The Democrats think they found Trump’s big weakness

It began with Brat Summer, and it’ll end with Adolf Autumn.

That’s the real-life story of a billion-dollar campaign to be president of the United States of America and the culmination of the most valued minds in Democrat politics, working in tandem to produce the party’s strategy.

Every aspect of the Democratic machine, from the campaign and its advertisements to Politico Playbook, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, is in on it. The closing message of the final week of the 2024 election cycle is this (drumroll): A roast comedian made a joke about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally.

They’re going all in on this, and to suffer through Playbook’s read on the situation, you’d think at long last they’d finally found the former president’s Achilles’ heel. He’s a racist! And no, not because of something he said or even something said in his company, but because of a joke a few hours before he took the stage.

Every remaining day they talk about it, they’re not talking about things that actually motivate voters.

Maybe Republican bed-wetting is to blame. The elected officials of the Grand Old Party had generally gotten a lot better at not falling for the condemnation game, even in the case of spicy jokes, but this one so close to an election spooked them like a loud noise in a stable. U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) joined Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) in tweeting their condemnation and assuring Puerto Rico that it is indeed a beautiful island.

It’s worth noting that the Democrats weren’t ever going to let the news coverage of a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden go well. During the lead-up, they repeatedly called Republicans Nazis and played nonstop footage of Nazis in Madison Square Garden 85 years earlier as proof. What was essentially the most ethnically and religiously diverse crowd ever seen at a Republican rally would never be reported on as such.

Even so, they’ve gone above and beyond, calling it "unfunny, racist, cringeworthy ... the repulsive ... disgusting ... hateful ... so incredibly crude ... extremely vile so-called jokes ..." Dana Bash (who insists it is pronounced “dah-nah” and gets angry if you don’t) said it was “too X-rated to play” on TV.

It literally took Jon Stewart, who still hosts “The Daily Show,” to call it out, playing some of the comedian’s jokes from the Tom Brady roast a few months ago, cracking on Beyoncé not playing a promised set at Vice President Kamala Harris’ Texas rally, and telling his audience, “I find that guy [Tony Hinchcliffe] very funny. I’m sorry! I don’t know what to tell you! I mean, bringing him to a rally and having him not do roast jokes? That’d be like bringing Beyoncé to a rally and not having … "

It’s not just Stewart calling out the stupidity. Future Forward, a $700 million Democrat super PAC, sounded the alarm in the New York Times, saying the campaign’s $10 million spend calling Trump a fascist and attacking his character wasn’t moving the needle with voters.

And when you pull your head out of the echo chamber, how could it? It’s been the same play since before the campaign even kicked off again, and all the while, Trump continues to climb. The official campaign doesn’t seem to know any other, however. Democrats are literally making their final pitch from the park in front of the White House to talk about the Jan. 6 riot.

Is it all ideal for Republicans? No. Was inviting a roast comedian to roast voters politically intelligent? Not really. But should Democrats look the dealer straight in the eye and move all their chips to the Puerto Rico joke? It’s amazing anyone even has to ask.

Every remaining day they talk about the joke, they’re not talking about things that actually motivate voters. Every sentence is another not talking abortion or the economy or any of the policies Harris is promising. Every breath of it is wasted.

The Democrats are spending a lot of money, and that will help them a great deal. Pennsylvania is very close, and that’s a good thing for them as well. But things aren’t going well for them, nor have they been for a while, and spending the final week on someone their voters haven’t heard of saying something that might offend them will go down as one more final dumb thing in what is undoubtedly the dumbest presidential campaign any of us have yet lived through.

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The fire rises: The New York Times: Dayton vs. Yale

Ever get the feeling we’ve been here before? Well, we have. Specifically: The Democratic Party and its obsession with Ivy League radicalism over working-class values. It was a worry then, too. (Not that anyone actually listened to the prescient warning.) David Leonhardt reports:

The book’s title is “The Real Majority,” and it appeared during Richard Nixon’s first term. Its authors were two Democrats hoping to save their party from future defeats: Richard Scammon, who had run the Census Bureau under John F. Kennedy, and Ben Wattenberg, who’d been a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson.

Scammon and Wattenberg believed that their fellow Democrats misunderstood the country’s electorate. The energy of the 1960s had led the party to imagine that the typical voter was young and highly educated. As a hypothetical example, the book described a 24-year-old political science instructor at Yale University. In reality, the authors wrote, the typical voter resembled a 47-year-old woman living in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, who didn’t have a college degree and whose husband worked as a machinist.

This Dayton voter wasn’t poor, but she struggled with rising inflation. She worried about crime, student protests and drug use, polls showed. She felt ambivalent about the Vietnam War. She was one of the “plain people,” as Scammon and Wattenberg put it, who had long voted Democratic but was uncomfortable with the party’s leftward shift — toward the views of that 24-year-old Yale instructor. Unless Democrats changed course, the authors wrote, “we may well see Republican presidents in the White House for a generation.”

The book was prophetic: Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections, including landslides by Nixon and Ronald Reagan.