“Trump may have lied 25,000+ times (and I don’t know that because I never leave the RW echo chamber), but Obama said ‘"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’”
“Trump may have used taxpayer funds to blackmail a friendly foreign nation in a ham-fisted attempt to generate damaging information on a political opponent, but Obama wore a tan suit, for fuck’s sake.”
‘So they’re even.’
– Trump supporters writ large
I keep seeing people saying you can’t rationally talk somebody out of a position that they didn’t rationally come to in the first place.
Yeah. Being in an echo chamber sure helps believe that stuff. I just don’t think it’s remotely accurate - or constructive - to write 70,000,000 Americans off as hateful frothing racists. Maybe you can say they don’t care about racism, or are in denial about racism. But that’s a long way from being actively motivated by wanting to hurt people.
At the risk of both-sidesism, humans aren’t 100% good or bad. Everyone is a mixture. Someone may support Trump and want Mexican illegal immigrants deported, yet also donate blood regularly, help at the local animal shelter and give a lot of money to the Red Cross. Someone may support Biden and want good healthcare for everyone and a reduction in carbon emissions, yet embezzle money on the job or be a verbally abusive manager. Put almost anyone under a microscope and you’ll find good and bad things about them aplenty.
Hey, I’ve always been a little bit of a conspiratorialist but if it was predictable that there would be massive protests over the killing of black folks and it was predictable that some of those protesters would resort to violence (even if said violence had to be manufactured) and it was predictable that images of that violence would move some voters toward trump…then factor in white supremacists infiltration of law enforcement, how big a leap is it to think that some of those killings were deliberate and intended to achieve the effects I’ve described? I know, I know, but describing the actions and thought processes of crazy people does tend to make one look crazy yourself.
0.0000 to the nth degree. Now, what is the chance that the trump admin leaped on those killings with sadistic glee as a excuse to do their dirty work? 99.99%
Democrats massively outspent Republicans in this election, by about 2-1. Michael Bloomberg alone spent something like $100 million in Florida. The Democrats have favorable media behind them amplifying their message.
But somehow, those dastardly Republicans always manage to swoop in and convince people to vote for them. Since there is no reason to vote for them, it must be all lies and disinformation.
Were Democrats too stupid to run their own Spanish ads? They outspent Republicans 2-1. I assume they tried just as hard to win their votes, but failed.
Or maybe, just maybe, those people hate socialism because they lived under it, had relatives who died under it or are still enslaved by it, or were raised with a hatred of it because of their parent’s experiences. So any time the Democrats veer towards socialism, they lose those people.
Also, the left should really retire the term ‘LatinX’. It’s condescending and kind of racist. Hispanic people from different regions have rich and varied backgrounds just like everyone else, and they shouldn’t be lumped together under one label like that.
This thing you wrote in another thread probably applies the opposite way here:
No one is surprised to find assholes supporting Trump, so they don’t stand out as much.
But Republicans can get away with being assholes since they are mostly selling themselves on the basis of self interest. If you’re asking people to care about others you kinda have to live up to that.
It is a bit silly. Of course Latin Americans don’t all vote the same way in their home countries, so why would you expect the ones who’ve moved to the US to do so?
One thing I will say in defense of at least a few Trump voters, I think that the economy was a bigger deal than Democrats realized and that, to their surprise, there was another way to look at the economic problems people are facing.
The argument from Democrats - myself included - is that you have to get the virus under control first before you can open up the economy. I believe that as well.
However, the degree and the manner of shutdowns is something that is debatable even among experts. I think where Dems might have gotten tripped up in terms of messaging is that if you’re going to propose prolonged widespread shutdowns, you have to acknowledge the pain that this is going to cause. A lot of small business owners that voted for Trump could have gone to Biden but I think they heard “Wear a mask” and “We need to shut things down for 6 weeks” and not enough of “Here’s what we’re going to do for small business owners.” Yes, McConnell and Trump bear a lot of the responsibility, but there should have been more campaign messaging that acknowledged the suffering of small business owners and workers in particular. Trump was able to sidetrack that message with his bag of shiny objects.
The Texas Tribune has been doing some interesting reporting on the massive upswing in support for Trump in South Texas between 2016 and 2020. The area is overwhelmingly Hispanic, and Trump made his largest percentage gains among non-Cuban Hispanic voters in the region. And it may seem counterintuitive to outsiders – this is the very land where Trump wants to build his border wall, full of people whose ethnicity he has slandered. Why would they turn to Trump?
Well, it turns out that voters (Hispanic or otherwise) are more nuanced than that. One factor that clearly hurt Biden was his comments in the second debate about transitioning away from oil. Tens of thousands of jobs in South Texas depend on the Eagle Ford shale play, and many people have been laid off during the economic contraction as the price of oil plummeted. A message of transitioning away from oil at the very moment when many oil field workers are most anxious about their futures was not well received.
It’s also seems that slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police” played poorly in South Texas. Many Hispanic voters is South Texas don’t see law enforcement and border enforcement as the enemy – they see them as a source of good paying, respected jobs. And almost everyone in South Texas knows someone who works in these fields. The Border Patrol employs 3,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley alone, and these aren’t an invasion force – they’re locals and relatives, friends and neighbors of other locals.
Obviously these voters are not unrecoverable – what’s interesting is that even as they were voting for Trump they were splitting their tickets to vote down ballot for the kind of conservative Democrats that have long represented the region. But I also think Democrats can’t just assume that once Trump is off the ticket these voters will just naturally “come home.” They’re going to have to recognize that these are rural voters who have much in common with voters in any other rural area – just that there are more “Betos” than “Bubbas” in the region. And they’re going to have to adjust their messaging accordingly.
They are laid off from their jobs during the Trump administration, and so vote for him in the hopes that they get their jobs back?
Seems that if I were in that position, a message of transitioning to a new job would be attractive. A vote to continue the administration under which you lost your job seems more than a little counterproductive, to me.
It simply is a fact that we have to transition away from fossil fuels. They are not an infinite resource, and their use has detrimental effects to the world. That is going to happen sooner or later, regardless of who is in the White House, however, who is in the White House may have quite a bit of impact on what opportunities they have when their jobs inevitably go away, assuming that they ever get them back in the first place.
Border Patrol does not mean ICE. ICE is a fairly new agency, before which, we still had border control. It is the specific mission of ICE, and their overreach of power that is discussed in the abolishment of this agency.
The Border Patrol is an entirely different agency. If they heard Abolish ICE, and were concerned about jobs in Border Patrol, then they have their messages crossed. Probably by those who deliberately meant to mislead them.
Biden never said defund the police. If they didn’t vote for him due to some protestors in Seattle yelling this slogan, then they were played by right wing messaging.
So, I would say their positions are less “nuanced”, and more indifferent to facts or policy. I don’t really blame them, I blame those who lied to them, and to those who repeat those lies.
The problem is not the Democrat’s policy or message. The problem is the distortions that those who want to harm our country create, the lies that they tell, and those who spread them. That’s what needs to be addressed. Democrats can adjust their message all they want, but as long as it is fed through malevolent actors, it will not matter a bit. We can’t assume that they will “come home” until they are getting the actual message that the Democrats have, not the deliberate deceptions that are created.
I think messaging as distinct from the message can be significantly improved. Politics has always hinged on propaganda, no more so than in the modern age. While I’m happy to blame the Republican Party and affiliates for distortion, the fact is that the Democratic Party hasn’t always covered itself with glory when it comes to presenting ideas.
Part of the problem is ideological - with the DP such a grab bag of interests trying to come up with coherent approaches that satisfy everyone is difficult. The RP has a similar grab bag constituency, but generally seem more willing to paper over differences short-term for long-term gains. Still, I’m not willing to let the DP as either an organization or a conglomeration of individuals off the hook. I think they make too many unforced errors.
If the people you are trying to flip never hear your message, but rather a distorted and malicious interpretation of it, then it’s hard to blame it.
I mean, seriously. According to @flurb, they voted against Biden, because there were those calling for abolishment of ICE, and they were concerned for their jobs in Border Patrol. Something went wrong with the message between reality and their perception of it, but I only see that as the fault of those who lied about the message.
What to do about that, I don’t know. It’s hard to pin down someone for lying, what with our freedom of speech and all. And making lying illegal would be worse than allowing, it, as that would depend on the government determining what is a lie, and I certainly do not trust that.
The only thing that we can do is when we see such lies and distortions, we call them out ourselves. Instead of hearing someone claim that their oil related job is in jeopardy if Biden is elected and letting it go, point out that they lost their job under the Trump administration, and he has no plan of getting it back. Instead of listening to them worry that their children will not be able to continue drilling holes in the ground, give them the option to give their children a safer and more lucrative job.
The people that @flurb was talking about would have voted for Biden if they were not fed these lies and allowed to let them fester.
And yes, there is the point that the democrats represent a wider array of interests than conservatives. For the most part, conservatives have one message, keep things the way they are, or roll them back to how they were. Democrats are progressive, which means doing new things, and as to which new things should be done, and what their priorities are, is a much more complicated conversation, with more voices and more disagreement. I see that as a feature, not a bug.
So why are these voters only hearing the distorted message? Fox News doesn’t have some sort of stranglehold on media in South Texas. There are a ton of elected local Democrats in the region who could amplify the party’s message. My suspicion is that Democrats didn’t really bother to try to confront Republican distortions or tailor their messaging to issues that were particularly important to the region, and just took it for granted that they didn’t really need to concern themselves with a region that went overwhelmingly for Clinton four years ago.
This argument never works. “The job you’re good at doing and has put food on your table for years is, alas, an economic dead end. You should learn to code!” And what was Biden’s plan for those workers “transitioned” out of their jobs in the oil industry? I’m sure I could guess, but I live in a state that floats on a big pool of oil and I never saw an add that talked about how workers in the energy industry would “transitioned” to new jobs under Biden. They lost the jobs under Trump due to a rapid and unexpected economic shock – the message they heard was that under Biden they’d never get them back.
Another factor is that Hispanics who came to the United States legally, don’t necessarily have any more incentive or reason to support illegal immigration more than white people (or any other race) would. Many Hispanics who came legally resent those who came in illegally, perceiving them as “cutting in line.”