#polling

If the last US election has been any indicator, pundits and politicians seem to be convinced that the winning strategy is to come up with a "coalition" of voters from different race/gender groups. Much attention gets paid to who is winning what demographic. But for all the talk about race and gender divisions, I have to wonder how useful it really is for campaigning. For example, if you know your campaign is behind on "black men," and you want to appeal to them, you have to assume you know what it is black men want. And if you did know that, you probably wouldn't be losing that demographic in the first place. Then if you try to appeal to black men, you have to make sure you're not losing other demographics, which is a never-ending whack-a-mole of appealing to different groups.

It seems to me that a better approach would just be to look at what swing voters or likely voters in general want. Ideally, you could appeal to all of them at once. It doesn't matter if your coalition is 20-year-old Latino men or 80-year-old Jewish women, because at the end of the day, all that really matters is having the most electoral votes. Knowing that some ad increases your support among swing voters seems much more useful than knowing it increases your support among white women or Chinese men. It also doesn't seem like a good thing that politicians care more about appealing to one demographic rather than pursuing what's best for the country as a whole...but I suppose that's the temptation of cross-tabs.

Politicians keep doing it, so they must have something telling them it's a good strategy, but if the last presidential election was any indicator, political advocates are at their worst when trying to appeal to a specific race or gender. "Real men for Harris" was endlessly mocked, and Trump saying he would "protect women" did him little favors, even if he did end up winning the overall election. The Democrats were convinced that a bunch of white women secretly wanted to vote for Kamala but didn't realize they could vote anonymously....why they believed this, I have no idea. What's good for the goose is usually good for the gander, and one might wonder if talking points that only appeal to one group are even worthwhile policies to pursue.

Feel free to answer elaborately.

For me, the ability to show backbone to the mods regularly, not aligned in their 'clique' and activity matter most.

I would also say the ability to write well so as to have persuasive power in discussions between president and people he/she/they defend/s and the other mods in the behind-the-scenes stuff matters.