The electoral college system means you really don't have to "branch out." The VOTING public is so polarized you don't have many "swing" voters anymore. It is ALL about getting out your voters and then trying to pick up a few votes here and there in different swing states. Even if you do believe in the old style of electioneering where candidates solidify their base first and then "moderate", we are still far enough from election day for that shift to occur. And because the group of truly "swing" voters is so small, this shift doesn't have to be some over the top clearly obvious move to the middle that might alienate his base.
As far as the media issue, nobody cares about that shyt except for journalists and people who follow politics day by day, hour by hour. The national media's reputation nowadays is in the toilet.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/15/media/gallup-knight-foundation-report-reliable-sources/index.html
American Views 2022: Part 2 Trust, Media and Democracy
This link has great underlying data. To me the most important and frankly frightening is the difference in how people view the NATIONAL vs LOCAL media. People trust in local media more than national by HUGE margins. Local news orgs and the people who own them tend to skew to the right. And they are much more likely to offer very surface level analysis or even blatantly put their fingers on the scale on behalf of the GOP. They've been doing this for every election in recent history.
I think what they're going to do is basically what trump did in 2016, spending tons of money figuring out what single issue motivates any undecided voters in PA, MI, WI, MN, AZ, GA. And it's going to be down to neighborhood levels, not even just zip codes, congressional districts of city by city. And whenever he is in that area that is the issue he's going to hammer.
And he's going to have a much greater margin of error because my sense is that he (and even trump if he was the nominee) will outperform trump's 2020 numbers among non white voters.
thehill.com
www.politico.com
Did you expect a Meatball to handle the broiler?
