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Comment by futuraperdita | Hacker News Reader

Agree with this. Regardless of the politics involved, this exchange seems pretty mundane in the grand scheme of corporate emails. Taking Bosworth at face value here, it sounds like both camps got the same advice, one acted on it in full, the other didn't, the party that did saw better results, and on top of that had a better ads/targeting strategy that maximized platform ROI. If we removed the political parties from this and made them two companies, I'm not sure HN would have much of an issue with its content.

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I doubt the Clinton campaign could have had as much of an impact with the same strategy. The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:

- white

- Christian

- rural

- guns

- lower and upper class

The upper class votes on taxes, so that is an easy one.

The rest are relatively easy to target.

The Democratic Party tries to capture everyone else, which is more people but hugely diverse. There’s hardly a single message (or single digit number of them) that resonates universally.

Identifying someone as Republican gives your clear signal for targeting if you want to get out the base, as Trump did.

Identifying someone as Democratic means they could care about a huge range of things, but you don’t know what.

> The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:

That's not at all true. The biggest contradiction is on trade. The "business" faction is against tariffs, but the worker base was for it. Same for immigration. Business is generally for it, the worker base is against it.

I can understand why you would think this - or rather, why you'd want to think this - because it lets you lean really hard into the "Republicans dumb lol" trope. But just to pick two of your examples, there are plenty of establishment Republicans who are quick to vote for increased gun control, and at least a few establishment Democrats who need quite a bit of convincing to do so. One side is better than the other (which is which depends on which side you're on, of course), but I'd say it's 80/20 when the media presents it more like 95/5.

And I don't know what "low class" means but if you're referring to socioeconomic status that doesn't match what you said either. According to Pew the bottom quintile (<36k/yr) is about 60/35 Democrat. The top quintile (215k/yr+) is about 53/46. Upper-middle ($144-215k/yr) is the only one with a Republican edge, and the other two (36-48, 48-144) are within the margin of error to 50/50.

I think of all your examples you probably have the strongest case to make with "rural" but I've met plenty of rural Dems in my life.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisan-coa...

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