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Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
Taylor Swift has officially endorsed Harris/Walz. Specifically citing both the debate and various AI memes of her voting for Trump, even referring to herself as a childless cat lady. It's Joever for Orange Man.
Wouldn’t Swifties be priced in the polls already? How many Taylor Swift fans are Trump supporters who’d change their votes based on her endorsement?
She isn't changing any votes, but she will get more people to vote.
Taylor Swift gets thousands of women to literally follow her across continents. She could be a significant poll driver just by asking her fans to vote.
In this case it's not just thousands, it's 10s of thousands or 100s (cumulatively). I went to one of her euro shows, the number of Americans at each one was insane.
It's not that the Swifties are particularly critical thinkers when it comes to politics, but many of them will use this as a moral superiority pump for their existing opinions, and those who were apathetic before may take the opportunity to swap friendship bracelets at voting booths.
Isn't the main reason that, since Taylor Swift is quite a bit less of a phenomenon in Europe than in US and the US tickets were thus considerably more pricey, it was actually cheaper in many cases for fans to fly to Europe than to US for a show (especially since many of them would have had to fly inside the US in any case)?
I can tell you that after spending the money on it I don't think it was much cheaper. She increased prices for the Euro shows, but at least people who had FOMO from the US tour were able to get them at "retail".
The whole point is that many people organized entire European trips around this one event, her cultural power is.... significant.
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