mtutiger

This is a really interesting way of looking at it.

Yep... Nights like these really reinforce how out of touch pundits can be lol

A couple of things: JD's a trained lawyer, the guy has "debate team leader" written all over him, Walz has a different background. On that front, it's just a mismatch altogether.... so when you get into that situation, do you play his game, or do you have to take a different tack and play to your strengths? I don't know if it worked or not, but the overall point is that you aren't going to "outlawyer" a Yale law grad if you have Walz' background and demeanor. You have to do something else.... there was a bit of rope-a-dope in the strategy, and sort of falling back on the policy specifics that are more popular within his ticket's agenda. My guess is it all did not harm. The second point is that while JD, as a forensic debater, looked the part well tonight, a lot of what he was asked to defend (ie. abortion, healthcare, J6) is *really* difficult stuff to defend. You can be a world class debater, but when given the task of defending Trump's position on abortion of his inability to accept election results, come up short. And I'd argue he did in a number of these exchanges, particularly on abortion and J6.

Yeah, I mentioned it in my post above, but there could be a bit of "Fetterman/Oz" in what just took place there.... the pundits ran after one thing (Fetterman's health / stroke concerns) when the moment everybody remembered (Oz' answer on abortion) was the thing that mattered the most.

That was probably goal number one: improve his favorables... they are historically bad.

The resemblance to the type is just uncanny when you notice it.... and we know all those types. Again, I think the pundits are going to give JD flowers tonight, and understand why... after all, these are the folks who couldn't see the forest through the trees in the John Fetterman-Dr. Oz debate! But objectively, there's a grain of inauthenticity that he gives off. It's a lot of the stuff that JD's supporters accuse Kamala Harris of, even (it makes sense that they are both lawyers by trade). Voters tend to like authenticity more, so it's possible that it looks more like a draw to viewers. Ultimately the debate won't matter much if at all though.... and he didn't look great in some of the bigger inflection moments of the debate (mike cut-off, January 6th)

The Mike Pence line was just brutal... Brutal. I wish it wasn't hidden in the back of the proceedings, but these debates are about viral moments and that was a good one

The Jan 6th response from JD was awful...

And illegals

JD was conceived in a lab to appeal to DC pundits, so he's getting plaudits there. My issue is that he comes across too shifty, kinda like Ellis in Die Hard.

What makes it worse now is that he's now 78 years old... It only gets worse from here

I know we are numb to it all, but this a vile thing to say. Vile.

Micro knows more about this stuff than any of us, but to clarify, my point was never the concept of it being wrong for a leader to ever visit a disaster site but rather that visits should take into account timing. I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been in my initial post, but that's it. Maybe the situation on the ground in Valdosta is different, but at the same time Biden and Harris are being grilled by people for not parachuting into Asheville right now even though local leaders wouldn't want them in there until such time that the situation is stabilized. According to the President, he's likely to go to NC this week.... hopefully the VP will go as well at some point. But at least as it pertains to Asheville and the situation in the mountains, it would be a mistake to go there right now. Politics be damned.

Diverting resources to accommodate photo op... Lovely

I think the Democratic Party has taken Hispanic voters for granted to some degree and hasn't messaged toward economics in the way that they should. Not to mention immigration, which they are struggling as well (Harris' speech in Arizona a couple of nights ago is a good example of trying to counteract that) My overall point that wasn't quoted needs to be grappled with: there's a lot of ink spilled on Hispanic voters these days, and certainly not without reason, but at the end of the day, anywhere between 68-70% of voters in this election will be white voters. That's even moreso the case in the battleground states, particular PA/WI/MI... Biden improved on Hilllary with white voters, particularly in the suburbs, and it's likely to going to happen again, both in suburban and rural settings, in 2024. It's a headwind for Trump that I don't think is given enough attention IMO.

Demographically, the attention tends to be focused on Hispanic voters, and not without reason: trends to the right aren't helpful. Not enough attention is being paid to white voters and what trends may be at play, for whatever reason... The fact that Trump feels the need to spend for the ME-02 EC vote provides evidence to that effect.

I post a lot of clips, and I know people get annoyed by Acyn and Yashar Ali and Aaron Astor and Filipowski clips and all But, at a very basic level, if any of us were conducting a job interview, we would never hire someone who sounds like this.

Awesome, he wants us to be a combo of "Idiocracy" and "The Purge"

Yeah, we know very little about what really happened at this point... The news will get so much worse

Has he even uttered a word about Helene yet? Western NC got hit with something approaching a Katrina level event, and he doesn't care

Mitt Romney can come off the sidelines anytime now...