Off Topic Thread 5.0

Dog Botherer wrote: »

Study conducted by Democratic Party PAC finds Lincoln Project ads incredibly ineffective at turning people off Trump.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-hottest-campaign-ads-on-twitter-didnt-really-work-study?ref=scroll

it’s a scam designed to make the “good conservatives” seem more appealing and valuable to bog standard Dem voters in order to push the Overton window even further rightward, and i wish otherwise intelligent people would stop falling for it.

I think their primary goal was to drive a schism between Trump republicans and generational republicans and this ad very much furthers that given it actually sides with Trump technically speaking.

If the Democrats pick up both Georgia seats then Republicans will be free to turn on Trump. If they hold onto them they will have more options in how they manage the Trump faction moving forward.

Dog Botherer wrote: »

was loose in my wording. to clarify, all of the snappy ads “owning” Trump by comparing him to other Republican politicians and their perceived values was not effective. it did nothing but build the brand of the LP amongst liberals desperate to be rid of Trump. if Biden wins, great, they’re now a major media figure in orbit around his administration. if Trump wins, great, they are pretty much ideologically indistinguishable, they just wish he’d knock off the tweeting. if they actually sincerely believed all the nonsense they spout they’d have stuck to making conventional attack ads, which, as they themselves admit in that article, were far more effective.

handy cash grab too.

They attacked across the republican spectrum including 20+ senators along with Trump, his cabinet and family (those utilised by the administration). I don't doubt their messaging found greatest cathartic appeal amongst liberal or democratic voters but the rhetoric, style and messaging was obviously targeted at republican and low information voters and there is plenty of data which suggests it was effective - particularly in swing states.

It was undeniably a cash grab by conservative activists that found the window of debate too far right to appeal to Trump republicans, and no doubt this is the beginning of what a return to mainstream conservatism is likely to look like - but it also contributed to the Biden win and as such can't be ignored as a useful deradicalisation tool by those who understand Trumps base the best.

I listen to Steve Schmidt a good deal as he is the type of conservative ideologue that you could actually have a reasonable fact based debate with. It's pretty clear and he's been open about the fact that bringing in Palin (he was John McCain's campaign manager) provided the hard right of the GOP with a eureka moment. It proved that the message is more important than the truth and whilst Trump wasn't the chosen conclusion of this - he was absolutely the inevitable one.

The biggest problem for politics in the social media world is how personality profiling has allowed large groups of people to be completely and utterly misled as to the nature of the world around them. A new type of voluntary serfdom is at risk of being produced out of the hyper partisanship becoming evident in the US / UK and no doubt elsewhere in due course. The Lincoln project is some of the most vicious and targeted campaign material against this and the emergent hard right that I've seen. These tactics don't work across the voter spectrum but they've filled an interesting void in that they've largely been financed by non republicans but will have the largest impact on the voting intentions of republicans.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

The Lincoln Project?

Yeah there was an interesting piece in the Washington post about it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/12/did-republicans-vote-against-trump/

Democrats maintain that Trump won a greater proportion of the Republican vote in the states targeted by the Lincoln project but the 67 million they spent specifically targeting moderate Republicans in swing states has to have had an impact on the 7% of Trump voters and 8% of Republican voters from 2016.

In a nutshell - more people voted full stop, but more historical republican voters flipped and they specifically were the target of the Lincoln project.

Stheno wrote: »

Isn't the Lincoln project run by Kelly Anne Conway husband?

It's run by a bunch of former republican activists and communication experts.

irishbucsfan wrote: »

Ah so the Lincoln projects own numbers show they were effective. Because the states they targeted are where Trump underperformed. Which also happened to be the states targeted by literally every other organisation trying to influence the election.

The whole thing is just an excercise in guilt shedding from the people who let it happen in the first place, and of course they’re going to tell everyone it worked. Why anyone would give money to the people who built the machine that enabled the administration in the first place is beyond me.

I don't think you can dismiss them that easily and whilst I agree that (and the question has been asked) there is an element of guilt here - the data they are using isn't in question, merely the impact they specifically had on the trends.

That data is being harvested as we speak and no doubt their efficacy will be more assessable in due course. Perhaps they had less of an impact than their expenditure and targeting would indicate on the final result but they may also have had more. Time will tell.

I think the Lincoln project is just another part of the **** slinging that is tearing the US apart