Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh

I wonder if the GOP didn't fully understand how far gone Biden is. Maybe they agreed to the early debate because they thought it would give Trump a couple easy dunks that they could use going into the RNC and show off a couple Biden gaffs, and instead got Biden absolutely self-destructing on stage and sinking his campaign.

I don't know if anybody else here has seen those chess games where each side is commanded by an AI and they're programmed to play the worst possible move every time, but the GOP and DNC going against each other reminds me of that.

It's not as if both sides have just a misguided strategy, per se, because one would expect them to at least occasionally get a W as even mediocre plans came to mediocre fruition. They seem to specifically pick the wrong thing to do at every opportunity.

Biden says he's going to be a 1 term president, then decides he's staying in. In 2024, his dementia and incompetence is too much for even the career opportunists to ignore, and his failings have been displayed to the nation. He makes the incorrect decision to keep fighting on despite this, losing donor support. Then he finally has to give up at his weakest moment, politically and physically as he lays infirm with coronavirus, and hands the reins to Kamala. She will inevitably fuck up too.

Trump gets shot at but survives. His immediate reaction is purely self-serving, but accidentally also fires up his base. He then proceeds to say he's going for national unity and perhaps be a little less extreme and weird, but then immediately reneges on that statement and remains on the same course. The Republicans are so online, so obsessed with the genitalia of children and bathroom policing and book-burnings and all sorts of weird shit that doesn't vibe with most Americans, that they fail to form a coherent attack against where Biden is weak (how the working class has suffered under Bidenomics, housing/rent prices, inflation, etc) because they also want the working class to suffer immensely and cannot even summon the effort to just lie and say that they're for the working man. So instead, they direct their effort at trans people (who most Americans don't care about), the border (a somewhat more successful strategy though it's been their hobbyhorse for decades), and like, how Kamala laughs like your weird aunt, which literally nobody cares about.

And instead of attacking the Republicans about how fascistic their border policy is and really drilling into how the Republican policy would be Hitlerian and result in concentration camps, they refuse to attack them on that because they also want immigrants at the border to suffer! So instead it's just "orange man bad" stuff instead of coherent attacks about policy!

This is why I generally don't put much weight into election predictions until like a week beforehand, because even a few months out from November, I already know we have a dozen more moments where the Democrats will fuck up, it'll look like the Republicans have it in the bag so long as the Republicans have even a slightly decent response, and then the Republican response will be so incompetent that it actually gives the Democrats a chance again. And on and on until the election. And @shipwreck@hexbear.net's comment elsewhere in the megathread is right: the reason why this is happening is because their policies are so similar that what attacks can the Republicans even perform? The only thing that they disagree on is Kamala's laugh or whatever. They might disagree on Ukraine and China, but that's foreign policy and no American gives a shit about that.