A Painting.
And a canvass.
1. Before we begin with a lengthy excerpt from “Slow Boring”, here’s a description of it:
Slow Boring is a daily newsletter from Matthew Yglesias (and occasionally others) about politics and public policy, mostly in the United States but occasionally elsewhere. We publish four columns per week (sometimes more) and a mailbag column on Fridays. We also do the occasional interview podcast.
We believe that a better world is possible, but that its realization requires difficult, rigorous conversations that don’t always flatter our biases, along with a spirit of pragmatism — the slow boring of hard boards that Weber spoke of.
Here’s the excerpt:
Today’s guest post is from David Broockman and Josh Kalla. David and Josh are associate professors of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, respectively, where they study political persuasion.
The entire internet seems to be buzzing about Tim Walz’s new line of attack on Donald Trump and JD Vance: they’re “weird.”
But social science research (including some of our own) suggests that Democrats should not be focused on attacking Trump. A huge new survey we fielded — testing dozens of messages among over 100,000 people — finds the same. Voters have been hearing about Donald Trump for almost ten years now. If they’re willing to vote for him based on that near-decade of experience, a few ads or a new quip are unlikely to change their minds about him. In our survey, we found that every attempt at attacking Trump — from overturning Roe to his threat to democracy and calling him “weird” — didn’t persuade voters to support Harris.
Instead of attacking Trump, Democrats should talk about Harris. The bad news for Democrats is that, to the extent voters do know Harris, they think she is very liberal and that her policies would not make them better off financially. The good news is that voters have heard much less about Harris than Trump: in fact, many don’t know basic facts about whether she supports protecting Social Security or taxing the rich. That means there should be much more room to change voters’ views about her. Our survey finds exactly this: Only messages praising Harris’s achievements and describing her vision for America win her votes. Messages attacking Trump don’t.
How should Democrats be defining Harris?
Some commentators treat this question as a proxy for the battle between the Democrats’ progressive and moderate factions, hoping Harris will voice support for their faction’s signature policies. But our mega-survey finds neither side of this debate is right. Rather than tacking to the left or to the center, it’s messages that present Harris like a normal Democrat that most persuade voters. That means running on mainstream “kitchen table” Democratic ideas to reduce the cost of living, protect Medicare and Social Security by taxing the rich, keep abortion legal, and raise the minimum wage. Other messages that don’t map onto ideological divides in the Democratic party, such as touting her achievements as a prosecutor and casting the tie-breaking vote for the American Rescue Plan, also perform well.
In other words, a good rule of thumb for Harris is that if both AOC and Joe Manchin would say they’re for something, she should probably be saying that, too. (Read the rest at slowboring.com)
2. That being the case, and it is the case, what might Harris do to enable people to get to know her better? One answer might be: the Richard Nixon media campaign of 1968.
Not paid advertising. Town halls.
Here’s one that Nixon did in October of 1968. If you watch the first two minutes of the video, you’ll get the idea.
Roger Ailes, who was one of Nixon’s media consultants in 1968, got his client to agree to do the town halls by invoking Teddy Roosevelt. Nixon would be “the man in the arena”, Ailes purred, he’d be the very embodiment of TR’s famous quote:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Nixon, who felt the televised debates with John F. Kennedy cost him the 1960 election, was reluctant at first. But Ailes persisted and Nixon eventually came around. And thus were born the “Nixon Town Halls” of 1968.
They worked. They allowed Nixon to talk to the electorate directly, without the national press filter. The people asking the questions were citizens, not TV talking heads. And the forum humanized Nixon, visualizing his campaign’s narrative that he was not one of those timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. He was, in fact, the man in the arena.
It’s a good fit for Harris. As noted in item #1 (above), we don’t know her, we don’t know what she believes, what she stands for. Four ‘Harris Town Halls’ (one a week) in October would tell us a lot.
Like Nixon, she would be seen as the (wo)man in the arena, putting it all on the line, talking to citizens about the future, about the present, about the challenges and opportunities ahead. Would she stumble? Of course. Would she always be at her best? Of course not. But she’d be there.
At his press conference today, former President Trump announced that there would be three debates in September. Harris should agree to those. And then invite Trump to her town halls.
He won’t come. If he doesn’t, she’ll own October. And that’s what she needs to do to win the election: Own October.
It might not work, obviously. But it would at least allow her to take control of the campaign’s final weeks. Glorious honeymoon coverage notwithstanding, she’s now on track to lose the election. She has to win the national popular vote by 4 percentage points, at least, in order to have a realistic chance of winning in the Electoral College. She’s not ahead by 4 percentage points.
3. From STAT:
In a speech earlier this year, former President Trump was mocking President Biden’s ability to walk through sand when he suddenly switched to talking about the old Hollywood icon Cary Grant.
“Somebody said he [Biden] looks great in a bathing suit, right? When he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know, sand is heavy. They figure three solid ounces per foot. But sand is a little heavy. And he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant — he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today,” he said at a March rally in Georgia. Trump went on to talk about contemporary actors, Michael Jackson, and border policies before returning to the theme of how Biden looks on the beach.
This shifting from topic to topic, with few connections — a pattern of speech called tangentiality — is one of several disjointed and occasionally incoherent verbal habits that seem to have increased in Trump’s speech in recent years, according to interviews with experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics.
At STAT’s request, four experts reviewed four clips of Trump’s speeches in recent months, and compared them to speeches from 2017. Several noticed Trump’s 2024 speeches included more short sentences, confused word order, and repetition, alongside extended digressions such as Trump’s comments on Biden and Cary Grant, or in another speech, comments on banking abruptly giving way to Trump lamenting the cost of electric cars.
These could be attributed to a variety of possible causes, they said, some benign and others more worrisome. They include mood changes, a desire to appeal to certain audiences, natural aging, or the beginnings of a cognitive condition like Alzheimer’s disease.
One other academic, James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, performed a more formal analysis for STAT based on complete transcripts of 35 Trump interviews from 2015 through this year. Rather than reviewing specific clips, he used statistical software to track word use in detail, highlighting changes in Trump’s speaking style. Although Pennebaker said he’d want to analyze more texts before submitting his findings to an academic journal, he concluded that the texts showed significant changes in Trump’s linguistic tendencies.
Since the end of Trump’s presidency in 2021, Pennebaker’s analysis showed a steep increase in “all-or-nothing thinking,” as indicated by a roughly 60% increase in use of absolute terms like “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This habit, Pennebaker said, can be a sign of depression, which also fits with other changes in Trump’s word choices: His dialogue now has far fewer positive words than previously, and includes more references to negative emotions, especially since his return to civilian life.
Increased all-or-nothing thinking can also be linked to cognitive ability, and such a sharp increase is associated with cognitive decline, said Pennebaker. “Another person who’s all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he added.
Another clear trend from his analysis showed that, since 2020, Trump has increasingly spoken about the past, with around a 44% increase in past-focused sentences, and is spending very little time talking about the future. This is particularly striking, said Pennebaker, given that presidential candidates are typically forward-looking and making promises about what they will deliver. It’s something that Vice President Kamala Harris picked up on in her first campaign speech, in which she criticized Trump’s vision as being “focused on the past.”
Even as Trump speaks with more derailments, Pennebaker found that he’s relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures since before he was elected president. A linguistic metric of analytic thinking shows that Trump’s levels of complexity have always been unmistakably low, said Pennebaker. Whereas most presidential candidates are in the 60 to 70 range, Trump’s speeches range from 10 to 24. “I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” said Pennebaker. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”
Biden’s “mental acuity” eventually required him to abandon his re-election campaign. Trump’s “mental acuity" is an open question. He’s 78 years old. He’s not getting younger. No one on the planet would say he’s getting sharper.
Two days ago, he had this to say in a post on Truth Social about the upcoming Democratic National Convention:
What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!
People on the right keep saying that if Trump would only discipline himself, stop all the crazy talk, focus on two or three or four issues, and promise a better future, he would win in a walk. That’s probably true. I would say it is certainly true.
The STAT piece and Trump’s Truth Social posts are two reasons, two big reasons, why he might lose. Trump can defeat himself. To the consternation of many of his supporters, he often seems hell-bent on doing so.
And the truth is: he can’t help it.