Over the last couple of weeks or so, Democrats and their media allies have ramped up the accusations of “fascism” against GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in what can only be described as desperate fearmongering designed to scare voters ahead of next week’s election.
Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris has been one of the most vocal in making the baseless claim, saying, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” when asked by CNN‘s Anderson Cooper, “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” during the network’s Pennsylvania town hall last Wednesday.
At another point, she declared that the American people don’t want “a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
And though she didn’t use that particular f-word during her underwhelming Ellipse speech Tuesday night, she did have this to say about her opponent after falsely accusing him of wanting to use the military to get revenge on people who don’t agree with him:
“America, this is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
Watch:
Though Harris clearly believes this is a winning strategy, a top pro-Kamala super PAC is saying otherwise:
The leading super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris is raising concerns that focusing too narrowly on Donald J. Trump’s character and warnings that he is a fascist is a mistake in the closing stretch of the campaign.[…]
In an email circulated to Democrats about what messages have been most effective in its internal testing, Future Forward, the leading pro-Harris super PAC, said focusing on Mr. Trump’s character and the fascist label were less persuasive than other messages.
“Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” read one line in bold type in the email, which is known as Doppler and sent on a regular basis. “‘Trump Is Exhausted’ Isn’t Working,” read another.
The Times report went on to note that at least one ad the Harris campaign ran with using this messaging was not very effective:
The ad fared relatively poorly in Future Forward’s ad testing, according to results obtained by The New York Times and shared with Democratic allies. After voters were shown the ad, it moved the race between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump by only 0.7 percentage points, where the most effective ads can shift the matchup by 2 percentage points.
Even Vox.com is calling out how the strategy doesn’t have the impact the Harris campaign no doubt hoped it would, though Vox, too, sprinkled “authoritarian” throughout their story:
But judging by the available data, swing voters are largely unmoved by such assertions, however objectively true and important they may be. Specifically, recent research by political scientists and pollsters suggest that undecided voters are less responsive to negative messages about Trump’s authoritarianism than positive ones about Harris’s economic agenda.[…]Survey experiments conducted last week by the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research — in partnership with the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy PAC — yielded the same conclusion.[…]Spotlighting Trump’s authoritarianism [has] performed especially poorly with blue-collar workers, and best with educated professionals (though even the latter group preferred the populist narrative). That’s potentially significant, since the key Rust Belt battlegrounds — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — are all less college-educated than the nation as a whole.
Coupling that with comparing your opponent and his supporters to Nazis, as Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz did, and calling them “garbage” as President Joe Biden did, and one would be hard-pressed to understand how anyone with a lick of common sense could believe these were good messaging strategies.
Then again, as Kamala Harris has shown us time and time again, the answer to Democrat failures is to double down on them, so there’s that, I guess.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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