I assume at some point they've thought of making the PDB a commercial.
And some of aides have almost certainly launder certain messages to Trump through Fox News.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in the DC metro area, I've always wondered about some of the ads that were obviously politically pointless, except for the possibility of influencing legislators. This actually isn't an unusual thing -- for issue lobbying, not candidate promotion. I don't really know anything about the strategic thinking behind it. Maybe lobbyists are conveying to Congress members: You don't want your constituents seeing this ad.
I enjoy a lot of the work of the Lincoln Project, but I still see it as a grift aimed at soliciting donations rather than creating political change.
The political value of getting Trump riled up seems dubious to me. "Riled up" is Trump's brand.
3: I believe that they are actually targeting other Republican 'elites" more so than Trump. Basic message: time to cut bait, count the judges and live to grift another day. That I believe is something more potentially useful in the short term.
Have they specifically targeted Barr's actions yet?
If they don't do something, the stereotype for conservative and the one for asshole are going to merge.
In close races -- Pa, Wisc, I suppose -- giving permission to 1-5% of Republicans to defect from Trump has real value.
Trump is such a mess, you really can't know what's going to happen if you shake him up. Will he say some stupid shit? Inevitably. Will it end up being the straw that breaks some Republican's back?
I should emphasize that I really don't mean to complain about the Lincoln Project. It's fun and funny! Maybe it's even helpful.
But: Republican apostates -- and particularly the ones who ape liberal talking points -- aren't viewed by anyone as Republicans, and they don't give Republicans any cover that Trump himself doesn't already give them. The big cover for potential Trump defectors -- the salient issue that caused them to vote for Trump in the first place -- is remedied by Joe's white maleness.
Provoking Trump is okay with me -- again, fun! -- but we are far past the point of diminishing returns on Trump's public stupidity and venality. Nothing else is really required on that front. Once you get to the point where it doesn't move the needle when the president proposes that we inject bleach, there's really no percentage in provoking Trump to say stupid things.
What actually does move the needle is concrete, grotesque policy failures -- the pandemic, the economic collapse, Black Lives Matter. And we've had quite enough of those, thank you very much. Provoking Trump into further fucking things up -- say, bombing Iran -- is not what this country needs right now.
But sure, fine. Let the grifters grift on behalf of the Dems for once. People like me are the actual target of the grift, and stoking liberal outrage isn't a terrible thing, even if it diverts a few dollars from productive causes. I won't donate myself, but if other folks want to contribute to my entertainment, I won't be unduly upset. I like the videos.
Oh, I'm not giving them any money either.
I think you might be overly optimistic about how closely persuadable low information voters are following events, and comparing claims to reality. It's a margin play, and I really don't see how it can be said that there are no longer any people at some particular margin. Trump is playing the same game: how many people are there on the fence about whether to vote and/or who to vote for that will be moved by a manufactured photo op of anarchists in Portland? He's probably right that it's greater than zero.
I agree that Biden being a white male may be alone sufficient for a different outcome even if all we were doing is a re-run of 2016. It can't hurt, though, to have a bunch of middle aged white men running around saying 'he really is the right guy for right now' because it counters the only narrative the Trumpists have going, which is that Biden is essentially a eunuch, a front for the women, people of color, and communists, that we all know want nothing more than to ruin your suburban dream.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in the DC metro area, I've always wondered about some of the ads that were obviously politically pointless, except for the possibility of influencing legislators. This actually isn't an unusual thing -- for issue lobbying, not candidate promotion. I don't really know anything about the strategic thinking behind it. Maybe lobbyists are conveying to Congress members: You don't want your constituents seeing this ad.
The billboards on the turnpike approaching Harrisburg always seem to be ads for "Coal: Why it's important and employs people"; "Apples. Pennsylvania apples. The pride of Pennsylvania"; "Milk; employing Pennsylvanians across Pennsylvania".
This seems like pretty straightforward lobbying. What confuses me is the ads in airports for, like, Cargill, or ABN-AMRO. I remember once walking through a concourse that was practically wrapped with ads for Emerson Electric. Obviously businessmen spend 50 times as much time in airports than normal people do, but how does this influence decision-making exactly?
Honestly, apples are really overrated.
I think of the Lincoln Project as a resume distribution program by experienced ad creators looking for work outside the Republican Party, or on the anti-Trump side of the Republican schism if that ever happens.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But not so overrated that I have ever been
Stupid phone.
Not so overrated that I have ever met someone proud of them.
ISIHMHBB, long before Trump, there was a traditional reason campaigners sometimes bought advertising in places completely unwinnable - the chance it makes the opponent panic and spend much more more nailing down their base they didn't need to.
Don't they sometimes bill based on a percentage of ad spending?
Last night at a political club meeting one person shared a document of which Senate races it made the most sense to give money to - elevating Dems with a chance but not enough money, downgrading them if they had plenty of money and/or less of a chance. In order top to bottom, the ones it recommended were Gross (AK), Ossoff (GA), Greenfield (IA), Bollier (KS), and Bullock (MT). The ones it actively disrecommended as less "bang for buck", continuing in the same order, were Hickenlooper (CO), Gideon (ME), SC (Harrison), Kelly (AZ), Jones (AL), and McGrath (KY).
It put Cunningham (NC) right in the middle, I guess saying "neither great nor terrible to give money to."
To be clear, this doesn't speak to whether phone-banking or otherwise volunteering for these candidates is a good use of time. We were pitched to letter-write to Arizona for the Senate in the same meeting.
8: I actually really like the ad with Reagan talking about our country being a city on a hill with lofty ideals juxtaposed with images from the Trump administration.
17: I'm giving money to Collins in Maine only because I lived there for a while.
8: I actually really like the ad with Reagan talking about our country being a city on a hill with lofty ideals juxtaposed with images from the Trump administration.
IIRC correctly that was branded "Republican Voters against Trump" rather than The Lincoln Project.
Probably others are familiar with this, but an idea like the list in 17 is Maciej Cieglowski's great slate -- the 2018 version funded 13 longshot candidates, 1 (Golden in ME, best bet) of whom won, and arguably 1 of whom who ran a strong race against the contemptible Steve King helped weaken him for the primary which he lost this time around. There's a narrower 2020 installment, 5 candidates.
I just donate to the DSCC or whatever it is. I'm not eager to get a daily email from everyone.
This is the current politics thread, so this is kind of on topic: my Google News feed has this as the second headline: "Trump pleads with Dems to agree to extend $600-a-week unemployment boost 24 hours before it expires." The spin is so ridiculous it's comical. It's the Daily Mail.
Something that seemed weird and creepy to me shortly after I moved to the DC area was advertising, with all the production values and emotional appeals of car ads or shoe ads, aimed at government contracts or policymakers. Ads just like "this SUV will turn a suburban dad into a modern cowboy", but instead the message is "buy this computer because we can't say that it's fit for CIA black ops missions, nudge nudge wink."
23. Yes, that's a disadvantage. But I ffigure that tipping even 1 house district towards sanity is worth an hour of classifying campaign mail as spam.
I'm glad to see Al Gross getting some more widespread attention. (The Lincoln Project recently put out an ad boosting him too.) He's still a bit of a longshot at this point, but Sullivan is looking more vulnerable than he has in the past; he doesn't have a strong independent personal brand like Murkowski, and he's tied himself very closely to Trump in a way that may well backfire given the current circumstances. Gross is an impressive guy and a strong challenger in terms of biography and policy stances, so if anyone is looking to throw money at individual senate campaigns his is a good one to target.
19: Your choice, but not only is Gideon consistently up in the polls, she has raised much more money than Collins to date and has about the same amount of cash on hand.
It's a margin play, and I really don't see how it can be said that there are no longer any people at some particular margin.
Yeah, sure, no real harm in it. But people like me and BG -- to whom these ads directly appeal -- have already made up our minds. The marginal voter that you seem to propose -- "Republicans who can be talked into being Never Trumpers by seeing outraged recitations of his public behavior" also long ago made their switch.
For others on the margin, the Lincoln Project starts off on the wrong foot with its name. Lincoln, while white and a Republican, was famously sympathetic to black people. He might as well be Joe Biden, who probably has a more direct connection to modern Republicanism.
If the Lincoln Project were serious about being white male Republicans talking to their own kind -- and to the people who defer to their kind -- then we'd see less about Black Lives Matter and more about how Trump screws over the white guys.
Kind of unrelated: I thought this one was the first real clunker I've seen. I liked the premise (guy in a coma wakes up 3.5 years into the Trump administration) but the execution was kind of lame. Maybe that works for our hypothetical marginal voter.
I sure did like this one. It's almost as good as if they just kept repeating, for 60 seconds, "Fuck you, Trump! Fuck you, Trump!"
I should send that to them as a suggestion for their next ad.
On the other hand, for Congressfolks who aren't closely tied to Trump, I do think there's some potential for this sort of thing.
This reminds me that I'm supposed to start making calls in less than an hour.
30: Campaigning against key Senators is what convinced me the Lincoln Project is more or less sincere in wanting to thwart current Republicanism as a whole - although it could also be that they think only a historic, deep, lasting defeat is what will bring them in as the new Republican leadership.
32: Now that I'm looking around, this one for Al Gross in Alaska is a good piece of rather standard political advertising. In most of their other ads, my sense is that they are promoting their own project as much as they are promoting any political goal. This one is really about the candidate.
28 last -- yeah, too long. But it ended well.
Oh god, he's an orthopedic surgeon?
Much better problem to have than Republicans, but they are such a malign influence on health policy.
I thought the Bullock one wasn't too generic or LP promoting.
Can't wait til she gets back into the mix
35: He has an interesting perspective on health care policy, actually, that is definitely more pro-provider than would probably be optimal but still within reason. E.g., he wants to make Medicare reimbursement more generous so more doctors will accept it, which is a big problem in Alaska.
38: If he calls for increasing all rates similarly, without increasing the relative reimbursement of PCPs to specialists, that's really filling his mouth with gold and not addressing the problems in places like Alaska that well.
But it does look like puts emphasis on a Medicare buy-in option, which is pretty good by centrist standards.
39: Sure, and I'm not saying his plan is optimal policy or would necessarily be effective (though I don't know enough of the details to say much more). But he's been involved in health care policy discussions for a while now and has a better-informed and more nuanced understanding than most doctors. At one point he was a vocal advocate for single-payer, though he's walked that back since he's been in the senate race.
And this is impressive candor (from before his campaign, but after he got into health policy) - he revealed in public that his surgical practice had made him up to $2.5m a year on just 5-6 surgeries a week, and talked about excessive hospital and doctor profits as part of the problem. That really warms me to him.
Calling people is so much easier when you are playing Civ on a second computer.
My computer is so old that it takes like a minute between turns, so you can dial.
17: I'm giving money to Collins in Maine only because I lived there for a while.
BG, please tell me I'm misunderstanding something here -- you're not seriously giving money to Republican Susan "I'm very disappointed, but I won't oppose Trump in any way" Collins, are you? Please tell me you somehow forgot to type "unseat" or something there.
It's certainly how I unthinkingly read it - like when one says "giving money to cancer".
I was confused and donated to Kony before I realized the mistake.
Oh, by the way: rich people suck.
"Paws Up" sounds like a beastiality thing not a resort.
Right. Like a bestiality resort for rich people.
$4,000 a night for a tent. I'm surprised the Q people haven't latched onto this as something nefarious.
They wanted to copyright the name Last Best Place, but ran into a shitstorm.
Well if he can't cancel the elections, at least he can ban Tik Tok! No pathetic global laughingstock here.
(Can he ban Tik Tok? What say you, smart people?)
We just finished season 3 of Babylon Berlin. A season 4 would surely just get darker and darker.
45: I thought I wrote "Collins' challenger."