AES’s messaging often hits this tone for me where I can’t decide if he’s genuinely cooking or just a bit too cute/self-aware to really connect with voters. Broadly, he’s a high-quality candidate, but when I hear people compare him to Obama or talk about him as a ‘28 contender, I don’t quite see it. He’s a little too prone to winking at the audience, a little too clever, to really hit that perfect facsimile of sincerity you need to go truly national, imo. Compare to Trump; both AES and Trump, imo, display the poster’s drive to dunk, to own. But with Trump, it feels compulsive and personal—he *appears* to care less about how it’s received and more about his genuine need to vent his spleen on the people he hates. This is similar to how you get so many voters who kept seeing Trump as a “straight shooter” despite his constant lying; his lies come off less as calculated, manipulative, clever ploys, and more as the sincere expression of his own narcissism and rage. In a way, he’s always managed to be ‘honestly dishonest’: someone who lies to satisfy *his own* emotional needs, rather than to cannily manipulate the audience. The fact that many of his lies are so ridiculous and facially absurd goes to this point—they’re not clever or plausible, so they don’t seem intended to manipulate, but instead come across like an *authentic* or *honest* expression of *intent* and *worldview*, despite being literally false. Trump’s drive to dunk is the same; typically his dunks appear impulsive and guileless, a sincere and unfiltered expression of his resentments rather than anything calibrated for an audience. With AES, however, you get the sense that his drive to dunk is a little too self-aware, a little too eager for likes. Less an expression of sincere anger and more a “get it? That was a pretty good one, right?” nod to the audience. Again, still broadly a very capable candidate and communicator, but if he ever wants to go national, he’ll have to learn how to fake sincerity a bit better.

Some centrist pundits will be like “perhaps we should grind some trans people into paste, to win independents in OH-09” which prompts some trans pundits on social media to be like “every Democrat alive wants to murder me, they are all Hitler,” Meanwhile blue states have made approximately ~zero concessions on trans issues (even when unpopular with their own voters!) and writ large trans people are extremely reliable Democratic voters and donors. The whole thing is extremely detached from reality.

Grim irony of Dems/trans people is that Dems have stuck to their guns on trans issues to a remarkable degree, and trans people are a 95%+ Dem voting/donating/volunteering bloc, yet both Dems & trans people are convinced the other is betraying them because of online discourse.