called “creative pretesting.” ... this is the first presidential cycle in which creative testing has crept into mainstream Democratic practice...
[...] “We are at this critical moment when people are looking at empirical evidence about whether messages work, and in politics, you still have poll-testing of messages, which is bullshit,” Swayable CEO James Slezak told me. “A pollster calls people up and says, ‘If I said this, what would you say? Would this message be persuasive?’ But there is no science that can predict how persuasive it will be. In a drug trial you don’t give a drug to a 1,000 people and ask them if they get better the next day. You have a test group and a control group. You run experiments, measuring certain things in a structured protocol that actually proves it can cause an impact.”
[...] Dutta told me that this kind of testing works like a focus group at a much larger scale [...] to measure specific outcomes and bypass the gut assumptions that usually fuel ad making. ... Dutta cited one Hillary Clinton ad called “Mirrors,” which showed young girls looking in the mirror, intercut with Trump making sexist comments about various women. The assumption in Brooklyn was that it would [...drive up...] negative views of Trump. “I thought it was one of those powerful spots,” Dutta said. “It made me cry. But it turns out ... it actually created huge backlash amongst undecided voters. And it made them more likely to support Trump. It just goes to prove that we have all these embedded biases as Democrats.”
Among those biases: that Trump’s loathsome personal qualities are enough to rally Democrats to vote against him in November. That bet proved to be a miscalculation by the Clinton campaign in 2016, and according to Fellow Americans, voters are largely rejecting messages that go after Trump personally rather than issues like his administration’s response to the pandemic. Its testing, particularly around coronavirus messaging, revealed that personality-focused attacks on Trump, specifically ads using Trump’s image or voice, were almost useless. [...] Fellow Americans found, and messages that featured Trump or rising death tolls or administrative failure had the adverse effect of reaffirming their skepticism of the political process.
[...] Its best-performing ads had a few things in common: They were optimistic; they included President Obama; they used simple facts and figures; or they starred regular people rather than politicians. Messages about Biden performed best when they avoided Trump contrasts or featured testimonials from young people who portrayed him as a bridge builder and focused on his unifying message... (MORE - details)
The Return of the Chaos Candidate
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl...44333.html
EXCERPTS: Donald Trump never liked the nickname. Back when he was a New Yorker and a newly minted Republican and generally considered a political oddity, Jeb Bush branded him on live television. According to the former Florida governor, Trump was “the chaos candidate.” It fit then, and it still fits now: The first Trump vs. Biden debate marked the return of the chaos candidacy.
Though no one who knew him well expected Trump to change because of a trifling factor such as living in the White House for nearly four years, the incumbent president was in classic form Tuesday night. For 98 minutes, he belittled and bullied and berated both his opponent and the moderator -- so much so that he made the debate painful to watch. But what was roundly condemned may have been the plan.
Trump trails former vice president Joe Biden [...] Figuring he needed a strong showing to close the gap, the campaign studied every Biden debate since 1972. The strategy they came up with entailed having Trump rely on his improv ability rather than employ a structured game plan.
There were just a handful of goals for Trump, a source familiar with the debate prep told RCP: Knock Biden off his talking points by answering questions from moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News and then posing another one to his opponent. Force him to own up to the less popular parts of his own record. Push the centrist Democrat to own the policy agenda of those on his left flank. “The more Joe stutters and stumbles and makes mistakes and says things that just don't resonate or make sense,” the source told RCP the day before the debate, “the more we're winning.”
If that approach wasn’t already apparent, it became obvious within the first few minutes when a discussion about the Supreme Court turned into a question about Obamacare.
[...] "The party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party," Biden insisted.
"And they’re going to dominate you, Joe. You know that," Trump shot back.
It was a redux of what Republicans have long argued, namely that Biden’s moderation is a sham and that the former vice president is little more than a Trojan horse for more progressive ideologies. At one point, after Trump accused Biden of embracing “socialized medicine” and signing off on “the manifesto” of a former Democratic rival, an incredulous Biden replied, “I’m not going to listen to him. The fact of the matter is I beat Bernie Sanders.”
This was a rare denunciation at a moment when Democrats have tried to bind up the partisan wounds of a divisive primary. Trump saw it as an opening to take advantage, declaring that Biden had “just lost the left.” Two minutes later, both men were shouting that the other was the real “liar.”
Much of the debate was wasted with this kind of jawboning, and little policy was actually discussed in detail. But as Trump was trying to peg Biden as a radical, he only succeeded in chasing the Democrat to the center. The Green New Deal? Biden said he didn’t support it. Rioting in the streets? Biden condemned violence. Defunding the police? Biden said he would increase funding. Just as Republicans struggled to define Biden over the summer, Trump was all over the place throughout the night. His punches didn’t land as hard as they did four years ago, and his new opponent was not as easily demonized as Hillary Clinton. But the president never stopped interrupting, which at some point became the issue itself.
[...] The debate continued for several more minutes. More barbs and more personal attacks followed. Both candidates regularly interrupted, and they kept doing so even as Wallace tried to bring the night to an end. “We are going to have to leave it there,” the moderator said, even as Trump kept speaking. “It has been an interesting hour and a half.”
More than anything, the 98 minutes marked the return of Trump as the chaos candidate... (MORE - details)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/...elping-him
EXCERPTS: . . . The outfit, called Fellow Americans, was launched without public fanfare in early 2020 [...] In June, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Fellow Americans released a digital ad condemning Trump’s now infamous march across Lafayette Square, using scary clips of tear gas and the sounds of flash bangs as Trump held a Bible aloft outside of St. John’s Church. The spot changed almost no minds about Trump or the protests, according to testing responses among various voter subgroups.
“We assumed it would be a mover spot, and it just wasn’t,” McIntosh said. The video had the adverse effect of pushing away not just moderate voters, but also many Democratic-base voters, particularly young people, who find politics tiresome and irrelevant to their lives...
[...] What did resonate? A spot called “Protest & Vote.” The video featured upbeat music, brightly colored graphics, and images of nonviolent protests, with former president Obama urging activists to both register to vote and take to the streets. The ad made no mention of Trump or Biden. The spot worked, its creators said, because it adopted a series of themes and images that have been shown to resonate among young people, African Americans, and a subgroup of disengaged voters they call “struggling skeptics.” It was optimistic, showcased diverse faces, tied current fights to historical struggles, and avoided the Beltway political debates that consume a news media growing ever more detached from the voting public...
[...] Fellow Americans partnered with two firms -- Civis Analytics and Swayable -- for what it called “creative pretesting.” ... this is the first presidential cycle in which creative testing has crept into mainstream Democratic practice...
[...] “We are at this critical moment when people are looking at empirical evidence about whether messages work, and in politics, you still have poll-testing of messages, which is bullshit,” Swayable CEO James Slezak told me. “A pollster calls people up and says, ‘If I said this, what would you say? Would this message be persuasive?’ But there is no science that can predict how persuasive it will be. In a drug trial you don’t give a drug to a 1,000 people and ask them if they get better the next day. You have a test group and a control group. You run experiments, measuring certain things in a structured protocol that actually proves it can cause an impact.”
[...] Dutta told me that this kind of testing works like a focus group at a much larger scale [...] to measure specific outcomes and bypass the gut assumptions that usually fuel ad making. ... Dutta cited one Hillary Clinton ad called “Mirrors,” which showed young girls looking in the mirror, intercut with Trump making sexist comments about various women. The assumption in Brooklyn was that it would [...drive up...] negative views of Trump. “I thought it was one of those powerful spots,” Dutta said. “It made me cry. But it turns out ... it actually created huge backlash amongst undecided voters. And it made them more likely to support Trump. It just goes to prove that we have all these embedded biases as Democrats.”
Among those biases: that Trump’s loathsome personal qualities are enough to rally Democrats to vote against him in November. That bet proved to be a miscalculation by the Clinton campaign in 2016, and according to Fellow Americans, voters are largely rejecting messages that go after Trump personally rather than issues like his administration’s response to the pandemic. Its testing, particularly around coronavirus messaging, revealed that personality-focused attacks on Trump, specifically ads using Trump’s image or voice, were almost useless. [...] Fellow Americans found, and messages that featured Trump or rising death tolls or administrative failure had the adverse effect of reaffirming their skepticism of the political process.
[...] Its best-performing ads had a few things in common: They were optimistic; they included President Obama; they used simple facts and figures; or they starred regular people rather than politicians. Messages about Biden performed best when they avoided Trump contrasts or featured testimonials from young people who portrayed him as a bridge builder and focused on his unifying message... (MORE - details)
The Return of the Chaos Candidate
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl...44333.html
EXCERPTS: Donald Trump never liked the nickname. Back when he was a New Yorker and a newly minted Republican and generally considered a political oddity, Jeb Bush branded him on live television. According to the former Florida governor, Trump was “the chaos candidate.” It fit then, and it still fits now: The first Trump vs. Biden debate marked the return of the chaos candidacy.
Though no one who knew him well expected Trump to change because of a trifling factor such as living in the White House for nearly four years, the incumbent president was in classic form Tuesday night. For 98 minutes, he belittled and bullied and berated both his opponent and the moderator -- so much so that he made the debate painful to watch. But what was roundly condemned may have been the plan.
Trump trails former vice president Joe Biden [...] Figuring he needed a strong showing to close the gap, the campaign studied every Biden debate since 1972. The strategy they came up with entailed having Trump rely on his improv ability rather than employ a structured game plan.
There were just a handful of goals for Trump, a source familiar with the debate prep told RCP: Knock Biden off his talking points by answering questions from moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News and then posing another one to his opponent. Force him to own up to the less popular parts of his own record. Push the centrist Democrat to own the policy agenda of those on his left flank. “The more Joe stutters and stumbles and makes mistakes and says things that just don't resonate or make sense,” the source told RCP the day before the debate, “the more we're winning.”
If that approach wasn’t already apparent, it became obvious within the first few minutes when a discussion about the Supreme Court turned into a question about Obamacare.
[...] "The party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party," Biden insisted.
"And they’re going to dominate you, Joe. You know that," Trump shot back.
It was a redux of what Republicans have long argued, namely that Biden’s moderation is a sham and that the former vice president is little more than a Trojan horse for more progressive ideologies. At one point, after Trump accused Biden of embracing “socialized medicine” and signing off on “the manifesto” of a former Democratic rival, an incredulous Biden replied, “I’m not going to listen to him. The fact of the matter is I beat Bernie Sanders.”
This was a rare denunciation at a moment when Democrats have tried to bind up the partisan wounds of a divisive primary. Trump saw it as an opening to take advantage, declaring that Biden had “just lost the left.” Two minutes later, both men were shouting that the other was the real “liar.”
Much of the debate was wasted with this kind of jawboning, and little policy was actually discussed in detail. But as Trump was trying to peg Biden as a radical, he only succeeded in chasing the Democrat to the center. The Green New Deal? Biden said he didn’t support it. Rioting in the streets? Biden condemned violence. Defunding the police? Biden said he would increase funding. Just as Republicans struggled to define Biden over the summer, Trump was all over the place throughout the night. His punches didn’t land as hard as they did four years ago, and his new opponent was not as easily demonized as Hillary Clinton. But the president never stopped interrupting, which at some point became the issue itself.
[...] The debate continued for several more minutes. More barbs and more personal attacks followed. Both candidates regularly interrupted, and they kept doing so even as Wallace tried to bring the night to an end. “We are going to have to leave it there,” the moderator said, even as Trump kept speaking. “It has been an interesting hour and a half.”
More than anything, the 98 minutes marked the return of Trump as the chaos candidate... (MORE - details)