The campaign is about to enter what sailors would call the doldrums. Public schools are about to let out, or they have already. College students are working their summer jobs or travelling. It's likely to be hot out. Or, depending on where in the states people live, about to tornado or hurricane or flood through their houses. Nobody has time to click a tasty political link about what absolutely hate filled, racists, inane, hurtful, stupid thing THE DONALD said last, or on a link that provides your next bland, uninspiring, totally vanilla, political legacy link from HRC.
Any campaign I have worked on over the summer goes through this. People are less likely to open their doors when you knock, less likely to answer the phone and not at all likely to have formed an opinion. Overwhelming, the research shows, people are spending about 4-8 seconds a week paying attention to politics right now. You can expect blips when the conventions happen to offiically select the nominees, and another blip when each candidate selects their Vice President nominee, but generally it's going to be a snooze fest.
Major media outlets will continue to try and get our attention with manufactured stories (or, maybe, genuine reporting), but the next major event in this campaign is the end of the labour day weekend in September.
Practical implications of this:
- Polls are going to change a lot after the labour day weekend, when people start to spend more time paying attention.
- Both campaigns will really whack at eachother with advertisements, tens of millions of dollars on tv spots trying to shape our opinions of the other candidate.
- This is largely done to win the "media" battle. Once media have settled in on a "narrative" about a candidate, it is hard to move them off. We tend to believe the media narrative, regardless of facts. As an example of this:
- Many people believe Obama is Muslim, and not born in the USA. This is factually inaccurate, but became part of the media narrative so it stuck
- Very little money will be spent by either candidate promoting themselves. THE DONALD has yet to spend money on advertisements that do much more than attack other people and refer to himself as the greatest. HRC desperately needs to show people how dangerous, racist, mysognistic, zenophobic, and underqualified THE DONALD is, so her ads will largely be about that.
We won't know if THE DONALD can win until September.
He probably can't. It will take a spectacular clusterfuck of an HRC campaign for him to win. He will look close, or maybe even winnning, but he can't win the battleground states. He has got this far on celebrity, money, and speaking in a way that people recognize is different and taps into their anger. He has about a quarter of the staff that the Republican party was planning on having, meaning there are no people organizing events, schmoozing local city councils, going door to door or making phone calls to back up his image and help him get his vote out. The democrats have an overwhelming structural advantage here, with a well trained organizer machine left over from the Obama years.
So, sit back, relax, let the doom take you to a sweet hibernation nap until September. Nothing meaningful will happen until then.
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