Rightwing playbooks used in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault on the vice-president
For Barack Obama there was “birtherism” and a name they said sounded like a specific Middle East terrorist. For Hillary Clinton there was “Lock her up” and merchandise that said, “Trump that bitch”, “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one.”
Rightwing playbooks deployed in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault against Vice-President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee aiming to become the first Black woman and first person of south Asian descent to be US president.
“It’s obvious that the Republicans are going to play the race and gender card, which we’ve seen already in some of the attacks on social media,” said Tara Setmayer, a Black woman who is co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee. “It may be catnip for their Maga base but it will be a turnoff for the moderate voters in the battleground states that will determine this election.”
Good. The uglier they get, the more people will be turned off. Plenty of people who are racist but don’t consider themselves to be racist do not like the overt racists.
#MAGA already has all the bigots and racists.
Doubling the shit won’t attract more maggots.
My dad is almost one of the the people FlyingSquid talking about; he’s a Democrat and kind of racist, but he doesn’t see himself as a racist. Someone like a more Republican version of my dad might be persuaded to vote for Harris, or at least not vote for Trump, if the Trump campaign gets too nasty.
Don’t forget that magats aren’t the only people who would potentially vote for Trump; a lot of people are swing voters who, for some reason, have a hard time deciding who to vote for. Neither candidate can win without appealing to a majority of those voters.
Yep. My grandmother, born in the first decade of the 20th century, had some pretty racist ideas. But when she lived in the UK, she always voted Labour and when she emigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen, she always voted Democrat. And she died before Obama was elected, but I have no doubt she would have voted for Obama even if she had pretty obvious racist issues with her black next-door neighbor.
Reminds me of the story going around during the 2008 election about the canvasser in the south being told by a white person, “we’re voting for the n-!”
I have family that are similar. I wouldn’t classify them as racist, but they straddle that line with opinions. I’ve never seen or heard them classify an entire group of people or act discriminatory in person. It is more along the lines of “everyone is equal and nobody should get special treatment” regarding things like affirmative action or the more extreme DEI practices of some companies.
My experience is such that these people can be reached if we keep the lines of communication open rather than do the easy thing of cutting them off. I’ve been able to use their own logic and verbiage (especially verbiage) against them but one can’t go in guns blazing. To change minds, it must feel like their idea. Turn the heat up slowly and introduce doubt and ideas.
My big take away, with people like I described above, is that they are reacting to the more extreme people who would feel right at home in the racist far right if things were just a tad different. Cultural warriors and grievance politics leaders are cancerous regardless of which side of the spectrum they occupy because their goal remains the same: divide the normal people and turn us against each other.
And judging by what happens in my extended family and how it is breaking down on political lines… it is sadly working.
Despite what many believe on Lemmy, there are also people who only vote Republican for financial reasons and try to ignore the racism and bigotry of the party. I personally know a few that intend to abstain in the fall now.
Yep. Every once in awhile I like to watch some former Trump voters talk about why they won’t vote for him. It’s heartening:
Careful a lot of them will still vote for him.
[According to] Ange-Marie Hancock, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. She also happens to lead a group of scholars studying the current vice presidency. Their work is called the Kamala Harris Project…
what’s interesting about how it impacts swing voters or independent voters is certainly on the surface, if you were to survey independent voters or swing voters, I bet you would get a strong majority who would say, we really don’t like that kind of language. We really don’t like the way in which he talks about women or talks about his opponents in that kind of way. The challenge of course, is that many political psychologists have found that even as we kind of consciously say, we don’t agree with it, it still ends up having a negative impact.”
From Consider This from NPR: Kamala Harris already faces racism and sexism from Trump and Republicans, Jul 24, 2024 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/consider-this-from-npr/id1503226625?i=1000663256947
There’s a deeper explanation in that (short) podcast in case anyone is curious.
The modern GOP don’t have a platform. They run on grievance. That’s why they’re freaking out about the fact that Joe Biden dropped out. They had been running “against Joe Biden” rather than running a campaign based on a platform or issues.
To be fair the Democrats don’t have a platform other than: not Republican/Trump/ diverse coalition. Ok, they didn’t want to backslide, which is good, but the things they want to accomplish don’t help the working class a whole lot.
Let me help you out.
Linking to this while also trying to argue that the Democratic platform is something more than “not Republican” is really funny.
From her speech the other day (in conjunction with Biden) these appear to be her focuses:
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The middle class
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Voting rights
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Reproductive rights (limited to a bill, no mention of stuffing the Supreme Court)
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Justice Reform
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Gun Control
Hopefully we get more information over the best while and some formalization at the convention.
I disagree the ban on non competes is a recent example of how this administration is helping the working class.
I mean democrats categorically support unions, support reproductive rights, support protecting the environment… They do have a platform that isn’t “not Republican”. It’s just that republicans know their platform (project 2025 really) is so wildly unpopular they have to focus not on that, they have to focus on tearing down the opposing candidate.
In terms of helping the working class: taxing the wealthy and wealthy corporations more will help the working class. Improving access to low cost / affordable healthcare will help the working class. Having strong unions will help the working class.
The problem is that “access to low cost / affordable healthcare” is such a limp dick policy. Yeah, I can “afford” healthcare, but it still costs me thousands of dollars every year and I’m tied to my employer for it. Then I’m still not getting very good care and I have a chronic mental health disorder. That cop just executed that schizophrenic woman in Illinois and I’ve been arrested and mistreated due to my own mental health. Nobody is helping people like me and her. Local jails are filled with people who are there because of the lack of mental healthcare. I’m lucky that I get to see a p-doc for 5 minutes a month without paying full price. Full price is $200 per visit, just to get a refill on a prescription that makes me feel like shit all the time. I got my appointment mixed up one time and couldn’t get a refill until I saw the doc a week later and had to restart on a lower dosage. Nobody wanted to help me get a refill, I talked to multiple people at the office and at the pharmacy and couldn’t get it and kept getting different answers from different people. The doctor told me I should have came in to see him without the appointment. I was afraid to do that because I didn’t want to get kicked out and lose access to my doctor. The healthcare system in this country is a mess and a joke due to shitty scum sucking MBAs taking over every aspect of it. They’re working for the private healthcare industry and doing nothing to help us.
No, that’s just ‘‘I’m rubber your glue’’ bullshit. It isn’t so. Just like CNN isn’t FoxNews for Liberals, and there’s absolutely no cult of personality for Unkie Joe, as you can see from him stepping down, and left wing engagement went WAY up.
It’s not enough to simply claim there’s no platform, there is, it’s not just ‘‘Trump bad’’. But to be fair, he is promising to create a dictatorship and end our country in order to remake it in his image.
To be fair the Democrats don’t have a platform other than
I’m sorry you’re ignorant. But the good news is that you can actually do something about. Go ahead! Give it a try.
Yeah, I saw her speech to the DNC the other day. She used a bunch of weasel words like “affordable” healthcare, “middle class” , assault weapons ban, etc. These things range from meaningless to barely a move in the right direction. Y’all got tricked into thinking the conservative corporate candidate is so progressive because she is compared to the fascist option. It’s a bunch of B.S.
You’re wrong. Some wisdom for you: If you’re always wrong about something, and only people who hold precisely the exact same viewpoints as you agree, you should consider looking into it yourself. Because the question is no longer whether you’re right, it becomes about who is the most correct, and whether you personally care enough and are brave enough to challenge your own viewpoint.
Yeah, we are a bit of a microcosm here. However, when it comes to people on the left you can at least trust that most of us will go around correcting one another, often to our own detriment.
Top things everyone I know is worried about:
College costs and student loans for themselves and maybe their children, must younger people can’t afford children. Medical costs Housing costs Ability to retire at a reasonable age Cost of living
Kind of hard to see how they want to fix those issues when they’re taking money from those industries and using private health insurance companies to administer Medicare/Medicaid plans and still paying sky high prices to private hospitals. Private health insurance is a huge gift to employers as well. It keeps people from easily leaving and they get huge tax breaks.
I would expect nothing less from Maga bigots.
I give it a week until I see a shirt about raping her. Disgusting, but expected from them.
Literally this week
Yeah, that’s been their brand for 8 years.
