Democratic vs. Republican assumptions about voter behavior

Politics & Elections
21

Unfortunately, with the difference between the D’s and R’s so glaringly stark today, the undecided voters must all be very confused or uninformed. (Whenever someone brags about “thinking” rather than reflexively pulling the D or R lever, I have to stifle laughter.)

But will the election be decided by the “Undecideds”? Or is it about exciting the base? On this topic I was dismayed by some numbers I looked at recently:

Sanders got more than 79,000 write-in votes in the November 2016 election in California. Write-in votes: people had to go to much bother to cast these votes. In Pennsylvania, there were 49,000 write-in votes — more than Trump’s winning margin. (We don’t know how many of these write-ins were for Sanders: Pennsylvania doesn’t bother to record the written-in name.)

Even more disgusting: they compare Trump with Cyrus the Great, the ruler who benefited the Jews even though he wasn’t Jewish. Cyrus was an intelligent benevolent ruler much admired by Thomas Jefferson et al. To hear him compared with Donald Trump makes one want to vomit.

22

I think this comment pretty well illustrates one of the points made in this thread, though - that many Democrats/liberals operate from a baseline assumption/attitude that* “Our values are (or ought to be) universal or considered blatant common sense, and if some voters don’t see things the way we do, that means something must be wrong with them.”*

23

I exaggerated to make my point!

The fact is that most “Independent” voters actually lean strongly toward either the Rs or the Ds. They call themselves “independent” either to distance themselves from partisanship, or because of one or two issues: Someone who prefers R consistently but is pro-choice and a pro-life or anti-immigrant D-voter may each describe themselves as “independent.”

Voters who truly are “independent” and lean toward neither party have dwindled to less than 5% of the electorate. Unfortunately most web articles will lump the D-voting and R-voting “independents” together with the actual Undecideds in their statistics, so I can’t point to research on, for example, the education level of the 5% Undecided, or whether they read newspapers. All I see with Google is that Pew Research finds these Undecideds particularly likely not to vote at all: ⅔ of them stay home on Election Day.

D-leaning Independents often have views just as strong as D’s on many issues (or stronger views than “weak D’s”).
Hmmm. Maybe appealing to the “base” is the proper strategy, but just with a slightly broader definition of “base.”

24

OK, gotcha, I see now.

Yeah I have always been skeptical of the “independent” label. I suspect only a tiny minority are truly nonpartisan, and the majority are just R’s and D’s who don’t want the baggage that comes with the R or D label, especially if they live in hostile territory.

25

It’s not that I consider myself so ardently non-partisan. Rather, I have strong convictions on both sides the ideological divide. So I’d have major conflicts with declaring myself either R or D. And it’s gotten worse as both parties have pulled further to their extremes.

26

That’s interesting. Because that looks to me like the way many Democrats view the current and recent behavior of Republicans.[ETA: of the Republican Party, not necessarily of all the members of it.]

27

Whats your perspective on it.

Republicans do support authoritarianism more than democrats.

Republicans support social hierarchies more than democrats.

Republicans are the ones pushing voter suppression and gerrymandering more than democrats.

I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong. I’m wrong about a lot of things. But the base of the 2 parties do seem to fall into these 2 categories.

High authoritarians who value social hierarchies and do not value liberal democracy.

Low authoritarians who reject social hierarchies and value liberal democracy.

This study of the 5 traits of Trump voters finds all 5 are related either to authoritarianism or social hierarchies.

https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/750

28

If somebody is basing their decision of who should be President on who has the best hair, then you’re right, I think there’s something wrong with that person. And I don’t feel I’m the one that should be changing my ways so I’m more accepting of his point of view.

His point of view is dumb. And it shouldn’t be given equal status with intelligent points of view.

29

Both parties are really identity parties now. Even within the Democratic primary you’re seeing more overlap between Warren and Harris and Warren and Buttigieg than Warren and Sanders. It’s also why all elections are close now. When I was a kid it wall all landslides, because about 20% of the electorate were swing voters. Now it might be 5%. Still enough to decide elections, but a small enough number that ideologues think they can motivate enough base voting to overcome losing swing voters. It is true that you can motivate your base enough to do that, but not with ideology: with identity. Bush beat Kerry by bringing out evangelicals, not ideological conservatives, and Obama got young and minority voters out, not ideological progressives.

I remember a time when one candidate could lead the other by double digits in September and it wasn’t anywhere near over.

30

I suspect that a significant percentage of independents are royally ticked off at both parties; though quite possibly for different reasons. And what those reasons are most likely varies from one independent to another.

31

Welcome to America, Little Nemo! Those who listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio thought Nixon was the clear winner. Those who watched on TV thought Kennedy was the clear winner. Kennedy had the better hair.

Every.Single Presidential election in the past 70 years has been won by the more charismatic candidate. (Trump may seem like a counterexample, but how could such a blatant criminal asshole have ever won if he didn’t “inspire devotion”?) “Definition of charismatic: exercising a compelling charm which inspires devotion in others.”

32

Well, yes, I’d agree that a large part of the “independent” demographic is actually quite clearly liberal or conservative personally, but just would rather not be presumed to endorse the whole-package platform as the parties are right now.

And brace for to those who will indignantly demand that you take that back… OK, so what about “every election of the past 70 years has been won by the greater ratings-/click-draw candidate”… (Bush 41 vs. Dukakis was quite agonizing)

33

I think that we all want the same thing,happiness and security for ourselves and our families.

The Republicans try to convince their constituency that they don’t have this because it’s been stolen from them. You don’t have jobs because the immigrants stole them. You lost your voice because the Democrats stole it. They are watching your every move and if you express a dissenting opinion, you will be shouted down or shamed on social media. The ownership of your farm and land has been stolen from you by big government. Your culture and lifestyle used to be dominant, and that dominance has been stolen from you by minorities.

This constituency has been mobilized to fight back. This is what Donald Trump recognized, amplified and tapped into.

The Democrats want everyone, liberal and conservative alike, to have happiness and security. All those things you might not have - jobs, housing, food security, access to affordable health care - they want to give it to you. If you can’t afford housing they’ll see that you have a place to live. They’ll give you free healthcare and see that you have food on the table. And they don’t understand that this level of dependency chafes the hell out conservatives, especially the rugged individualists that make their living off the land, by farming and ranching. They see government policy after policy, environmental controls, price controls, tax policy, that put their interests last and prevented them from making a “honest” living, then try to make up for it by giving them welfare. They liken this governmental control over every aspect of their life to slavery.

The Democrats do not understand the level of anger that conservative politicians have whipped up with their mostly false narratives, but narratives that contain just enough of a grain of truth to work. So they blame it on racism and accuse them of voting against their self interests, because they don’t understand the nuances of their self-interest. And they whip up indignation in their supporters to counter the hate the Republicans whip up.

And I don’t think that we are as far apart as we think, we are the victims of artificially enhanced factionism. The media constantly mines for the most extreme example of right wing hate and left wing indignation and righteousness and presents them as the norm.

The real power in this country is held unambiguously by large corporate and wealthy private interests. They loot our retirement accounts. They take our tax dollars for their own research and development, then sell the results back to us. They addict us to drugs then sell us the cure. They work in concert with energy companies that maintain their own foreign policy. Their goal is to keep us constantly at each other’s throats, so we don’t realize our commonalities and turn against them. Kind of like our Middle East policy. And it works.

34

So stupid hateful angry and evil?

35

How about arguing the facts instead of the strawman?

36

My sense is that Democrats tend to push economic and social issues that favor poor and working people and that when unemployment is high the Dems tend to do better locally and nationally. Republicans go more for traditional values, non-interference in social and economic issues, advocating for morality in a broad sense, such as saying “racial discrimination is wrong” rather than, as Dems are increasing prone to, “we’re the party of diversity”. Yet for all that there are increasing numbers of people of color voting Republican, while the so-called (as of the 2016 presidential election) “red states” are, most of them, ancestrally Democratic (Michigan, for instance). It’s my guess that the states that have been traditionally Democratic will revert sooner or later (likely sooner) to their roots in left of center politics. The election of Donald Trump is an aberration, and I say this non-judgmentally, just as a matter of fact. I didn’t think it was possible for a candidate who had either never held elected office or served as a high ranking military figure in wartime could win a presidential election, and I was wrong. Now that Trumpis in I think he has a chance for re-election. Yes, I’m getting rather OT here but I’m just offering my own view of national politics.

37

“Evil” is debatable but “stupid, angry and hateful” is a realistic description of the main right-wing media sources these days. Spend a day watching FoxNews (or listening to its radio station) and you’ll hear a lot of stupid, angry, hateful and fundamentally dishonest things. Spend a day listening to MSNBC and you’ll get a lot less of that (and listen to NPR and you’ll get very little).

Furthermore, the assessment that Republicans want to “hurt the right people” (to paraphrase an actual Trump supporter) also has an empirical basis; it’s not pure partisan smear tactics. Removal of access to healthcare insurance to millions of the most vulnerable people in society; diverting funds from public schools into the pockets of the wealthy; literally taking immigrant children from their parents, “losing” them in the system and offering them for adoption to American families (while making a healthy profit); decimating affordable women’s health services; removing hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from the rolls and engaging in all sorts of other shenanigans to undermine the democratic process; removing environmental regulations that keep toxins out of the air and water - these are just the tip of the iceberg. The number of GOP policies that don’t actively harm large numbers of non-wealthy people are disturbingly small.

So if you don’t like the characterization of the modern GOP as “stupid, hateful, angry and evil”, perhaps you might come out of your own bubble, stop blaming the messenger and consider whether there is some truth to it.

I mean, the Democrats are an entirely different type of clusterfuck but they at least mean well.

38

Especially when your elitist candidate (who didn’t even campaign in some Midwest states) calls Trump voters " deplorables"! So much for reaching out to working class and farmers.

39

have you forgotten that uber-liberal FDR wanted to pack/enlarge SCOTUS (imagine if Trump tried that!), or his attempt to muzzle newspapers

40

FDR basically kept America capitalist by reducing the stress of the Depression on everyone but the millionaires. It might be a good idea for right-wingers to remember how heads start to roll when food becomes scarce or unavailable (the People vs Louis Seizième).