People fucking love free shit from the government. Everyone loves that. I love libraries and fire departments and all that great socialist shit that makes my life better. I don’t care if libraries are “a human right” or not or whatever, I just want to be able to check out free books and DVDs of Foyle’s War. I’m not a beard-stroking 17th century philosopher fretting about the fundamental rights of man, I just want books and healthcare and DVDs of cozy murder mysteries.
If you are running for president, you should just promise to give everyone access to healthcare and complete boxed sets of David Suchet’s Poiroit mysteries.
It’s funny how this wasn’t/isn’t obvious to everyone here. We actually had to have a “Is health care a human right” thread to demonstrate this. I think we got there relatively quickly, but it still had to be done.
This guy seems to be one of the relatively few people who thinks seriously about the big picture regarding elections and campaigns and structural issues with the electorate.
It’s not the pollsters fault that a historically high number of educated people were stuck at home, were highly engaged, and were answering their phones at ahistorical rates.
That seems like a plausible explanation for the systemic miss, though I know many pollsters were paranoid about missing on education so they oversampled noncollege whites, including Nate Cohen. Gonna have to reread his explanation for the miss.
Trump won the rust belt by the tiniest margin. Trump is a historically bad president. The economy is in the toilet and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been dying of Covid. It’s not a huge stretch to question his reelection chances.
I agree, but I think that in retrospect, once again, we were likely underestimating the stupidity/simplicity of so many people.
I think there is a good reason to think that many many many people simply never saw it this way. They bought Trump’s line that the economy was cooking before COVID, and the media did little to dissuade anyone of that notion. In fact, the mainstream media often conceded that point with little to no explanation.
The COVID part will take a bit longer to figure out for sure, but it certainly seems like tons of people bought one or more of the following:
It wasn’t Trump’s fault; it was China’s.
Trump did the best he could even though the science was unclear and the media was against him
Trump wanted to open schools and football and the economy and others wanted to just oppress.
Plus, he told them that it would be fine and that’s about all they wanted to hear on it.
I think @ChrisV hit the nail on the head. I’m a salesman and if I’m using values to sell you something it’s because I know an insanely large amount about you already. What’s in it for you is the standard tool of persuasion.
This is all well argued and I generally agree. However, I think it’s a bit naive to think people will shift their political identities based on policy.
Florida just overwhelmingly voted for $15 minimum wage and the person who is strongly opposed to that policy! Tribal identify won over policy.
Here is an interesting summary of some, admittedly, lab based research into changing minds.
But here is some other research that suggests the barrier to changing minds isn’t policy or values, it’s very deep seated self identify rooted in biology. Intuitively, I think this supports your general point as I’d assume value-based confrontations are more likely to cause us to trigger that part of the brain wired to reinforce our political self identify.
The other thing I think our side is massively underestimating is that the vast majority of people (~80%) have not had any direct impact from covid. A lot of people still don’t even know anyone who has been infected. All most people have seen is the economic impact which has the reverse trend, having impacted like 99% of people.
It’s the same problem we face on climate change. It is very difficult to get people to care about abstract problems.
Trump’s angle on covid has the benefit of appealing to the 99% who have experienced the economic effects but not the medical effects of covid.
Maybe the takeaway is more Dems are complete shit at messaging, and nobody believes them because they don’t do these things, instead of just tribal politics winning out.
If you asked the people who voted for $15 min wage and for Trump, they’d almost certainly tell you they didn’t know dems supported it, or didn’t believe they’d actually do it, or think Trump would do it because he gets stuff done.
Dems need to be WAY better at messaging. The shitlib moderates need to stop hammering on bullshit and start hammering popular policies. And they need to dunk on Republicans when they accuse them of being socialists. Like pick a handful of the most popular policies like $15/min wage and hammer them. You don’t gotta adopt all of AOCs platform or even " be progressive "
What we need is the old white people that are trusted by other old white people to start hammering these policies. We need the people that are seen as moderates to start hammering popular policies and messaging them correctly. Especially on fucking digital. And we need to make them actually happen if we ever get full control again.
Mostly they need to stop playing defense and get in on the attack.
Shoutout to @Trolly for constantly saying the Trump bad angle was complete shit. He fucking nailed it.
Like Biden Nancy should have been hammering " day one we’re going to pass a massive stimulus, direct cash to every America, we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going to get covid under control so people can get back to work "
They did a decent job in the ACA stuff, but I didn’t hear shit about any of the rest and I’m in the top 1% of following politics.
Most people blaming both sides for the stimulus is political mal practice. Only passing one fucking bill 6 months prior is political mal practice. Not forcing Republicans to vote on it is political mal practice. If you can force a vote on healthcare, you can force a vote on stimulus.
The single toughest thing for me to square is that it seems like our focus on identify politics, while morally justified, has also significantly hurt our ability to win.
While there is no doubt racial and gender equality are critical issues that directly effect millions of people they are also the issues most likely to trigger the tribal part of the brain making it impossible for people to shift politics. We just can’t win minds if our core message is “you are a generally racist, transphobic and homophonic and therefore bad person. Please vote for us”, even though this is empirically true.
Good point. This is also supported by the research that shows education and world travel tends to correlate with progressive politics because simple exposure to the “other” leads to acceptance.
This is a great discussion and there are lots of good posts and points that I don’t need to copy.
I would add that it is so discouraging and demoralizing to have the entire party leadership comprised of machine politics fossils who so obviously just don’t fucking care about anything but maintenance of their own power. It is impossible to play the long game and have a coordinated strategy when the people in charge are far more worried about protecting themselves from people within the party than beating Republicans.
This is why congressional term limits needs to be a core policy for progressives. Of course, any bill setting them would have to be set in the future for the reason you suggest. People are not going to vote against their own self interest.