Bad campaigns are disorganized, suffer from poor strategic decisions, or both.

Jeb's campaign misread the national mood and had absolutely no plan for how to deal with Trump's juvenile insults. They just assumed that the candidate with the most money would win and that Trump would flame out.

Kamala was far too loyal to the people she initially picked to run her campaign, one of whom was her sister.

Trump is a bad debater, a poor candidate, and a historically terrible president and person. But some of the strategic decisions from his campaign have been pretty shrewd. In 2016, Trump's campaign people did a good job of leveraging his ability to get press without spending money. They clearly understood that giving the finger to establishment Republicans was a viable strategy. Down the stretch, Trump's campaign focused on the correct states, whereas HRC wasted time in Georgia and elsewhere because her campaign foolishly assumed that key states in the Midwest were in the bag.

This time around, Trump's decision to skip the debates clearly was correct.

I'm wondering if there's anyone that hasn't already decided who they are voting for.

yea i dont really know the answer to that. i try to remind myself that just due to the fact that we post about politics on a message board makes us probably more politically informed/involved than 95% of the country if not higher.

There are probably some but its going to be not a lot of people and they are not going to be liking either candidate.

The bigger issue is convincing people to vote who either aren't registered or just aren't motivated. This is what cost Trump Georgia in 2020. And it could have affected Arizona and Nevada as well.

Because of the current abortion issue and the 6-3 conservative lean of the US Supreme court (3 of whom were already appointed by Trump) it is likely that this could be the issue that motivates voters who will hold their nose at pulling the Biden lever but will do so anyway.

This will be especially significant in states that have Abortion ballot initiatives.

trump asked for a delay in his trial until tomorrow which was granted over the other sides objection, so that his cronies could say that the judge and the democrats are interfering with his campaign by making him have trial on the day of the New Hampshire primary. it also allows them an out if he underperforms while still beating hailey. Elise Stefanik is already yelling about it on twitter. they know the average republican isn't gonna sweat the details of truth or reality.

that's the kind of smarts the campaign has which makes the campaign a "good" campaign.

have you read fire and fury or fear? i think you'd enjoy them, if you want i can send you a dropbox link to the audiobooks, and i forget which one it was, but in one they clearly laid out his strategy and it was pretty brilliant

You are talking about the Michael Wolff book. I haven't read it.

two books - basically the same so i have trouble remembering who covered what



i have both in audiobook format and can post to a dropbox and pm the link if you like

it's really interesting because both books extremely anti trump

and yet, two books diving deep into the woodwork of who trump was both as a campaigner and as a president and exposing just how dysfunctional and outright idiotic most of it was - it's also deeply humanizing

he stops being a caricature and he's suddenly a real person and it's actually impossible to not view him more positively after reading those books because your mental image of him previously just viewed him as this evil and stupid tyrant whereas now he's a selfish and stupid person who at times is able to see through the bs

for example a big thing he does as president is just assume the status quo is not optimal and can be improved - so things like longstanding deals for military access or trade deals are cosnidered perfect and he's like "let's renegotiate because we can do better" and everyone from staffers to the bureacrats running the relevant departments give him these doomsday scenarios as to why he can't do that but never show their work

i found it very similar to religion - everyone says there is a heaven and we must all act accordingly in order to get into heaven and discussion of "how do we know there is a heaven or what the criteria for entrance are?" is met with non-answers but rather ridicule "you need to have faith" "god has told us there is heaven" etc etc etc



you may recall the entire thing with him looking into cancelling our military treaties with south korea - the news headlines were trump saying the land we got was bad land - which is a "lol you stupid idiot" kind of moment because that's strategic land for the military and he's looking at it with an eye to developing a hotel or golf course on it

yes, he did actually say that, but that was some random stream of conscious statement he said that had nothing to do with the greater picture of "each year we spend billions protecting south korea and get nothing in return and we even have a massive trade deficit with them to boot and we need to change that by either fixing the trade imbalance and/or getting them to pay for their own defense" and he was universally met with "WW3 will start tomorrow if we pull troops out of South Korea" this was coming from the military, from his staffers, from anyone in the room. Everyone was saying it's cheaper to defend America through proxies like Korea than to deal with the nukes that'll strike down upon us if we don't.

I found that line of reasoning insane. Sure we can up the monthly risk of ww3/nuclear attack on usa from one in 50 million to say 1 in 49 million if we withdrew from Korea, but to treat it like a foregone conclusion was just assinine.

You found this echoed everywhere. "No you can't renegotiate our trade treaty, the global ecosystem will collapse"

most of the books is about how he wanted to change things and then everyone would spend all their time talking him out of it and taking advantage of how forgetful and adhd he was that you could be told to do something and just not do it and he'd forget about it so long as it didn't come back up again in the news or someone mentioning it to him - that's how his staffers would control and restrict who get access to him "can't let Bob see Trump again, he's going to mention NAFTA again" and a week later, Trump asks the very person who stopped Bob from visiting the oval office why Bob doesn't come around anymore and he likes Bob and the guy just shrugs his shoulders and then Trump just moves on to the next thing.

Like his staffers would genuinely go to his desk and take executive orders waiting for him to sign off his desk and hide them. They did that knowing that if he didn't see it on his desk, he'd forget about it and if he remembered about it again, in the day or so it took to draft the order, he'd again forget about it and that same person could just swing by his desk and intercept it once more


amazing books, both are brief and light reads

Ive never voted 3rd party but if a legit moderate split ticket shows up (probably manchin as prez), at this point i would likely vote it

Trump.vs Biden I'm legit undecided

I'll add these to my Audible backlog, behind the 2020 Obama one.

The stuff you describe here is what made the Trump administration so insufferable to endure from an internet user standpoint.

Jesus H ****ing Christ, people. I get it, you can't nuke a hurricane to alter its course or shut down the cell. Trump saying his personal shower thoughts out loud at a podium is not justification for 183 new posts on the forum and 4 entire days of "LOL TRUMP" coverage from every media outlet. Plus, you know damn well anyone who spends their evening staring at the ceiling has had the same thought at one point when considering what kind of crazy **** nukes can do beside level cities.

You can see the ADHD in Trump every time he talks, and maybe that's why he should stick to the prompter every time, but one thing that gives me pause from generally disliking him is seeing some minor thing he said blown way out of proportion or taken completely and wildly out of context to make some larger point about how all republicans are ******ed. With as much ammunition as someone on Twitter 24/7 provides, you can at least pick some better spots.

Edit: Are we reddit now? Regarded is a banned word on the filter? Sweet baby Jesus we are soft.

Edit2: Thinking about this has reminded me about Biden's Corn Pop story, which got a smile. Imagine what kind of comedy gold could be mined if Biden was terminally online and just speaking off the cuff to any camera pointed in his direction. We're really going to have another election between these two.

This is one way to look at it, yes he did things no one dared before, that doesn't mean one could do those things and they were good for the US.
One of the the biggest impact Trump had is to destroy USA's trust.
Since Trump I can say you cannot trust USA.
Before him USA trust had meaning, now it has as much value as russian trust.

Not sure I read that in your post.

books are amazing and anyone who has any opinion on trump at all should read them

the syria part was wild

he goes in saying Syria gassing their own people was unforgivable, that the Obama admin previously declared that was a red line that couldn't be crossed and we thus were obligated to take Assad out - the generals all go omg you can't do that bruh

the generals insist on taking out military targets instead - trump is adamant that is stupid and unproductive and it's better to do nothing than to launch a tomahawk at an empty airfield

a day later, the generals had won him over and talked him into launching tomahawks into launching tomahawks at an empty airfield

he gets some of the first universal praise from the media that he's ever received and thus decides the generals were correct

but it's just kind of wild how he goes in with "airstrikes don't fix anything, they are dumb, we're not just going to do airstrikes, if we do then it's to take out the leadership not to hit some tarmac"

and then a day later by being surrounded by generals who only know airstrikes on tarmac and that's all they've ever known - he's now onboard with a pointless airstrike of tarmac that accomplished nothing but puts him in line with expectations and thus gets first genuine praise as a president

like he was genuinely onto something that we either take out assad like we literally promised we would do if he did that again or do nothing, half measures are stupid - meanwhile Syria is way worse now than it was then and you can easily argue that the USA casually dipping their toes into the region definitely made things much worse


also, something that was very interesting about the books was they author noted how visibly moved and upset trump would be when seeing the suffering of others and how shaken he was to see the images of the syrian chemical weapons attacks and how unlike it was when he was up on the dais - one thing the books are wholly onboard with is trump is performing when he's up on the dais, he knows who his base are and what they want and he makes sure to give it to them

yeah i've mentioned this a bunch elsewhere on the site, that as an american traveling the globe, the tone of reactions I received changed dramatically from "wow so strong and powerful" to "lol" during his time as president

it's been the same under biden though, literally no different, just a new kind of buffoonery of instead of giving out shower thoughts to a microphone he's getting lost on stage or falling over - we have recaptured our legitimacy under him


i think one thing that bears repeating though is the few things that trump was able to push through and wasn't talked out of or had the order pulled from his desk - the wild and crazy ideas that snuck through the cracks like trade wars with china and immigration reform - he's been shown to have been right about that stuff - these were obvious and unpopular things which Biden could have repealed no problem with no pushback and he didn't but rather stayed the course and even took it to a higher level - so much that biden is now actually getting a lot of criticism for not dialing back the china trade wars and border reform from his base

i 100% think trump is a buffoon and attempted treason and should be executed for that

i 100% think he was the least qualified president we've ever had, the laziest president we've ever had, but he was far from the worst

we need to get out of "status quo is correct, USA#1 forever and always" and recognize that a lot of what we do is stupid and needs to be changed

The bolded above is hard to square with the bolded below.

strictly based on policy in a vacuum

take away the treason and i'd be voting for him in the upcoming election - but that has more to do with biden not even being aware he's president than anything to do with trump

but we need change, so much that any dice roll decisions from a buffoon are going to improve the situation more than someone who says "oh the generals say if we stop giving south korea billions of dollars then we'll get nuked in a week so we need to keep that money hose flowing"

trump may be a monkey at a typewriter, but i'd rather get it was the best of times it was the blurst of times than someone who doesn't even type

literally everything the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES says is justification for any number of internet posts. every document the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES touches has to be retrieved and saved. the crazy thing isnt the coverage but that people like you voted for this ****ing idiot and will again.

Reflexively disregarding experience or expertise in favor of random button-mashing is a common but deeply wrong-headed way of thinking imo.

i would normally agree

but no analysis whatsoever of US policy in nearly anything could ever support that it's even plausibly the correct or optimal path

i'd rather have a monkey at a typewriter either destroy it so it can be built anew or luckbox into improving it


i mean, i'm speaking out of ignorance here, was a poli-sci major, later a journalist/gov researcher, etc

i feel like i have a pretty good understanding of our gross incompetence and things like "mr trump if we don't give south korea billions of dollars then ww3 will start in a week" is just simply not true - it could indeed be a net positive for us, but we're simply repeating what we started in the 1950s without any consideration of "have things changed since then?"

literally nothing of note has changed in american policy since we built the highways and created the EPA other than domestic spying

I haven't read Wolff's book, but I find it incredibly unlikely that U.S. generals told Trump that WWIII was a certainty within a week if the U.S. cut aid to S. Korea. That isn't how military people normally talk.

This is incorrect. Off the top of my head:

FISA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (i.e., repeal of Glass-Steagall), the ACA, the Patriot Act, and various policies that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union.

With a little time, I'm sure that I could come up with a lot of other examples.

again, i mentioned spying already

ah yes just a magic coincidence FIRE upped political contributions 10x in the years leading up the repeal and that repeal led to the 2008 economic crisis

no breakthrough whatsoever, still utterly terrible compared to other western countries - fact you view this as a major shift tells me we're never going to agree on this

lol, c'mon now, i included this one

pepsi, blue jeans, and gross soviet corruption is what did this

so congrats, our military spending is almost as much as the rest of the world combined, we have social services which provide nothing yet cost 20x more than other western countries, all our infrastructure is crumbling, we don't even have high speed rail

we're pathetic and slowly heading towards bankruptcy

I missed your reference to spying. I wasn't suggesting that all of the policies that I mentioned were to the good. You said that there were no significant policy changes since 1970.

And neither the Dems and GOP will solve any of these as they are both bought and paid for.

I don't get the fascination with high speed rail in America. Particularly as a "the least we can possibly do" sentiment you just alluded to, like it's a total no-brainer.

What problem are we trying to solve there? Who are these people that need to travel long distances in a short period of time for a higher price than an airplane ticket?

Europe is brought up as an example, but nearly the entirety of Europe can fit within US borders, and they have more than twice the population. Plus, most of the truly high-speed rail is contained within western Europe, presumably where the population density is higher still.

The last time a project like this was floated in Wisconsin, it mathed out as more efficient to contract door-to-door limousine service for 3 riders per vehicle, replacing the limos every 6 years and paying the drivers $100k/yr than it would be to build the rail infrastructure for a shittier overall experience and barely saving any time on the trip once you account for getting to/from the train station and needing to slow the train down through every population center, not to mention any extra stops along the way.

Amtrak can't pay their bills on even the most highly-trafficked routes in America. Who the hell would be using this service?

I can get on board for the cool-factor, but it seems like such an enormous waste of money given the relatively low demand such a service would generate. Sink that eleventy billion dollars into more free ponies that people might actually ride.

Yeah, I agree. I think the geography prevents this from being a reasonable solution. I like the idea, but it just doesn't seem practical.