https://subium.com/profile/joshuajfriedman.com/post/3l6qkl25mog2y

TIL - Advertising jargon has a phrase also used in prisons. The general population is “gen pop”.

Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris

Future Forward has ascended to the top of the Democratic political universe, but it has also drawn suspicion and second-guessing.

[...]

Future Forward’s advertising strategy can be summed up in four words: Reserve early, spend late. The group began booking fall ads in January to secure the best prices. The most intense spending is occurring now, guided by an unswerving belief that the persuasive effect of ads decays quickly.

[...]

The group is, in some ways, an ad-making laboratory masquerading as a super PAC, testing thousands of messages, social media posts and ads in the 2024 race, ranking them in order of effectiveness and approving only those that resonate with voters. Ad makers produce roughly 20 potential commercials for every spot that ever airs.

[...]

Future Forward’s belief in designing digital and television advertising to appeal to the general population — “gen pop” ads, in industry shorthand — has also worried strategists who want more messages tailored to people of color.

[...]

The most intense friction between Democratic groups and Future Forward has concerned issues of race. Future Forward opened October spending $35 million to broadcast a single advertisement that juxtaposes Mr. Trump telling his “rich as hell” supporters that he will cut their taxes with a Black voter supporting Ms. Harris because he is “not rich as hell.”

The idea is to target everyone at once, and Future Forward found in testing that the spot was in the 95th percentile for effectiveness with white, Black, Asian and Hispanic voters — as well as the electorate overall. But the approach has skeptics among party strategists who believe Ms. Harris needs to specifically mobilize key Democratic constituencies in other ways.

[...]

Founded by a group of wonkish Obama campaign veterans, Future Forward is animated by the idea that a blend of data science, political science and testing can usher in a new era of rigor in advertising. The group’s ads were widely praised in 2020, and Future Forward earned the coveted designation as the official super PAC first for President Biden and then for Ms. Harris.

But throughout the year, some top party strategists have worried about the consolidation of so much money and decision-making in a single group. They warn of succumbing to what some describe as a tyranny of testing and about what they see as an almost dogmatic belief by Future Forward in the power of late advertising — to the detriment of other methods of reaching voters.

In September, the Harris campaign made an unusual public statement suggesting donors back other groups devoted to get-out-the-vote operations.

Soon after, Billy Wimsatt, who runs a donor group called the Movement Voter Project, warned in a memo to Democratic donors, Future Forward and the Harris campaign last month that get-out-the-vote operations were “dangerously underfunded” — to the tune of $165 million, mostly affecting groups that turn out Black, Latino, Asian and young voters.

“It seems like a ton of money is going to paid media and not enough to the ground game,” Mr. Wimsatt warned. More recently, the Harris headquarters has been frustrated by a lack of mailers being sent by allies.

Maggie Haberman is a tool and an access journalist but she's spent 9 years covering the guy and she's probably had a hand in writing more than a million words about the guy at the NYT.

She knows him better than maybe any other journalist. And as much as I hate her - I trust her observations on this. In fact - I assume she's sitting on lot of recent juicy examples that will only appear years later in one of her books.

05:47 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSWa6S1r6Ec&t=347s

"The music thing is a big thing for him. It was how people would basically 'reset' him in the White House."

~7:42 She talks about him at a dinner.

"It was as if he had no sense of who he was in front of or who he was talking to... It's like he's devoid of context. It's like he's showing up and behaving."

---

Rant

Media outlets need to provide transcripts. It's super annoying to hunt for this sort of crap.

It's unironic although the writer tries her hand at humor.

tl;dr "I like a dance party as much as the next gal, but..."

Xcancel

Sore Loser

With three weeks to go until Election Day, Donald J. Trump stands a reasonable chance of becoming the 47th President of the United States. Despite assassination attempts, impeachments, special counsels, felony convictions and hundreds of millions in civil penalties, most polls show his race against V.P. Kamala Harris is too close to call.

The first time he ran for president in 2016, he was coming off the last season of Celebrity Apprentice. I had a front row seat as a finalist on that final season and marveled at his audacity with his checkered past to seek the highest office in the land. Then, in the blink of an eye, he went from novice to formidable challenger to victorious over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As President he was a loyal friend, who allowed regular access. My resulting coverage gave him the benefit of most doubts. His presidency was underrated. Throughout his first big scandal in office, the 2017-2019 Mueller Investigation into allegations Trump conspired with Russia to undermine our political process, I stuck with him, deeply suspicious of constant efforts to undermine his Administration.

The last time President Trump and I spoke was Friday, November 13, 2020, when he called me at home. It was ten days after his narrow lost to Joe Biden. He was calling to get my take on the controversies surrounding the election, which appeared to have been decided by a handful of votes in several states. I asked him what he would do if the vote count remained against him. As I reported on Fox News that same morning, Friday the 13th, he told me he was a reasonable man and would do the right thing if that time came.

It never did. Instead, President Trump embarked on an increasingly menacing campaign to discredit the 2020 election. With a motley supporting cast of increasingly fringe characters, he careened from one bizarre theory to the next, offering no meaningful proof, that he had been robbed by the Democrats.

None exists. If you are a Republican, Donald Trump has made a liar of you. He has coaxed and intimidated tens of millions into pretending he was reelected in 2020, and that the election was stolen.

In furtherance of that Big Lie, on January 6, 2021, Trump incited and unleashed the violent attack on the center of democracy, the U.S. Capitol for which he was Impeached. As his followers trashed that sacred space, he was on the phone urging Vice President Mike Pence essentially to overturn the will of the American people. Pence refused to put Trump ahead of the Constitution. Trump stabbed the Constitution in the back.

Maybe you are inclined to vote for the former president anyway, because he says he will cut your taxes or build the border wall or pull out of NATO or put tariffs on China. However, you justify voting for Trump, adopting his big lie about the stolen election makes you a liar.

Better to admit he lost last time but that you don’t care because a Harris presidency would be a disaster, or you admire his defiance in the face of an assassin’s bullet. Just don’t pretend that he got robbed in 2020. That is a lie. Former President Trump is a sore loser who cannot be trusted to honor the Constitution. That is why I am voting for Kamala Harris to be our 47th President.

"Strongman jaw-jaw" makes me laugh.

41 percent of likely voters agreed with the assessment that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”

“The normal rules just don’t apply to Donald Trump, and you’ve seen it time and again,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Mr. Newhouse said that he has found in his polling and focus groups that “people think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”

[...]

During Mr. Trump’s term in office, some of his autocratic rhetoric did become reality. He really did set in motion a Muslim ban; he really did order up investigations of his foes; he really did foment a mob when the election didn’t go his way. But in other instances he was stymied, and a lot of his strongman jaw-jaw remained just that.

[...]

Mr. Trump [addressed] the Detroit Economic Club. Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama had all, in their respective days, come to Michigan to talk to this club, too.

There were a few hundred people there. They were not the sorts of people one encounters at a Trump rally. They weren’t construction workers or truck drivers or forklift operators; they carried business cards and had very active LinkedIn pages. They did not wear red hats or T-shirts with images of Mr. Trump’s bloodied face; they wore windowpane suit jackets and loafers and rather conspicuous cuff links.

They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Mr. Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.

By Ezra Klein

[...]

Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.

You could imagine a world in which these errors are random and cancel one another out. Perhaps Donald Trump’s support is undercounted by three points in Michigan but overcounted by three points in Wisconsin. But errors often systematically favor one candidate or the other. In both 2016 and 2020, for instance, state-level polls tended to undercount Trump supporters. The polls overestimated Hillary Clinton’s margin by three points in 2016 and Joe Biden’s margin by 4.3 points in 2020.