For better or for worse, the narrative in the US is slowly shifting to class differences rather than the usual culture war dog whistle issues. No matter how much the ultra wealthy wring their hands and try to explain their plight, the people are less and less inclined to be sympathetic when they are seeing the full effects of the K shaped recovery we've been in since the GFC.
I feel like people don't want to discuss this because the root cause is likely that people are easily manipulated by ads.
We like to tell ourselves that it doesn't work on us. It does. And the advertisers love that we think it doesn't work, because that means we're not noticing.
And I've got no idea what to do about it. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear that advertising is free speech. You need a fig leaf that you're not coordinating your ads with the campaign, but they barely enforce that.
There are limits to how much it can do. They wouldn't be spending $1B+ this time around if the first few hundred million had worked. They're trying to limit the damage, and even after the fact it'll be hard to tell how effective the spending was -- there is not control country to compare it to.
But note that this is a midterm, and even if the opposition party wins, they're going to be ineffective. Just wait two more years, and that $1.2 billion figure is going to look like petty cash.
The result of this design can be found in studies like https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... :
> When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/10/28/tax-wealth...
The key thing here is to look at the trend over time, esp the last few years. There has been a steady rise in support for a wealth tax since the GFC, with a sharp rise in recent years.