“The rules of the game have changed. Now, we have to rewrite the new rules.”
— California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), quoted by NBC News.
‘Flooding the Zone’ Leaves Trump’s Opponents Gasping
“The strategy has existed since at least 2018, when the former Trump administration strategist Stephen Bannon boasted of the ability to overwhelm Democrats and any media opposition through a determined effort to ‘flood the zone’ with initiatives,” the New York Times reports.
“This time, the flood is bigger, wider and more brutally efficient. As President Trump begins his second term, he has enacted his agenda at breakneck speed as part of an intentional plan to knock his opponents off balance and dilute their response.”
The Hill: Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy delights MAGA.
How Trump Uses ‘Gish Gallop’ to Spew Disinformation
Lorraine Ali: “GG, as I’ve come to call it, is a shell game/debate tactic that takes its name from Duane Gish, a prominent figure in the creationist movement who deployed dubious arguments, selective factoids and rapid-fire lies to overwhelm his opponents in public discussions about the theory of evolution.”
“The disinformation technique, coined Gish Gallop in 1994 by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director, Eugenie Scott, is essentially the art of burying one’s opponent in falsehoods, outlandish rhetoric and red herrings, making it nearly impossible for them to cut through the subterfuge and correct the lies within the timed confines of a debate.”
“Making the GG method work in one’s favor requires criminal levels of confidence and showmanship. I’m not suggesting that former President Trump studied the late creationist’s playbook, if there is such a thing. That would require reading. But there is an instructional set of videotapes.”
Clippers Make Political Campaign Videos Go Viral
Wall Street Journal: “Clipping political gaffes was once more of a pastime for amateur political obsessives. Now, professionals have stepped in and supercharged the political discourse, flooding platforms like X and TikTok with cuttingly captioned video snippets, often publishing edited clips within minutes or even seconds.”
“Despite concerns that the most-watched clips often omit crucial context, sometimes by design, clippers have amassed tens of millions of views, forcing candidates to pay attention — and to watch their words.”
“More so than ever before, clipping has been embraced by both official Democratic and Republican campaign committees that have exploited the reach of real-time clips and even outdone their independent predecessors.”
How the Biden Campaign Attacked the Age Issue in 2020
Sasha Issenberg: “Amid reinvigorated interest in the electoral impact of Biden’s advanced age, these never-before-reported details reveal how his advisers attempted to manage this storyline during his successful presidential campaign and shed light on how they think about doing so today.”
Make Mike Johnson Famous
Brian Beutler: “I do hope they understand there’s more to typecasting an opposition leader than issuing a few press releases, fanning out some juicy opposition research, and declaring the damage done. Johnson’s record—forget his record, actually; his name, his face, his job title—will not take root in the public imagination on its own. And without a sustained effort to make him famous, he can make himself seem innocuous simply by being a bit more demure than his peers.”
“Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on.”
Why Some Attacks Work Better Than Others
Joseph Rodota: “Opposition researchers — ‘oppo’ to political insiders — provide the kind of information that can make attacks stick to their targets. They pore through a rival candidate’s record and produce a list of perceived vulnerabilities and the facts to back them up. Oppo researchers ply their trade at every level of democracy, from the local school board to the White House.”
“They are often bookish and introverted, but they are also competitive and relentless. An oppo researcher can’t sleep peacefully until she’s unearthed a damaging quote or ‘smoking gun’ video that can give her candidate an edge.”
Taking a Break from Campaigning Can Be Risky
New York Times: “Politicians need vacations, too. But while taking a break can create an opportunity for campaigns to show that their candidates are just like the rest of us, it also carries potential peril.”
“The ‘right’ vacation can give a candidate time to rest and recharge, to reconnect with family after weeks on the road, and a chance to look presidential while doing it. A tone-deaf vacation — too elite, too disconnected, too much beach bod — is tabloid catnip and can alienate voters. And the wrong vacation can upend a campaign faster than a wave topples a windsurfer.”
“So it’s no surprise that the presidential candidates this year, by and large, are lying low.”
The Secrets of Debate Swag
New York Times: “These days, retail politics has a whole new meaning. At a point in the electoral cycle when candidates are desperate to distinguish themselves and have only minutes onstage to do so, being able to deliver a zinger that will play on via swag is a key advantage.”
“Ever since the inauguration of George Washington, voters have been participating in the electoral process by means of merch. Back then, it was fancy commemorative buttons that were sewn onto clothes (and were, largely, accessible only to the well-off).”
“Over the years, the ‘store’ — effectively an alternate way for candidates to elicit small-dollar donations and add to their supporter base by appealing to consumer culture — has grown in importance as technology has transformed our ability to make stuff, sell stuff and mine data. Now, almost as soon as presidential contenders declare their candidacy and their websites go live, the shops go live with them.”
Is Trump’s Name-Calling a Good Debate Technique?
Rolling Stone: “The inconvenient truth is that to win any argument, and especially to win over a skeptical or divided audience, you need to establish your own authority and expertise while challenging your opponent’s. And for that, you do sometimes need to rely on ad hominem arguments — logical fallacies and politeness be damned!”
“To understand how to attack your opponent’s ethos, it’s best to start by understanding the three most common forms of the argumentum ad hominem—and why, in my view, they happen to be totally legit.”
Ron DeSantis Avoids the Media
New York Times: “Although he courted right-wing podcasters and conservative Fox News hosts, Mr. DeSantis did not grant an extensive interview to a national nonpartisan news organization during his 2022 re-election bid — and he coasted to victory, with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire now promoting him as a 2024 contender.”
“His success is an ominous sign for the usual rules of engagement between politicians and the press as another nationwide election looms. Presidential candidates typically endure media scrutiny in exchange for the megaphone and influence of mainstream outlets. But in an intensely partisan, choose-your-own-news era, the traditional calculus may have shifted.”
Said GOP lobbyist Nick Iarossi: “The old way of looking at it is: ‘I have to do every media hit that I possibly can, from as broad a political spectrum as I can, to reach as many people as possible.’ The new way of looking at it is: ‘I really don’t need to do that anymore. I can control how I want to message to voters through the mediums I choose.’”
Democrats Spend to Amplify Far-Right Candidates
“Democrats have spent nearly $19 million across eight states in primaries this year amplifying far-right Republican candidates who have questioned or denied the validity of the 2020 election, interfering in GOP contests to elevate rivals they see as easier to defeat in November, even as those candidates have promoted false or baseless claims,” the Washington Post reports.
“The practice by some campaigns and outside groups this year has divided Democrats, with some in the party complaining that such tactics are risky and could ultimately result in the election of candidates who pose serious threats to democracy.”
The DeSantis Playbook
Judd Legum explains how Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) uses the media to play up to his supporters.
“DeSantis’ press strategy is to (1) make a splashy announcement with a simple, misleading narrative, (2) generate heaps of media coverage based on that misleading narrative that benefits him politically, (3) count on the media (and the public) to lose interest as the truth slowly trickles out.”
Jonathan Last: “Republican voters are such cheap dates that it doesn’t matter what a politician does, so long as he signals that he really hates the out group.”
The Boris Johnson Scandal Playbook
“This latest scandal, over a deputy whip in Parliament accused of sexual misconduct, is just one in a long, wearyingly similar series of self-inflicted troubles to befall Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government,” the New York Times reports.
“Mislead, omit, obfuscate, bluster, deny, deflect, attack — the prime minister’s blueprint for dealing with a crisis, his critics say, almost never begins, and rarely ends, with simply telling the truth. Instead, he tends to start with a denial, move through several interim admissions in which his previous falsehoods are recast as honorable efforts at transparency, and then end with a great show of remorse in which he appears to take responsibility for what happened while suggesting that it was not his fault.”
The Simple Math of Voter Turnout
Ruy Teixeira: “Start with this: when Democrats persuade a voter to switch sides, that nets two votes for the Democrats (one less for the Republicans, one more for the Democrats). When Democrats turn out one more voter to vote Democratic that is, of course, a net of only one vote for them.”
“But it’s really worse than that. Typically, Democrats think of increased base turnout in terms of turning out more voters from various pro-Democratic demographic groups—young voters, black voters, Hispanic voters, college-educated whites, whatever. But not all the voters in these groups favor the Democrats so mobilization of more voters from a given group may well net less than one vote per additional voter. For example, looking at current Congressional ballot preferences, Democrats might net only a third of a vote for every additional Hispanic or young voter, six-tenths of a vote from every additional black voter and just a sixth of a vote from every additional college-educated white voter.”
“The math looks even more unfavorable when the following is considered: Democrats tend to assume that nonvoters from a given demographic are the same politically as voters from the same group… except they don’t vote. But a mountain of political science evidence shows that’s not so.”
Democrats Play with Fire in GOP Primaries
“Democratic groups are buying ads touting some of the most extreme pro-Trump candidates in Republican primaries around the country — meddling in GOP contests to set up more favorable matchups in November,” Axios reports.
“The risky gambit assumes general-election voters will reject candidates who embrace conspiracy theories or lies about the 2020 election. But it could dramatically backfire by vaulting fringe Republicans into national office.”
Democrats Boost Controversial GOP Candidates
“Groups linked to Democrats appear to be trying to use pricey television ads and mailers to boost the profiles of three conservative — and controversial — candidates in Colorado running in important Republican primaries this year,” the Colorado Sun reports.
“The effort seems to be aimed at giving Democrats a leg up in the general election. It’s not the first time Democrats have deployed such tactics in Colorado, and in the past they’ve been successful.”
The MAGA Playbook
Philip Bump: “Deny, deny, deny. Lump the media in with critics on the left. Never acknowledge that you erred but, instead, argue that you are being unfairly accused of having erred because of bias. By now, it’s rote — even when the question is whether you stand by an argument that was allegedly deployed by a man accused of killing 10 people at a grocery store.”
“In 2016, Trump ran in explicit opposition to immigration, even at one point making an argument that the Democrats wanted to bring in uncountable numbers of immigrants who would vote for their party. He refused to admit his errors or his lies. And then he won. And then he retained enormous popularity with the base.”
“And lessons were imparted.”
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