Will Nazipalooza hurt or help Trump?

Although the rule that what can be realistically attributed to incompetence rather than malevolence probably should be is a sound general principle, I still find it implausible that even the clown show that is the Trump campaign didn’t approve the speeches/ninth-rate standup routines at yesterday’s already infamous Madison Square Garden rally. This was an event designed to draw maximum media attention, so it’s fair to assume that all this, meaning the open sewer pipe racism and misogyny — one speaker referred to Kamala Harris’s supposed Svengali-like puppeteers as “pimps” — was planned and vetted in advance.

This assumption generates incredulity among people outside the right wing bubble — how can it make sense to get a formerly neutral pop star with 40 million social media followers to blast you and endorse your opponent? — but inside the bubble it’s a different story.

The math here is pretty straightforward. If the Trump campaign assumes, quite plausibly, that the key to the election is getting low-engagement elements of its base to turn out, then there many many times more votes to be garnered from, for example, white men without college degrees than Puerto Ricans.

Here’s something from the crosstabs from the ABC/Ipsos poll from this weekend that had Harris up by four nationally among likely voters.

White men without college degrees: Trump 68 Harris 27 (Trump +41). There are about fifty million such men in this country, so juicing the turnout in that demographic is worth taking some risks in regarding to going “too far with the racism,” to the extent such a concept even makes sense any more, which is after all not much.

BTW white women with college degrees in the same poll broke +23 for Harris (61/38), which illustrates just how powerful the combination of gender and education, or lack of it, is in this election.

Now I have no idea whether the Trump campaign is right about the calculation it’s making, assuming again this just wasn’t some gigantic clusterfuck, which I admit remains a possibility, given the actors involved.

But it’s not an obviously irrational bet, which itself is a really stark a comment of what’s wrong with this country.

UPDATE:

The removed “joke” involved calling Kamala Harris something that’s the centerpiece of a certain Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.