I was pretty confident in a Clinton win until I went to vote for the first time since I moved out to a more rural area. First I drove past a church that was a polling place but not mine. People standing in line out in the parking lot. Then I got to my polling place and it was busy but nobody standing outside. I got through in 25 minutes but one of the poll workers told me it had been about an hour and a half most of the day. I really had the feeling that I was the only Hil voter in the place. That said, I may have been stereotyping people by what they were wearing, and in fact I probably looked as “rural” as anyone there*. I just really had the feeling that all these people were really determined that they were going to elect Trump.
*Carhartt shirt, camouflage John Deere hat, jeans and work boots.
But it’s not an intellectual cop out. When you’re name calling or otherwise being dismissive you’ve already closed yourself off to discussions. In those previous arguments I mentioned, I was already a declared Clinton voter, and still vitirol ensued. I’m not excusing either side in this. But if you’re painting the other side as monstrous bigoted rapey trolls (even if some of them are)you’ve given he other side no reason to listen and find common ground, it’s more entertaining and equally productive to watch you batttle your construct.
That’s why the media also blew it. I will demonstrate this for everyone else, but we’re both black so this argument won’t be lost you. You know how whenever a news event happens in the hood and you just know the reporter is gonna find somone to interview who just put down a 40 and probably has curlers in and has bad teeth or grammer. That’s what we saw with Trump rallies, because yes there were absolutely racist and assholes in the crowd and some people are just awful. They played up the awful, and the dems ran with the construct. Scott Adams and Michael Moore tried to point out the same things and of course were shot down.
The elephant in the room seems to be that rural white America is suffering job losses and economic deprivation that can’t really be remedied.
I mean, what’s the guy who runs the shearer in a coal mine supposed to do when they shut down the mine? Go move to the city and become a programmer? That’s unlikely. And if he has a family, then he’s even more stuck- he may not even have the resources to move to the city or retrain.
But what is the government going to do? They can’t realistically open the mine back up just for the sake of employing people, and they’re not interested in just paying this guy to do nothing either.
That’s the fix that middle America seems to be in, and they’re frustrated, depressed and angry. They feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under them, and they tend to boil it down and lash out against globalization and environmental causes because from their perspective, they’re rightly perceived as having been the root cause for their job losses.
So when one party comes in and says that they’re all for those things and about helping minorities, and then claims to want to retrain them or do various social programs for them, , that sounds like a cartload of BS, and in essence, asking them to take one for the national team, but they’re paying with their lifestyle and that of their children.
Then the other party comes in and says “This shit sucks! Let’s change it! Screw those foreigners and hippies!”. It’s not nice, and it’s not PC, but it does play to what they feel. They’re not necessarily stupid enough to believe, but they’re almost certainly desperate enough to give it a shot in lieu of more of the same old BS from the other party.
Guess who is having a big victory parade in North Carolina on 3 December this year? The Ku Klux Klan. So all the rhetoric DOES play up to what they feel. And believe.
How they are gonna scream, when (IF) Trump starts “walking back” on some of the rhetoric.
If Mrs. Clinton said that, she didn’t say it well. I follow politics like a junkie needing a fix, and I don’t recall that as a part of any of her speeches. Part of politics is being an effective communicator; Mrs. Clinton failed at that.
And… they also believe a bunch of stuff that is OBJECTIVELY UNTRUE, and absolutely refuse to listen to science and factual analysis at all, and prefer to listen to insane crackpots on talk radio or the internet.
How do you get past the fact that these people are yes, certainly pissed off at the system, but ALSO deeply, deeply ignorant about the facts of the world they live in?
When you try to educate them, you are branded as “elitist”. They DON’T WANT the facts, because they are difficult. They DON’T WANT to do anything hard. They want the easy solution. To repeat an analogy used by a poster here, they DON’T WANT to go on a diet. Diets are hard. They want the magic pill that will make them thin and fit. Trump promised them a magic pill. The democrats promised that they’d have to go on a diet and work hard to get fit.
Voters chose the diet pill from the charlatan.
And now here are clever people telling us “Oh no, don’t talk down to these people by telling them the magic pill will not work. Don’t tell them that a good diet is the way to lose weight. You were mean to the voters by telling them the magic pill is no good”
And you know what? His fans will repeat these lies, happily. I saw a video of a Trump supporter blaming Obama for “just sitting in the president’s office doing nothing after 9/11”. Yes, this Trump voter actually blamed Obama for 9/11. This is what we have to look forward to in the next few years… The blame game. And Trump has been a master at this his whole life.
I agree that is a huge factor. I don’t have any clue about how you rectify that except to ensure that today’s children get a better education than their parents did, and frankly we seem to be doing a shitty job of educating our children right now.
You can’t force someone to learn. Of course people are going to resent that. They’d resent it if you made them go to the bathroom at noon every day, too.
Of course people want the easy solution. Who wants the difficult solution? Assuming both will produce the same result, would you ever do the more difficult option?
I haven’t read anyone, even me, who has said that pointing out the bad parts of plans is to be avoided. What should be avoided, at this point, is calling 50% of the country, who just successfully elected our next president, a bunch of fucking idiots.
They won. That makes the Dems, even in their own view, the people who got beat by a bunch of idiots.
That stings, aye? Not the way anyone likes to think of themselves, I reckon.
Well, to win the next election, the Dems need votes. Some percentage of the 55 million who voted for Trump could be swayed. It would only take 1 million of them voting Democratic to change the next election’s outcome.
Alienating them further is not a good strategy; remember the goal.
Yes. It doesn’t matter if they are wrong. If one guy on a street corner is wrong, you can safely ignore him. If half the country is wrong, we have to figure something out and not just dismiss them.
Sadly, I believe that what is being pushed right now is that education is “elitist” and something that those bad liberals want you to have. This is the anti-intellectualism that seems to be emanating from the Republicans right now. This is one of the reasons that China is going to absolutely CRUSH you in the future.
True. However, what we’re doing right now is to try to tell these people to stop shitting upstream of where we’re all getting our drinking water. And for our trouble, we’re called elitist. Why oh why don’t we just listen to them and let them shit upstream?
I guess then, the Dems strategy should be to lie the loudest, make stuff up about their opponents, ramp up the hatred… and by all means, promise the folks that they’ll be allowed to shit upstream of where we all get our water… because if the majority want it that way, then it would be “elitist” to do anything else.
No, the strategy is to try to converse with the most moderate. Obviously, there are people on the extreme that are unreachable. There are good people on the meat of the bell curve who we aren’t reaching, and worse we are actively alienating.
If someone is inclined to support Trump–and can not on their own see how bad he is–it is doubtful any discussion from a liberal is going to help. I do think it’s naive to think otherwise. Sorry.
Look at our message board. A number of conservative, longtime Republican posters overcame their deeply entrenched political biases to do the unheard of: they voted against the GOP nominee. It is improbable that such a thing will ever happen again in our lifetimes. My conservative in laws defected similarly. Truly, it is a testament to how awful Trump is to bring this about. We are not talking about a candidate whose pluses and minuses are largely subjective, that can be debated between two people with equal give and take. We are talking about someone objectively bad, and this is why so many people who should be supporting him (because of party affilitiation) cannot in good conscience now.
If someone can’t spot this objective badness on their own, there is little that an ideological outsider can say to open their eyes. I’m not saying no effort should be made, but the idea that the problem is the lack of Dem reaching out is flawed brcsusr it assumes Trump supporters are actually open to being reached. I see no indication that they are. Facts that paint Trump negatively and facts that support Clinton are so readily spun by them as “media lies”. How do you get through that? You don’t. It’s a waste of breath to try to do so.
Of course you’ve given them reason, at least some of them. Semi-sensible people who don’t want to be lumped in with their bigoted rapey troll peers just might pause and take a hard look at their fellow countrymen and be a moderating influence. Same way white folks who stood on the sidelines when 1950’s mobs chased after the black folks got embarrassed when the rest of the nation reacted.
First, that’s a weak analogy unless you can demonstrate the Trump supporters we see in the media are not representative of Trump supporters at large. Black people are forever trying to distance themselves from those they deem as walking stereotypes; how many Trump supporters cringe when they see one their own waxing lyrical about walls to keep out the Mexicans.
Secondly, call me crazy, but I’m glad they cast a bright light on the racists and sexists among his supporters. Given the amount prejudice that laced Trump’s rhetoric, it would be bizarre if the media didn’t home in on those types. if they hadn’t, consider the dangerous possibility that more people would have gravitated to Trump’s side than they actually did. Consider also the dangerous possibility that we would not have had the wake up call that we did about the status of race and gender relations in this country, if the media hadn’t made us acutely aware of what things were being said in his rallies.
Aye, it’s one of the reasons. There are many reasons, but that is one of them.
Aye, it’s a conundrum, to be sure.
Think of this and the 2020 election as a 1980s comedy movie; we’ve just ended the first act…
You don’t have to do the same things as your opponent, you just have to do your thing with such panache that everyone loves it. Meatballs, Revenge of the Nerds, Hot Dog! The Movie, Bachelor Party, etc.
Lost cause in terms of outreach. Money and time would be better spent in getting out the vote among likely Dem voters, not trying to court the kind of person who thinks voting The Man is a reasonable decision to make when you are mad at The Man.