Throughout much of last week’s Democratic National Convention, multiple observers commented on the convention’s aggressive appeals to independent voters and Trump-weary Republicans.
Those of you who subscribe to the Daily Current newsletter may recall the newsletter’s email subject line Tuesday morning was “Democrats to nation: We like you.”
By the end of the convention, the message out of Chicago had become “Democrats to nation: We are you.”
Well! Friday Donald Trump showed that he isn’t confined to just doubling down on his base and hoping/praying there’s more of them than of everyone else. No sirree. He wants everyone to know that he too can reach out – that he can expand his message beyond the MAGAfolk.
And to prove it, he welcomed the endorsement of … Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his brain worm.
Kennedy, whose name evidently will still be on Nevada’s general election ballot whether he likes it or not, has spent more than a year running for president with a very simple message: “Look at me! I am a quack! But I am also a Kennedy! Celebrity and quackery! What could be more attractive to U.S. voters in the 2020s?” Except Kennedy phrased it differently.
It’s not as if Kennedy didn’t have a point.
Multiple high-profile careers, especially Trump’s, demonstrate that in the 21st century mediascape, quackery can be a hot sell.
Add a famous name and, to borrow Michele Obama’s phrase, “the affirmative action of generational wealth,” and something like Kennedy and his brain worm shooting across the political firmament was always inevitable, to the point of being banal.
(Kennedy has said Trump offered him a job in a Trump administration, a premise of hopefully no practical consequence but one that is amusing to speculate about. Trump didn’t confirm it, so was Kennedy spewing nonsense when he said Trump offered him a job? Or, if Trump did offer him a job, was Trump lying? Or, did Trump really say he’d give him a job, and meant it, but Kennedy can’t count on that because Trump has no sense of loyalty to or regard for anyone but himself? Each of those scenarios are plausible.)
The Kennedy noise aside, Trump’s more substantial attempt to reach voters beyond the fold of his cult is his pitch to tipped workers: vote for the authoritarian and women will never have control of their own bodies but at least tips won’t get taxed.
His “no tax on tips” event in Las Vegas Friday, a modest affair to begin with, sort of got short shrift in the news cycle, thanks to Kennedy and his brain worm.
Trump did say something interesting in Las Vegas though, something that appears to have gone unnoticed except by Nevada Current reporter Jen Solis: You know how Democrats have glommed on to the “no tax on tips” thing but also tried to leverage it into getting rid of the hideous federal subminimum wage by which people in some states can be paid as little as $2.13 an hour? Trump wants to make sure that employers get to keep paying the subminimum wage.
Nevada’s one of a handful of states that already outlawed the subminimum wage. But one likes to think Nevada workers care about their fellow service employees in other states.
Meanwhile, to reiterate, Trump’s no tax on tips pander, though petty policy, could be serious politically, for the same reason Nevada is the battleground state where Harris tends to poll the weakest: Nevada has spent pretty much the entire 21st century getting economically pummeled harder than any state in the country.
That understandably makes for an owly electorate.
The higher costs of groceries, insurance, energy, and rent that accompanied the emergence from the pandemic have hit Nevada households especially hard, because Nevada’s economic recovery from the pandemic (just like its recovery from the Great Recession) is largely a low-wage affair.
And Nevada workers suffer even more than most Americans from pandemic-driven rises in prices, because Nevada workers pay one of the nation’s highest sales tax rates when buying shoes, a sandwich for lunch, or a used car.
Granted:
-Occasional seemingly significant polling results notwithstanding, independent candidates almost always perform much more poorly in elections than they do in polls, and Kennedy’s candidacy was already disappearing before our very eyes.
-Democrats just concluded what was arguably the most successful televised makeover in the history of televising or makeovers.
-Trump’s schtick is old and boring.
And for the vast and overwhelming majority of Nevada workers, the benefit of eliminating the tax on tips would equal exactly jack doodley squat.
But the gimmick makes rhetorical contact with the issue that, according to polling anyway, will impact the election in Nevada more than any other, voters’ perception of the economy.
As Democrats repeatedly reminded everyone in Chicago, the election is going to be close.
Harris has a good shot at winning in Nevada.
Alas, so does Trump.
Tim Walz’s “we’ll sleep when we’re dead” thing should be taken especially seriously by Democrats in Nevada.
A version of this column was originally published in the Daily Current newsletter, which is free, and which you can subscribe to here.
