Life would be so different and so easy if you could just make a living being as stupid as the consultants who came up with this plan.

Link to the article here

(I’m very bored at work today so have included optional commentary to entertain myself about the article below. Please feel free to skip it if you’d like.)

NEW YORK (AP) — A Democratic group is rolling out a new $140 million ad campaign that aims to chip away at Donald Trump’s support among one of his most loyal voting blocs: rural voters.

The ads, from American Bridge 21st Century, will begin airing Monday in the northern battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are aimed at swing voters in smaller media markets that are less saturated with political advertising and where they hope to reach people, especially women, who may be on the fence.

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Yes! Fantastic! We have eaten away at Trump’s margin in Nowhere, Upper Peninsula by 15%! We have gained an entire 23 statewide votes compared to our 2020 result! Now Trump only won the county by 10%!

“We should compete everywhere,” said American Bridge co-founder Bradley Beychok, who said Democrats have too often shied away from rural counties as they have focused on turning out base voters in more urban and suburban areas. In the states that are likely to decide November’s election “Margins matter,” he said.

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Margins matter, which is why we will not work nearly as hard to mobilize the massive, concentrated groups of populations which historically support our party.

The ads, part of the group’s broader $200 million effort to defeat Trump, target exurban and rural areas like Erie, Johnstown and Altoona, Pennsylvania; Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, Michigan; and Wausau and Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

They feature testimonials from voters sharing their concerns about a second Trump term. The first round focuses on abortion rights and health care access. In one, a nurse who’s a mother and grandmother bemoans the overturning of Roe. v. Wade and highlights Trump’s own words on the issue. In another, an OB/GYN shares a heartbreaking story of having an abortion late in pregnancy after discovering the child she was carrying had a fatal abnormality.

Future ads will focus on issues like IVF and democracy and freedom as they try to help voters who are turned off by politics and may not be paying close attention to the election understand the stakes this November.

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This chauvinist “THEY just don’t understand the stakes this November.” is so pathetic and emblematic of how democrats treat rural people and why the dems lost the rural progressive vote. Instead of offering rural people any real, tangible solutions to their social and economic hardships, dems double down on the “You just don’t understand what’s good for you.” politics that get them labeled as elitists.

American democracy has overcome big stress tests since 2020. More challenges lie ahead in 2024. “People are afraid of Trump. And in some cases you have to remind them why,” said Beychok, who said first-person testimonials are the most effective way to reach voters, given the electorate’s broad distrust of politicians.

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Literally the paragraph before this was talking about focusing on ads about freedom and then go and tell people that because of the way they voted or who they support, they must not like freedom. It also says they are targeting people who are turned off by politics and then goes on to say that you should be afraid of politics. Masterful gambit, epic sir.

People “want to hear from voters that look like them, that have similar stories,” said Eva Kemp, the group’s vice president of campaigns. She said they spent years recruiting participants via door-to-door canvassing and other outreach, identified over 1,500 potential voices across the three states and interviewed hundreds.

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Holy shit. 1500 testimonials across all of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. How much do you genuinely think was spend over the past few years on this campaign that is absolutely oozing with consultants to acquire 1500 testimonials about being a regular person who lives in one of these three states?

They include Lori Cataldi, 57, a nurse who works for a local community hospital in central Pennsylvania and speaks in her ad about abortion rights. “If we reelect Trump, what are women going to lose next?” she asks.

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If you re-elect Biden what are women going to lose next? Abortion rights went away under Biden, not Trump.

She said she was contacted by the group after her husband wrote a letter to the editor that was published in their local paper and hopes her ad will catch the attention of other women who may be undecided or turned off by the current political climate.

“I’m hoping that it just touches people who might be frustrated, who might be tired of it all. I really hope that it resonates in a way that makes them take pause … and say, as tired as they are, ‘I really should look close at this,’” she said.

She called on voters to look past what she called “extraneous issues” like the candidates’ ages or their alleged crimes. “Women need to pay attention to what’s important to women. And I’m hoping that it speaks to other women who are just like me,” she said.

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Ok but if you look past the extraneous issues like the fact that both candidates are senile and that both candidates are criminals, they really aren’t all that bad!

Trump’s dominance in rural countries has been critical to his success. Some 60% of voters who live in small towns or rural areas voted for Trump in 2020, versus 38% who voted for Biden, according to AP VoteCast.

That trend continued in this year’s Republican primary contests. In the early voting states, between 58% and 66% of voters from small towns or rural areas supported Trump, the data show. He was less popular among suburban and urban voters.

Swing voters represent a small sliver of the electorate, especially in a year when both major party candidates are so well known.

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No shit? Biden will have been listed on a ballot for presidential election for four of the last five elections, and this will be Trump’s third in a row. Everybody knows who these clowns are already and has had no less than a decade to form an opinion on each.

But the Democratic group has identified several million swing voters it says fit into four broad categories of potentially persuadable voters: soft partisans, volatile voters who readily switch between parties, anti-MAGA conservatives turned off by the more extreme elements of the Republican Party, as well as “double doubters,” which is the name that has been given to voters this cycle who are turned off by both parties’ candidates. Voters in those groups, they say, are predominantly women and from rural and exurban areas.

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Very cool made up categories, but have you considered that the volatile voters, anti-maga conservatives, and double doubters have already had 6 years to decide between these two candidates, and also already had the choice between the two in a presidential election? What are you doing differently?

“Democrats should have learned by now that since Trump was elected in 2016, women have saved democracy election after election,” Beychok said.

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Beychok also mentioned that their DMs are open btw ladies 😏😜

Another ad features Susan Pryce, 74, a retired nurse who lives in Derry, Pennsylvania, and got involved with the project after she lent her neighbor a laptop to record a follow-up interview during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She offered a litany of reasons why she does not support Trump, from his comments maligning the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, to his history of bragging about sexually abusing women.

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Well that was nice and neighborly of her to share her laptop, but why is it tossed in here like an unsolicited piece of information in a conversation with any person over the age of 65?

“…and I’ll take two pounds of the Boar’s Head Honey Ham… You know once I found two half dollars stuck together? I never could get them apart.”

Anyway I’m starting to think this Biden outreach campaign was distributed via AARP snail mail.

“I feel like this is the most important election that I’ve ever voted in,” she said, choking up as she described her family’s extensive military history. Her father was a POW in Germany for 21 months during World War II and her husband is a disabled Vietnam War veteran.

“I want to honor everything that they sacrificed,” she said, and make sure “there’s a democracy for us here.”

“I want my grandchildren to know that a good leader seeks that office to serve, not for personal gain or personal power,” she went on. “I want them to know a good leader respects the Constitution — Constitution that all their relatives who served took an oath to … that no one is above the law. That every one of us, including the people at the very top, have to have respect for the rule of law,” she said.

She also voiced concern about women’s rights, describing how women once needed their father’s or husband’s permission to have certain medical procedures or to get a credit card.

“When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I just felt that I had suddenly become a second-class citizen,” she said. “I’m really worried that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that we’re going backwards.”

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She said she lives in a rural area that’s very conservative, but noted a neighbor had recently put up a “BYEDON” sign, giving her hope.

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Drumpf will never recover from this.

“I really believe just from the last year, from interactions with people that there are more people that feel like I do but are just quiet and going about their lives,” she said. “We’re going to make our voices heard with our vote.”