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With three days until Election Day, is there still enough time for the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Michigan?
Cenk Uygur's Rebellion PAC dropped a controversial new ad supporting the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed featuring a grocery store conversation about Israel. Some are calling it the most antisemitic ad of all time:
Now, I don't think this is a very good ad. It's poorly acted and a bit too on-the-nose, but accusing the political opposition of wasting money on unpopular special interests while regular citizens deal with rising prices is probably the most common political maneuver in modern American politics. Apparently, this ad is at the center of a possible last-minute fracture of the Michigan Democratic coalition.
Haley Stevens, El Sayed's defeated challenger in the dem primary, released an incredibly passive aggressive statement preemptively thanking El Sayed for his "Expected Condemnation of Antisemitic Campaign Advertisement". Amusingly, long-time TYT host Ceng Uygur has been demoted to "Hasan Piker's Uncle". In case you didn't catch the subtext, this is a threat to pull her support (as explained by Haley Stevens's fiance on TMZ for some reason?). Abdul appears to have no intention of disavowing the ad.
This doesn't seem to have affected El Sayed's chances in the prediction markets. He is now up to an 80% chance to win, but I guess we'll see what happens at the black church on Sunday.
This mostly just illustrates the enormous gap between perceptions of the elite and perceptions of the actual voting public. Abdul runs 7 points ahead of his baseline support with voters who are "focused on Israel". Support for Israel among normies is around 65-35 at this point, on the level of "trans the kids", "open the borders" or "raise my taxes". If the media remotely reflected actual public opinion they'd be asking Rogers why he supports unconditional support to a country with an approval rating comparable to syphilis.
This whole "controversy" kind of reminds me of that time Trump compared MS13 to "animals" and then the media ran with it for a week assuming that it would hurt him somehow.
We debated these issues a week or two ago here and, assuming your poll numbers are accurate, it's a misleading comparison.
So for example, a large percentage of Americans are categorically against transing of children under any circumstances. The same cannot be said about Americans who are categorically against Israel existing.
And of course the proof is in the pudding. Donald Trump campaigned against Kamala Harris aggressively and successfully based on her support for gender ideology. Nobody bothered campaigning against Donald Trump based on his support for Israel.
I mean, is he campaigning on "Israel should not exist"? You can play the game where you replace the outgroup's policy position with what you think they actually believe/what you think will be an inevitable consequence if they get their way/what you think gets listeners to take the threat of it as seriously as you do, but then the correct comparison is not to the mere motte of the reference position ("transing children under any circumstances") but the result of playing exactly the same game with it. Many leftists have in fact already done that very thing, down to the exact substitution you used!
So, how do you figure the number of Americans who are categorically against Israel existing compares to the number of Americans who are categorically against trans children existing (in the classic culture-warry "denying our right to exist" sense)?
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