Dem
48
Ties
1
GOP
51
Elon Musk has made no secret of the fact that he would like to see Donald Trump back in the White House. The eX-Twitter owner gave back his much, much, much poorer buddy's eX-Twitter account. Then there was the one-on-one interview, though it was undermined by technical issues and low audience interest. On a near-daily basis, Musk also tweets something encouraging about Trump; literally while we were writing this he sent out a message declaring that polling has Trump ahead in the electoral vote, and that "A Trump victory is essential to defense of freedom of speech, secure borders, safe cities and sensible spending!"
Musk also posts plenty of anti-Harris material to his own account, and then uses his powers as owner to make sure the maximum number of people are exposed to his, well, propaganda. The South African is particularly obsessed with the notion that Harris is a communist, and so flogs that particular line of attack on a regular basis. Here, for example, is yesterday's entry:
No, we cannot believe it, because that is one of the least believable AI-generated images we've ever seen. As well as one of the least believable claims about Harris we've ever heard.
The question, at least in terms of things we care about, is whether Musk's cheerleading is actually doing Trump any good. Our gut feel is that the answer is "no." Only 25% of Americans use Twitter, and only 14% use it regularly. An overwhelming percentage of the engagement, both in terms of creating and viewing content, comes from a very small fraction of Americans, less than 5%. And that 5% tends to be overwhelmingly on the fringes, politically (and about 70% male, by the way). The upshot is that most people aren't listening to Musk, and those who are tend to be in the choir already.
What we did not think about is a notion raised in a piece published over the weekend by NBC's David Ingram, namely that Musk might actually be harming Trump with his support. Ingram observes that Musk is not only generally kind of toxic, but that he tends to embody many of the same bad qualities that Trump does: prone to lies and exaggerations, out-of-touch rich guy, anti-labor, indulges in casual bigotry, etc.
Heightening the potential Musk damage is the fact that the Harris campaign is very good with messaging, and has worked to set up a dichotomy of Trump and Musk as out-of-touch plutocrats vs. Harris and Walz as friends of labor and the working class. In this way, the Democrats are dusting off the playbook of 2012, when they managed to brand Republican nominee Mitt Romney in much the same way.
We are not sure if we do, or do not, buy Ingram's take, but we thought it was interesting enough to pass it along for readers' consideration. (Z)