- Joined
- Jan 23, 2015
It's not too risky a bet to take on, though. Hillary Clinton was much smarter than Joe Biden.Don't get me wrong, I like how Trump is doing his campaigning. My complaint is that if he guesses wrong in a state, he runs a risk of losing it on a slim margin.
The perfect example is MN from 2016. Trump didn't fight there late and lost the state by 45k. He had rallies in WI and only won by 23k. His biggest buy was in VA, which he lost by 5 points (Clinton had already pulled ads because she had it locked up). He completely pulled ads from Rust Belt states in September, and only returned to specific targeted ones later; good write-up of the strategy here from late September 2016.
For all the memes about 4D underwater chess, Trump does get things wrong. He's used to that in business, where he writes off losses, and in politics, where he pivots to a new focus or replaces personnel. As long as future successes outweigh the failures he comes out ahead. But he can't afford to get too many things wrong during an election; there's nothing to salvage if he loses the one big event.
You can spin 2016 as a perfectly calibrated, cost-efficient campaign that did the minimum he needed to win, and praise its efficiency. It was a legitimate accomplishment. But along with the good strategy came a series of small mistakes, which were offset by his opponent's larger mistakes. That's fine, if you win, but relying on an opponent's screw-ups is still a risky strategy.
At some point, a lean campaign doesn't just neglect to run up the numbers for bragging rights. It can also cut into your margin of safety. Considering the 2016 margins and this year's need to overcome the margin of fraud, I'd feel better with a cushion of votes in some of the "safer" states instead of just a "we think we have it" margin that triggers a pullback.
Trump already cut ads in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, states he should not feel comfortable about this year. If he's right and a handful of rallies compensate for it, great; he's a political genius and I'm an anonymous autist. But you can't see that as anything other than a huge gamble right now.
Hillary was intelligent enough to know that taking money for political favours tends to be frowned upon, but people love charities, so they had the Clinton Foundation act as a front. If you want favours, donate to charity. You look good, we get paid, you get the favour you want. She and Bill even had the foresight to have almost all of the donations move down through their Canadian branch, since donations from the Canadian branch to the American one would look more legitimate, rather than tying directly to the actual donor.
Joe's such a dumbass that he got his own son directly employed at an incredibly corrupt company, in a notoriously corrupt nation, had him taking bribes directly in the form of a suspiciously large and undeserved paycheck in a field he has no expertise in, and when the company started to be investigated for shady shit, rather than have his son pull out and head for the hills, good old Dipshit Joe intervened--personally-- to get the prosecutor fired.
Then he bragged about it on camera. In public.
The whole scenario is so ridiculously inept that it borders on being comedic. It's the kind of dumbass decisions that only someone who graduated 78th in a class of 85 could make. "Never underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."