Vice News: “Half of Republicans—and almost a third of Americans overall—said in a recent YouGov poll that it’s definitely or probably true that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.’ That’s a slight uptick in belief of that core QAnon conspiracy from when the pollster started asking the question in 2020…”

“But claims made in bad faith can still pay political dividends, making even bonkers attacks risky to ignore. Democrats largely shrugged off GOP claims last election that even their most moderate members were socialists who wanted to defund the police‚ and then they were shocked to lose House seats in 2020. During a furious post-election conference call, many centrists complained their party had done too little to push back against those GOP claims.”

“A group of Democratic strategists is trying to spread a novel organizing tactic in this year’s election. Technically, it’s called ‘paid relational organizing,’ but it boils down to this: paying people to talk to their friends about politics,” Politico reports.

“Democrats think it helped them win the Senate in 2020 — and are hoping the get-out-the-vote strategy will help limit the pain of a brutal 2022 election environment.”

“Conversations with friends, family members or neighbors are more likely to earn a voter’s support than chats with a stranger at their front door, which is the traditional way campaigns have run paid canvassing programs in the past. And an important test case for deploying the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 when now-Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer relational program to get people talking to acquaintances instead of strangers about the election.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) quoted an article about how Democrats won Wisconsin in 2020 suggesting it offered a roadmap on “how to steal an election.”

The offending passage: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”

John Harwood pointed out that “convincing potential voters to cast legal ballots is the how you win elections in a democracy.”

“As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left,” Politico reports.

“But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.”

David Leonhardt: “This morning, a creative new poll exploring these issues is being released. It asks working-class respondents — defined as people without a bachelor’s degree — to choose between two hypothetical candidates. The candidates are described both personally (their gender, race and job category) and politically (including a sound bite in which they talk about their views).”

“A central conclusion is that infrequent voters are not a huge Democratic constituency just waiting to be inspired by a sufficiently progressive economic message… The poll instead finds that working-class swing voters hold a swirl of progressive and conservative views.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “We know, for example, that many voters don’t pay attention to much of what politicians say, and have short memories about what they do notice. Even big deals, such as the major bills Congress is acting on right now, get ignored; indeed, many voters this summer failed to recognize that the current Congress (and President Joe Biden) had delivered anything to them despite the stimulus checks that they had received.”

“Most voters aren’t up for grabs because of partisan polarization. For the rest, fundamentals such as peace and prosperity, or their absence, tend to be extremely important, either directly or mediated through their opinion of the current president. (That is, if things are going well, people tend to like the president, and that drives their votes). All the rest — policy positions, speeches, clever ads, the candidates’ personalities — only matter on the margins. Of course, elections can be won or lost on the margins! During campaigns, it makes sense to maximize everything a candidate can maximize. But most of it just doesn’t matter much.”

“It’s also not as easy as it might seem to succeed by supporting policies that poll strongly. That’s because even high-quality survey research is limited in value by the fact that most of citizens don’t think much about most policy questions, which makes their views on them not very strongly held.”

Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel: “Joe Biden, in defeating Donald Trump, won more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history. But as we saw with several ballot initiatives from this past election cycle, a handful of issues outperformed Biden in red and blue states — and may offer Democrats both a popular message and a slate of wedge issues to take to voters.”

“We’ve dubbed these ‘workers, wages and weed.’”

“Legislation supporting workers, improving wages and legalizing marijuana are progressive, Democratic policies. But they’re also extremely popular among Republicans and moderates.”

Philip Bump: “A pattern has emerged in Republican politics over the past several years, a three-part system by which to generate a cloud of uncertainty about certain things.”

“One component is to suggest a failure to treat something unserious as serious is a reflection of an unwillingness to debate, that the party considering the unserious thing as unserious is somehow afraid to confront it. Another is cherry-picking from huge pools of information, using isolated and usually misconstrued claims to construct alternative narratives. The third is the existence of a sympathetic media and social universe that collectively agrees the unserious and unproven thing is, in fact, both proven and serious.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: “Often, people just want to believe the liar. Personality cults increase the leader’s credibility, since they present him as possessed of special powers or ruling with a divine mandate, making him seem infallible. Strongmen also know how to be persuasive, especially if they previously worked as journalists (Mussolini and the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko), in television (Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Trump) or were professional dissemblers (Putin was a KGB case officer). These practiced liars work hard to seem authentic.”

“Moreover, once people bond with the leader, they may be inclined to dismiss any evidence that conflicts with his claims, or overlook contradictions in his messages. They believe him because they believe in him. Or, in an interesting twist, they know he is lying, but they decide that they don’t care: better him than his enemy (who, as they have been taught to believe, lies even more). And some people actually approve of all the lying, seeing it as rule-breaking by a rogue they adore.”