you mean dems efforts at governing isn’t being treated fairly by the liberal bias media?
Whether malicious or not, media sucks at statistics. Maybe put some error bars or equivalent on the data.
Your median media person would think error bars illustrate errors in the research.
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I suppose. Some context regarding variance would be nice.
Anyway maybe we got a little unlucky in how the initial numbers fell out.
This is several orders of magnitude beyond the explanatory powers of the infotainment media. They are only capable of Level 1 narrative structures. Blueberries are either a Super Food or they cause cancer. Maybe both, Super Food on Monday and they cause cancer Tuesday.
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I get these daily emails from NYT where they try to sell me a subscription but also provide a little content. Today they had a piece on a poll of infrequent voters that everybody thinks there must be an easy way of winning over. They say that’s
‘Just a fantasy’
Political pundits often talk about swing voters as if they were upscale suburbanites, like “soccer moms” or “office-park dads.” And some are. But many are blue-collar. They are the successors to the so-called Reagan Democrats, who let Republicans win the White House in the 1980s and Democrats retake it in the 1990s.
Summary
This century, blue-collar swing voters helped elect Barack Obama twice, Donald Trump once and Joe Biden in 2020. They have also played a deciding role in congressional and state elections, including in Virginia last week.
In the current polarized political atmosphere, many college graduates follow politics obsessively — almost as if it were a sport — and identify with one of the two parties. Many working-class voters, on the other hand, vote for both parties and sit out some elections.
Figuring out what moves these swing voters is a crucial question in American politics. It has become an urgent question for the Democratic Party, which is struggling to win working-class votes in many places, including some Asian and Latino communities.
This morning, a creative new poll exploring these issues is being released. It asks working-class respondents — defined as people without a bachelor’s degree — to choose between two hypothetical candidates. The candidates are described both personally (their gender, race and job category) and politically (including a sound bite in which they talk about their views).
A central conclusion is that infrequent voters are not a huge Democratic constituency just waiting to be inspired by a sufficiently progressive economic message. “That’s just a fantasy,” Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin, a socialist magazine and one of the poll’s sponsors, told me, “and it’s a fantasy we ourselves have engaged in.” (In fairness, numerous other people — including Trump and, well, me — have believed that same misplaced idea.)
The poll instead finds that working-class swing voters hold a swirl of progressive and conservative views. “To mobilize these voters will take a lot of grass-roots organizing efforts, particularly more labor-union-centered organizing,” Sunkara said. “There is no simple programmatic solution” — for either party.
Below, I walk through themes from the poll, focusing on those respondents who said they did not lean toward either party. About 33 percent of them voted for Trump last year and 22 percent voted for Biden, with the remaining voting for a third party or not voting.
YouGov, a large nonpartisan pollster, conducted the poll, in collaboration with Jacobin and the Center for Working-Class Politics, a new progressive group.
Politics isn’t just issues
Nothing produced a more positive response from poll respondents than hearing that a candidate was a small-business owner. It offered a bigger lift than any political position or demographic feature, and it was popular across Black, Latino and white respondents.
Voters also had positive feelings about candidates who were listed as being teachers, veterans or construction workers. Lawyers fared less well, and Fortune 500 C.E.O.s did worst of all.
Source: YouGov, The Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin
It’s a reminder that big business and small business have very different images — and that Trump’s victory depended on selling himself as a brash entrepreneur rather than a bland corporate manager like Mitt Romney.
Race is undeniably vexing
Many Black working-class swing voters are attracted to candidates who focus on racial justice — by promising to “end systemic racism,” for example. Many white working-class swing voters are turned off by these same positions. There is no simple answer on race for the Democratic Party, given that it must attract a multiracial coalition to win.
But the political costs of a campaign message focused on ethnic identity seem significantly larger than the benefits, Sunkara said. Among five different candidate sound bites presented to respondents, the worst-performing was one that the pollsters internally described as “woke moderate.” Its first sentence sounds like something out of a corporate mission statement:
Our unity is our strength, and our diversity is our power. But for too long, special interests have blocked critical progress in addressing systemic racism, climate change, and access to affordable health care. We need creative leaders who will fight for our values, listen to the experts, and make real change happen.
Populism is popular
The second best-performing sound bite was one that pollsters internally referred to as “Republican.” It warned that “freedom is under threat from radical socialists, arrogant liberals and dangerous foreign influences.”
Yet the most successful sound bite was the “progressive populist” one. It was as pugnacious as the Republican entry, albeit with different targets:
This country belongs to all of us, not just the superrich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.
Source: YouGov, The Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin
Populism has its limits
Working-class swing voters tend to favor generous versions of Medicare, Social Security and other universal government benefits, polls consistently show. But they also responded positively in this poll to candidates promising vaguely to “cut government spending.”
And while Democratic-leaning working-class voters liked a “Medicare for all” message, swing working-class voters preferred candidates who instead promise to “increase access to affordable health care.”
Americans are mostly progressive on economics, but Democrats can still run too far left on these issues.
Source: YouGov, The Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin
You can read the full poll results here. (If you do, note that the beginning of the report focuses on a Democratic-leaning group of working-class voters — who are relevant to primary elections — rather than the swing voters who have been my focus.)
Touché.
In the current polarized political atmosphere, many college graduates follow politics obsessively — almost as if it were a sport
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This is so stupid. The guy is getting bought off for peanuts.
https://twitter.com/schwartzbcnbc/status/1458429292052942852?s=21
What type of backwards ass country is still filling important positions one year after the election?
Reminder that Louis DeJoy is STILL the head of the US Postal Service.
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The term you’re looking for is “Shithole Country”.
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https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1458910826069475329
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1458956839480086532
https://twitter.com/AnthonyAdragna/status/1458859798900916228
Obciously Democrats have moved too far left
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Did you know we still don’t have an ambassador to China?
This is such bullshit. Find me articles about Mike Pence less than a year into that presidency. This should go in the Poor Media Outlets thread. The media is on a crusade to tear her down, AND to gin up some weird rivalry between her and Pete for 2024…even though they are friends and fetch just isn’t going to happen.
https://twitter.com/brat2381/status/1460129815445471235?s=20
https://twitter.com/EricBoehlert/status/1460106777878487040?s=20
https://twitter.com/TeamCavuto/status/1460338705420501012?s=20
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https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1460317926591016960
Guess the plan is to drag the CBO grading out until recess then whoops OMG debt ceiling crisis then we just all forget the BBB was ever a thing.
Really wish we could coax FlyWF out of retirement for some Bannon drug speculation
https://twitter.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1460334043195744260?s=21
All of them?
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sorry not sorry for hoping that lesion on his face is an incurable disease.
bill cassidy amuses me in that he’s the rarest of rare republicans these days, a guy who takes the job semi-seriously, trump’s guilty so I voted that, infrastructure good so I voted for that, most of the rest of them have realized all the voters care about is triggering the libs.
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I have to agree he’s the wrong guy. Bannon will attention whore this to his last breath. Meadows or some other schmuck would have been better.