If you’re reading this, you probably know who you’ll be voting for long before Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
The reason for this is simple: a minority of American voters, who have no strong affinity for any party Tend to pay less attention In politics rather than party. Any political actor trying to reach a decision must be mindful of the knowledge gap that exists between them and their audience.
And that’s one thing Donald Trump completely failed at in the Philadelphia debate. For this reason, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris was perhaps the main beneficiary of her first rhetorical showdown with the Republican nominee.
The first indication that Trump was allowing himself to be “too online” for normie debate watchers came before the event even began. When the former president’s plane touched down in Philadelphia, far-right internet personality Laura Lumer was among the VIPs. who emerged from its hull (If you recognize that name, don’t waste time trying to appeal to any presidential candidate). Voiced by Lumar opinion that “there is a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. right? And a lot of liberal and left-wing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that.” It’s theoretically possible that a man with that perspective might be a good sounding board for a politician hoping to reach moderate mothers in suburban Milwaukee, but it doesn’t seem likely.
In any case, once on stage, Trump routinely betrayed signs of being the kind of guy who knows what Lumar and who Nick Fuentes And who can probably recite Fox News’ primetime lineup.
Early in the debate, Trump tried to portray the horrors that the Biden-era surge of asylum seekers has brought to America’s shores. Polls suggest swing voters share Trump’s general concern with immigration levels, and of course there were countless ways he could have expressed the prohibitionist argument that they would have found coherent and sensible. Here’s what he chose to say instead:
What have they done to our country by allowing these millions of people to come to our country? And see what’s happening in cities across the United States. And many cities don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. Many cities don’t want to talk about it because they’re embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating dog. Those who came are eating cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.
The comments must have been confusing for any American not immersed in right-wing social media. Trump invoked “Aurora” or “Springfield” without explanation, as if these places were synonymous with well-known disasters (instead of unclear right-wing conspiracy theories). And his answer gets more confusing from there, as he declares that “the people who came” were eating “dogs” and “cats.”
Here, Trump was referring to an unfounded, racist allegation — circulated mainly by his running mate — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets. His reference was easy for all us fallen souls who, due to our social media addiction, were forced to scroll the most. Abominable AI-generated images of cats Never conceived earlier this week. But to anyone else, he sounded like a Fox News superfan who accidentally ingested some of his grandson’s LSD.
For swing voters, many of Trump’s quips sounded like recaps of the sixth season of a show they’d never seen.
At other moments, Trump’s attack lines were less wildly detached from reality but still lacked sufficient exposition for those hearing it for the first time.
Attempting to spotlight the left-wing positions Harris took during his 2020 primary campaign, Trump announced, “He wants to do transgender operations against illegal aliens in prison.”
Here, Trump was referring to that in a questionnaire In 2019, the ACLU, Harris answered “yes” when asked if she would “use executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including in prisons and immigration detention — have access to comprehensive gender-related treatment.” Conversion with all necessary surgical care.”
Trump is probably right to smell the potential benefits of attacking Harris in favor of taxpayer-funded medical treatment for documented immigrants. But he didn’t walk the audience through exactly what Harris advocated and its implications. Instead, he chose to briefly summarize his position while unnecessarily distorting it, suggesting that he wanted to “perform transgender operations on illegal aliens” (instead of provide such care for them), as if the Vice President wanted to impose gender reassignment on immigrants detained against their will. The effect was to make Trump’s attacks sound more baseless than they actually were.
Elsewhere, references to Trump were perhaps too highbrow; He repeatedly declared Harris a “Marxist,” a term that may not have much resonance for non-college-educated voters who were not fully desensitized to the Cold War. He mentioned the “Nord Stream 2 pipeline” without immediate elaboration and praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an endorsement that may carry weight with the extreme online right but means nothing to most ordinary voters.
Perhaps a single instance of Trump’s failure to understand the difference between his Truth Social followers and swing voters, however, was when he referred to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots as “J6” — an acronym that few people ever used. A microblogging platform may have reasons to use or even recognize subject to character limits.
All that said, it’s certainly true that I’m no more a relevant audience for Tuesday’s debate than Laura Looma’s superfans. Whatever our political leanings, those of us who read the New York Times every morning or watch Fox News every night — and scroll through the X all the while — live in a different universe than the people whose fickle loyalties will decide November’s election. we are JD Vance’s “couch” reference is supposed to convey what I know. they are Learn what it’s like to have a healthy and fulfilling hobby. We are not the same.
But I’m not relying on mere intuition when I claim that Harris won last night’s contest. available Audience poll and swing-voters Focus groups available As indicated, the Democrat defeated his rival Not the betting market. If that consensus holds, Trump’s inability to speak to voters who aren’t like me — which is to say, those who don’t immediately know what “J6” means — will be a factor in his failed debate.
