Kamala / Walz 2024

Why would abortion not be in the typical, moderate, and progressive categories

Because there are 3 different abortion messages meant to appeal to either a progressive, moderate, or typical Democrat:

Typical (I think. There are actually 2 labeled liberal on the sheet, and this one seems less aggressive about supporting abortion.):

Kamala Harris understands that abortion is a deeply personal issue. She believes in protecting womenā€™s health and safety. Harris wants to ensure that families can make their own decisions without government interference. She prioritizes maternal health and patient care, showing her dedication to real issues that affect families daily. By supporting Harris, you support someone who fights for your freedom to make personal decisions and keeps government out of your private life.

Liberal:

Kamala Harris strongly supports abortion rights and reproductive freedoms. After the Roe v. Wade reversal, she focused on advocating for these rights. Harris has co-sponsored laws to protect reproductive health services and opposed restrictions on abortion access. She believes in national protections for abortion, ensuring women have the right to choose. Her commitment to womenā€™s health and reproductive rights shows she is dedicated to fighting for these causes. Supporting Harris means supporting womenā€™s rights and health.

Moderate:

Kamala Harris understands that people have diverse views on abortion. She focuses on fairness and protecting families. She believes in keeping abortion safe and legal, especially in cases of rape and incest. Harris aims to balance peopleā€™s rights with common-sense regulations. By supporting Kamala Harris, you are choosing a leader who seeks a fair and compassionate solution for all Americans.

(Or maybe you meant, why arenā€™t there 3 different Pro-Harris lines for abortion on the graph? I canā€™t answer that question.)

Iā€™m not sure I buy that people are good judges of what actually persuades them.

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Fair. FWIW, this is their process:

To test whether our argument that campaigns should focus on the less-known candidate held up in the 2024 race, we examine data from a survey conducted in early August of over 100,000 Americans recruited on the platform Lucid. In the survey, which we collected as advisers to Democratic consultants, we randomized voters to see one of 76 video ads created by our friends at Tavern Research or a ā€œcontrolā€ ad that didnā€™t talk about either candidate. Tavernā€™s ads either attacked Trump or praised Harris, and did so from different angles ā€” e.g., some focused on issues of democracy, others about who was most ā€œweird,ā€ and others on core issues like Social Security. After survey respondents saw one of the ads, we asked them how they planned to vote this November. Comparing peopleā€™s responses based on which ad they saw offers insight into which messages are most persuasive.

The results are essentially identical to what we found in 2020: Attacking Trump simply isnā€™t as effective for Democrats as praising Harris. Messages attacking Trump moved a small number of people from saying theyā€™d support Trump to being indifferent but didnā€™t persuade people to vote for Harris. Only messages that praised Harris actually boosted support for her (and reduced support for Trump).

Despite all appearances to the contrary, I have no affiliation to this survey or these researchers. I just thought the results were interesting.

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I read this at first as Nate Bargatze and got excited.

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It does support that Dems are bad on immigration. Just about the worst positive message is about Harris being liberal on immigration and the worse messaging at all is to attack Trump on being tough on immigration.

Looking at the topā€¦social security and medicare?..man, these people would love Bernie.

He even favors tough borders

I wouldnā€™t say thatā€™s fair.

His position has changed over the years.

and itā€™s not so hardline that he canā€™t get some commie support

Sanders without question now sets the bar on immigration, border, and labor policy, and he has made it clear that immigrants are central to an insurgent American working class and that the working class must be united to win.

Sandersā€™s immigration plan is dedicated to immigrant freedom. It contains no talk of border security or targeting ā€œcriminal aliens.ā€ He rejects the establishmentā€™s comprehensive immigration-reform model that has traded draconian enforcement as a putative down payment to buy Republican congressional support for a mass legalization of undocumented immigrants. In other words, Bernieā€™s plan identifies presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obamaā€™s strategies as a failure.

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Jacobin is tepidly social democrat

Also commies seem to love impenetrable borders

I think the weird message just needs to happen naturally not through forced messaging/ads. Let the comedians and social media run with it now that Walz got the ball rolling.

So heā€™s a flip flopper

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Yes. He used to be too captured (ideologically if not financially) by unions.

Not real commies. Like obviously. Not arguing with you here, but others on the forumā€¦itā€™s not no-true-scotsmanning something when their practices are the exact opposite of the ideology. International as opposed to national is just a key feature.

And, yeah, prolly, but still, closer to commie than anyone gets in the USA government.

I was hinting at the opposite. That youā€™d pick whatever you thought was good and live with that decision, but to be honest I guess itā€™s more the passive aggressiveness that bothers me than anything. Shapiro is a pretty good pick and if everything comes down to Pennsylvania and Democrats lose then it was the right pick, but others like Nate Silver or Ezra Klein who said the same thing just state their premises openly without the need to continuously revisit the issue obliquely. Itā€™s an annoying personality trait that I dislike in Yglesias, while thinking he does good analysis as a pundit.

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https://x.com/TallBart/status/1823432793671786694?t=jnSmLK3Jh06b1bJGGk723g&s=19

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This is well established in multiple fields. People are AWFUL at determining this.

The ā€œweirdā€ message seems like a perfect example. If you directly ask somebody whether or not itā€™s persuadable to them, the thought is likely to be something like ā€œno, Iā€™m not going to be persuaded by a childish insultā€. But they will subconsciously start noticing when Trump acts weird, and theyā€™ll start thinking of him as weird. And they will be less likely to vote for him, because it emotionally feels icky to vote for someone who you consider to be weird.

The entire marketing industry is built around this stuff. You might be able to glean some bits of info from surveys like this, but not much. Strategy should be based on what people actually do, not what they say.

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+1

Itā€™s like when someone claims they arenā€™t affected by advertising. They see through the propaganda! But we are all affected by it. Itā€™s a constant fight to see through the effects.

Yeah, to be fair, the methodology is better than what I first thought, self-reporting on persuadable messages, but even the methodology as stated doesnā€™t capture, as you suggest, the temporal factor: which messages may not be persuasive right now but that fester over time due to repetition and reinforcement. Iā€™d kinda like to see one of these from the other side right now, and especially, Iā€™d like to see one from 2016 when there were two non-incumbents (2020 doesnā€™t seem like itā€™d be that interesting, as pandemic stuff would dominate).

I dunno, I would expect that list would at least correlate decently with an ideal metric, and the messaging Iā€™ve seen during the Olympics, which has coincided with Harrisā€™s rise, has all been the stuff at the top of the list.

Used in this instance in product development, but yeah. Thereā€™s a reason what someone says is on the bottom.

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Agreed.

I think the process by which someone decides how to vote is just way too dynamic to be captured in a static study like this. People are bombarded by messages during a campaign. Some by the candidate. Some by ads. Some by the opponent. Some by the media. All that stuff blends together over time to create an impression, and to create emotional reactions. Getting somebody to the point where they get off the couch and actually fill in the square next to your candidate is complicated.

That all said, I do think you might get some useful info from studies like this when comparing within category. For example, I think you can reasonably conclude that social security is a better issue to focus on compared to other dry policy issues, for example.

Not sure Iā€™d put any stock into the cross-category results. Positive vs. negative ads. Issue-based vs. character-based. Etc.

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New attack on Walz