- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Some of Democrats’ once-hateable figures are out of the picture. And emerging democratic socialists haven’t made for strong lines of attack nationwide.
Republicans have tried to find a new boogeyman this year as they rail against Democratic socialism and the “radical” left: Zohran Mamdani. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie Sanders.
Still more mentioned than all of them, at least in campaign ads: former President Joe Biden.
A POLITICO review of hundreds of ads running in battleground House and Senate races in recent months shows Republicans largely haven’t seized on progressive icons in paid media. Instead, Biden is the Democrat most likely to be mentioned in GOP ads this cycle, coming up across dozens of races.
Yeah, Biden-era inflation was supply chain shock from onset and recovery from COVID (which I can’t imagine any government doing well), the COVID stimulus (technically on Trump’s watch, but I’m not going to blame that government since it’s hard to say what the better approach would have been if there even were a better approach), avian flu (narrowly on egg prices, but GOP milked the election year avian flu for all it was worth), and Russia’s invasion (which Trump asserted that Putin would have obeyed him and that he could negotiate that away in a day, and Trump proved him wrong).
Trump-era inflation is ongoing Russian invasion (not Trump’s fault), AI bullshittery (in the ways that would matter, not Trump’s fault), terrorizing laborers (100% Trump’s fault), tarriffs (obviously his fault), and the Iran war (again, totally his fault).