You misunderstand. I do not believe that Trump voters have a valid POV. I do however believe that combatting the efficacy of the Trump message is difficult when we lazily dismiss the group, as some here have, as either evil or stupid or both. People to be shunned.
My WAG is that those have voted for Trump in the past are a varied group with varied motivations, some that they may not even consciously admit to themselves. I want a campaign team that recognizes that, and by their understanding of those motivations can work to do all of converting past non-voters to vote Harris-Walz, depress Trump voter turnout, and even flip a few, all without decreasing D turnout in the process. So far I see the Harris-Walz team doing that skillfully.
Well it’s only worth four electoral votes but it seems the Trump campaign doesn’t think New Hampshire is worth spending any further time or money on, according to the Boston Globe:
This similar article discusses how Harris is polling in New Hampshire:
I’m not going to bother to quote all of the poll data in it, people can read it themselves if they want the details. But essentially, New Hampshire hasn’t gone to the Republicans in a presidential race since 1992, but despite that it’s often pretty close. Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won it by fairly small margins. Harris is leading by quite a bit ever since Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris, and she has maintained a 6-7 point lead there, which does seem to indicate that it’s not something Trump is likely to flip, and as you pointed out we’re only talking about 4 electoral votes anyway.
I think the main issue here is thinking that a WAG is needed: Trump voters have to be some of the most studied people in the history of political science. And that ties into the “lazily,” which I deny for myself and for most other people. We know what we’re talking about at this point.
Sure, they’re varied. But accepting the unacceptable tends to arise via undesirable character traits. At best they’re ignorant people who know so little about Trump and politics that they have the excuse that they don’t know that he’s totally fucking unacceptable as a candidate. And that number is really small, since any dumb mutherfucker has seen Trump on TV and knows, at some level, that he’s not a good guy.
Exactly! As I said upthread, I’ve tried and tried and tried, constantly over eight years, to understand, to plumb the depths of alternative explanations.
The only other one (besides “willfully ignorant, incurious jerks, willfully enabling evil”) that still has a smidge of traction for me is “brainwashed by Fox News at al.” — but I find this so hard to swallow whole, because we’d have to be talking mass, clinical, North-Korea-style psychological transformation, not just some propaganda. I admit I don’t know enough about psychology to know how plausible this is as a partial explanation (there’s no way it’s the whole thing. We just have too much access to a range of information and opportunities for even just a bit of critical thinking in the US. This isn’t North Korea.)
I won’t say more about this in this thread. It’s not exactly a hijack — it does help to answer the OP’s question
— but I think this thread is more about the evolution of this particular campaign season.
Nate Silver is currently giving Trump a 55% chance to win the electoral college so I think a better thread title is How Can Harris Win at this Point.
Silver acknowledges that this is an unprecedented election cycle and the whole thing is likely a toss up.
As you can see from the forecast chart, Harris’s odds have declined slightly over the past two weeks, as she’s gone from roughly a 55/45 favorite to a 45/55 underdog. It’s not a huge change
The Trump supporter here is absolutely a victim of North Korea style brainwashing. There’s no other possible description for it. They simply inhabit an alternate reality.
Thanks – yes, that post from Dinsdale made an impression on me. I believe every word, and yet I find it so hard to fathom. As I said, I am no expert on human psychology.
I still contend that the US is not North Korea. We have easy access to information* that they do not. This alone shifts at least some of the responsibility onto individual Trumpers.
Okay, I said I wouldn’t post anymore on this confounding and enraging subject…and I won’t, starting now!
*And, all Americans were educated in schools that – imperfect though they may be – are not constantly drilling “Dear Leader”-esque crap into childrens’ heads.
Yes there is. His friend isn’t telling him the truth. He isn’t interested in explaining why, so he’s just saying whatever he can to end the conversation.
Chomsky is, uh, problematic–but I read something from him decades ago that has stuck with me. In a true totalitarian state, they don’t care what you think, they only care what you say and do. The propaganda doesn’t need to be effective at persuasion; persuasion is the job of the secret police. Propaganda just needs to instruct people what they’re supposed to say and do.
In a democracy, propaganda is actually a tool for persuasion, so it’s necessarily much subtler and more effective. Citizens in a democracy are much more prone to believing propaganda, because the propagandists are so much better at making believable propaganda.
Trump is a master of fearmongering racist propaganda.
Indeed that is an alternate explanation for what happens. We need to understand that many people want to signal to us dammit stop asking me “why” .
…
I see someone else again used the “fail to fathom” figure of speech and the deal is, maybe you can’t “fathom” it. This is “faith” based ideology — I don’t mean religious I mean the way of viewing what is or is not capital-t Truth(*). You just got to “follow your heart and believe” or else you become untethered.
I used to respect Nate Silver, but now he seems like he’s really reaching for some way to make DJT the favorite. What I see is unprecedented enthusiasm for Harris coupled with unprecedented fatigue for her opponent. The polls are breaking Harris’ way, but the pundit class seems to fall over itself trying to make it look like a mirage.
But the swing state polls aren’t “breaking Harris’ way.” The polling averages in every single one is within the margin of error, and you can’t just sweep that aside.
Follow the money. Pundits, one way or another, get paid by viewership. Not many people are interested in hearing how a candidate has changed their chances from high to slightly higher. But instead keep talking about how small changes up or down can flip the race–that gets views. See also, the whole concept of “tipping point state” to keep the focus on the stuff that’s always changing.
The problem with arguing about the economy, is that both sides are right. By every objective measure, the economy today is in great shape: unemployment is good, the inflation rate is back to normal levels, GDP is up, and the Fed is about to start lowering interest rates.
But prices are higher than they were 4 years ago, and for most goods they’ll never come down.
So yes: inflation is down. But prices are up. It all depends on what part of the economy affects you the most, and if you have a job, don’t care about the DOW, but do care about the price of eggs - you’re not happy.
Although salaries have outpaced inflation, so the average worker should technically be happy. But, we’ve discussed this a lot on this board, and I would agree that psychologically-speaking, people see raises as particular to their own skill and hard work, but increased prices as evidence of the world going to hell. So the propagandists don’t even have to do anything to make this seem like an L.
Also this hypothetical worker could know about how well the US has escaped inflation compared to other developed nations post-covid. But I know “look at other countries” is not a very resonant message in the US.
