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It’s rather telling however that democrats get upset about republicans saying true things about them. If democrats made ads that said republicans want to cut spending and lower taxes, republicans would be thrilled even if they went to the wrong side.
Democrats are constantly running on "Republicans want to cut spending on [widely used government service or one that serves a sympathetic category] and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthy". That's like the single most common Democratic line besides "Trump is bad".
Ok, and the analogous situation would be if there were some kind of conservative NGO with a website and literature promoting these sorts of tax and spending cuts; and some Democrat supporters started spreading their literature among people who would be offended by such proposals; and they concealed the fact that they were the ones spreading the literature.
I think that in that situation, a conservative Republican candidate might respond with something along the lines of "I support tax cuts for everyone and my priority would be to cut taxes for the middle class, not just the wealthy." Which might be a bald-faced lie, but I think @MaiqTheTrue 's point is plausible.
It seems that much more than the Republicans, the Democrats have positions which are very unpopular, very embarrassing, but which they still are reluctant to disavow. To be sure, I am a conservative so I am possibly biased on this issue, but if anyone can identity a few analogous issues on the Republican side of things I would be interested.
Data centers, abortion, and ICE- although Republican candidates tend to have considerably more leeway about sticking to strict ideological orthodoxy on the issues.
Well that's more or less the point.
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I would suggest, speaking as a perpetually disappointed Republican, that Republican politicians do have a revealed preference for pursuing toxic, unpopular policies while in office. They simply lie about them if confronted with it in advance, and often continue to lie about it afterward.
Trump's war of choice with Iran is actually managing to be less popular than transgender kids. Pew polling shows 56% of Americans favor banning medical care for youth gender transition. While close to 2/3 of Americans polled disapprove of the handling of the Iran war. It should be noted that there has probably been an uptick in approval for a war with Iran after the war started, compared to approval for starting a war with Iran beforehand, though I couldn't find definitive polling on the topic.
But if in 2024 you put out a flyer saying "Don't elect Donald Trump, he'll start a war of choice without seeking public or congressional approval, raising gas prices;" Donald Trump would simply say that he won't start any wars while in office. Reminiscent of George W Bush running on reducing America's role as global policeman.
Democrats have a unique problem regarding issues like Trans rights and Reparations where they can't publicly disavow these policies, because the parts of their coalition that want these policies are insane spoiled children lobbying for status rather than for material or political success. Where the Zionist lobby or the oil companies are sophisticated enough to not care what you say about them in public as long as you deliver in private.
I'm not sure that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Disapproval of how a war is being handled is not the same thing as categorical opposition to such a war.
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is all true, why don't Democratic candidates such as Kamala Harris simply disavow the unpopular position, e.g. state that they oppose trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms; oppose "transitioning" for youth; and so on?
I wouldn't frame it quite this way, but I think that's a big part of the answer to the question.
That may be a factor, but also I am pretty confident that Israel and even oil companies are more popular among the general public of Republican voters than trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms are among the general public of Democratic voters. That being said, if it's really true that only 56% of people are in favor of banning medical care for "youth gender transition," I may be out of touch.
All the numbers I've seen indicate that support for the war climbed slightly after it started compared to pre-war polling around questions like "Should the US launch strikes against Iran?" or "Should the US invade Iran?" but we can't get an apples-to-apples comparison because nobody polled the question "Should we launch a surprise decapitation strike against Iran in cooperation with Israel?" because that policy was never put on the table as something we might do. It was done completely as a choice by the executive branch, without any attempt to inform or sell the war or what it meant to the American public. Clearly the element of surprise had advantages in terms of the military's ability to launch decapitation strikes against Iranian leadership, but it also has costs.
So I'm not speaking about some hypothetical ideal here, just what Democrats were like in 2008. Barack Hussein Obama publicly opposed gay marriage, saying publicly that while he supported civil unions he thought that marriage was between a man and a woman because then "God is in the mix." Dan Savage told his readers at the time, vote for Obama, because he's lying about his support for the gays, and even if he isn't he's better than the alternative. Democrat freaks used to comfortable with accepting that their leaders would sometimes need to swerve in public, but trust them to take care of them when they came into power. Trump's super power is his supporter's belief that he's lying about all the things they don't like.
Coincidentally, the latest Pew Polls show Favorable/Unfavorable for Israel (the state) at 37% favorable and 60% unfavorable. Slightly higher for "the Israeli people" and much lower for "the Israeli Government." So Israel is slightly less popular than "transing kids." I would assume, though it's hard to find numbers on this as it's not exactly ethical polling practice, that transgender people are more popular than "transing kids."
I agree that it's tough to get an exact 1:1 between policies across different fields, and for the most part the median voter is foolish and incapable of thinking about tradeoffs so you're going to get overlapping impossible policies if you just go off public polling.
I think a more appropriate apples-to-apples question would be something along the lines of "Are you categorically opposed to war against Iran?" Certainly there are a lot of Americans who are categorically opposed to transing of children under any circumstances.
Similarly, just asking people if they have an unfavorable opinion about Israel is not apples-to-apples either. A more appropriate question would be something along the lines of: "Do you believe Israel has a right to exist"?
Anyway, the proof is in the pudding. It would be easy enough for supporters of Democratic candidates to start using support of Israel as an issue against Republicans. Kamala Harris could have made attack ads against Trump on the Israel issue just as he attacked her on the trans issue. He did move the US embassy to Jerusalem in his first term, after all.
That seems off, because there are certain provocations (see 9-11 and Afghanistan) which would make all patriotic Americans support a war against Iran. The relevant comparison is "Are you categorically opposed to wars against far-off countries which are no more obnoxious than early-2020s Iran?" A lot of Americans are categorically opposed to what they consider wars of choice, not all of them leftie pacifists.
That's kind of the point. By contrast, there are a lot of people who would oppose "transitioning" of minors no matter what.
Perhaps, I would need to think about that one. But either way, a poll showing that X percent of Americans believe the war is being mishandled is very different (in my opinion) from a poll showing that X percent of Americans are against "transitioning" of minors.
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True, but if I understand correctly, these are unedited flyers merely send to the wrong people. The group in question doesn't even claim that it disagrees with the content itself?
Anti-Rep ads on the other hand usually explicitly uses a Dem framing, like the planned medicare changes: Reps say they want to make access harder to make abuse more difficult, Dems say they just hate poor people (Btw, I'm against the medicare change).
That seems qualitatively different.
Yeah like Democrats had no problems with pushing a lot of 'Project 2025 is the secret plan of the Republican Establishments look how evil it is' when it's like one think-tank's opinions which have some overlap with Republican interests but are nowhere near 1-1. Reddit Libs were treating Project 2025 like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for years.
The actual project 2025 was a nine hundred page pdf of boring policy and personnel recommendations, of which thé trump admin(or any Republican) would enact the majority.
The project 2025 in dem messaging was a hallucination that had nothing to do with it.
Not nothing. A decent chunk of the messaging was verbatim quotes, some taken out of context, some not.
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The best thing about Project 2025 was that absolutely no one read it, so you could just say it had anything in it and people would believe or reject on pure tribalism.
I think Jack Chick used that same philosophy as a comment about the Bible and the Catholic Church in his classic Death Cookie comic tract.
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