I am a school teacher in a tiny town in far West Texas, but I actually live in a somewhat less tiny town in Central Texas (some 500 miles away). Now that school is out, I will be returning home to my lovely wife, our five dogs, and my father-in-law (FIL) who lives with us.
My FIL and I get along pretty well, but we argue politics all the time. He is pretty much an Archie Bunker type. I am as liberal as Mike Stivic, but I am no “Meathead”. At least, I don’t think so.
One thing FIL and I argue about is the Russian interference in the 2016 election. From his perspective, he marked his ballot for Donald Trump and no one made him or influenced him to do that. Trump is the candidate he wanted and he marked his ballot of his own free will. In the primary, FIL actually marked his ballot for Rubio, but that didn’t work out. FIL was always going to vote for the R candidate, no matter who he/she was or who the D candidate was.
My FIL also assumes that everyone is just like him. This means that everyone who voted for Trump (or Clinton, for that matter) did so of his/her own volition. No one held a gun to their heads and made them vote for anyone. So he does not see any way that the Russians could have possibly influenced his decision. By extension, they could not have influenced anyone’s decision.
My FIL is generally a kind a generous man. He is visually impaired and does not participate in social media at all. He probably wouldn’t be interested even if he could see well. The TV in his room is pretty much always on FoxNews. However, he does watch the evening news on one or more of the big-three networks – usually NBC or ABC. (I suspect he doesn’t know Lester Holt is black or he would not watch NBC.) He does not watch CNN, MSNBC, etc. at all. When I say “watch”, I really mean “listen to”. His ability to see anything on the TV screen is very limited.
So, how did the Russians penetrate his decision making and make him choose Trump? All I’ve got is that they planted false stories on FoxNews that Fox then happily broadcast for all to enjoy.
They may not have reached your father-in-law, but they reached a lot of people who don’t always vote Republican and made them think Hillary was terrible, that she screwed over Bernie, and that she would preside over a scandal ridden and incompetent administration. They also depressed the Democratic turnout.
Personally, I don’t blame the Russians for Trump. I blame Trump, the Republicans, and the deporables. (and the Democrats who stay home or voted third party thinking there was no way Trump could be elected)
The Russians didn’t have to influence everyone. It only took 80k votes to swing the election. And they certainly had some level of influence through planting false news stories all over FB and other social media.
They also fed advertising dollars into the RNC through the NRA and other super PACs. But it’s not the “always check R” voter they were targeting, it was the swing voters in the middle and the far left progressive voters who could be convinced to stay home.
They also hacked the voter registration lists in several states but I’m not sure if they actually removed voters or not, making it more difficult or impossible for them to vote on Election Day. If they knew what they were doing and covered their tracks well, we really couldn’t know.
Seriously? “I believe I’m not swayed by commercials, so they can’t ever work on anybody?” This fallacy was busted before you were born.
Commercials work. They keep being used because they work. They don’t need to work on everybody, every time. They just need to work sufficiently well to make their expense worthwhile.
Next you’ll be asking why spammers still exist. :smack:
I would agree with this. They weren’t interested in your FIL, and he is correct in describing his own decision process. So, you (Drum God) should agree with him on that. (It makes continuing the conversation go better.) HOWEVER, not everyone operates like he does. That is the point that you should make.
You could make that point by discussing the basics of advertising. Make a statement and repeat and repeat and repeat (and repeat and repeat…) eventually, some segment of the population will buy what you are selling. It doesn’t have to be everyone, just some segment. People in the business of advertising spend a lot of time and energy figuring out which messages get the most traction. Basic advertising stuff. It works the same for Coke, Budweiser, McDonalds, Ford, and for political campaigns.
The second point you could make is that, like it or not, it is illegal for foreign entities to try to influence our elections. So, the Russians doing anything in this arena should be considered bad news. Surely FIL can grasp that the Russians doing something illegal is bad, no?
I don’t see any value in trying to convince a person that the Russians made them vote a certain way. But at least he acknowledges implicitly that the Russians tried to do so.
Next time you get a change, you should ask him why he thinks that people who voted for Obama twice switched over to voting for Trump in 2016. I’m not saying there are millions of people who did so, but I’d be curious what his thoughts are, and whether those people will stick with Trump in 2020.
The Russia hawks will have you believe that a small group of poorly funded foreigners can influence people in an ocean of highly paid and generously funded political hacks with a good understanding of the American psyche that were overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton.
The participation of the Russians was a drop of water in that ocean.
Clinton was heavily financed by corporations and wealthy individuals. Look at the stats. Clinton swamped Trump in campaign contributions and devastated him in PAC money. She also had the support of virtually all mainstream media outlets.
Trump’s Republican rivals also swamped him in money from corporate donors and the wealthy.
If anyone influenced the election it was the vast system of crony donors who sought a payout. The Russia hawks act like provincial xenophobes. Many are supposed to be part of a metropolitan elite, but I feel embarrassed for them falling for this agitprop.
Did Russian efforts influence the election? That is hard to say, the point is they tried and efforts should be made to restrict their ability to do it again.
Does he also believe attack ads and other political ads are without effect? Then there’s really no point trying to convince him.
Think less in terms of Manchurian candidate-type control and more in terms of making would-be Democrat voters too unenthusiastic to bother to go vote and making would-be Republican voters get that little push they needed to bother showing up at the polls. The real electoral gains may not lie in convincing swing voters to vote for your candidate but in convincing people who already agree with you to turn that agreement into actually voting or convince people who won’t agree with you anyway to stay home.
I doubt Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) got your FIL or other staunch conservatives to vote for Trump because, as you say, he was already going to vote R no matter what. It’s not really clear that the IRA was effective in getting Obama moderates to switch to Trump. What seems most plausible is that the IRA made it so that people who didn’t want to vote for Trump were less likely to vote for Hillary. There were just enough people who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, or who simply didn’t vote at all, that Hillary lost the election.
Ask him yourself. Why did he vote for Trump? Presumably, he did so because of what he knew about the two candidates. And whatever that information was, where did he hear it from? If someone got the wrong information to him, then they could influence his vote. Did they? That’s tougher to determine, but it’s at the least possible.
The Russian influence program didn’t just support Trump, it undermined Clinton and tried to pull off enough Democratic voters to third party candidates. The program also stoked racial tensions, especially on both sides of Black Lives Matter; the Russians not only promoted anti-BLM messaging on social media, they also staged actual events in American cities. The fact that BLM was such a hot button issue in the Republican primaries was due in some small part to the Kremlin. Old white racists were triggered into supporting the most overtly racist candidate, which is a high bar in a GOP primary. The Russians also fanned the resentment of the Sanders camp of Clinton’s primary win to get enough of them to vote for Jill Stein or Gary “What’s Aleppo” Johnson.
Because the support for Clinton was legal and aboveboard. And more or less, didn’t consist of lies, other than hyperbole.
And Trump was also supported by corporate and wealthy interests. So was Bush I&II,so was Bill, so was Carter, so was Reagan, so was Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so forth. It is impossible to be elected president of the USA without support from corporate and wealthy interests.
You are like saying the Las Vegas shooter wasnt a horrible tragedy as he only killed 79 people, while 70 Million people died in WW2. Your comparison is totally completely meaningless, and serves only to attack Hillary and defend trump and the Kremlin. It’s pure unadulterated 'whataboutism" of the very worst sort. :rolleyes:
Ask him how he felt when he heard the pussy-grabbing tape. Did that make him think twice, maybe make him a little less enthusiastic about going to the trouble of voting? Did the subsequent release of DNC emails strengthen his resolve? Ask him where the emails came from.
If the Russians accomplished much, it was to throw away the swing voters by dumping a bunch of DNC documents into the mix just before election day. They convinced the people who are willing to consider both sides that there was no honest man in the election and that if the partisan voters like to practice self-coprophagia, then they’d just leave that to them.
If you want to sway your FIL at all, just ask him if you can read the Trump Foundation suit out loud to him and then ask him what you think should be done to people who steal charity money for soldiers who fought for our country.
Pose him a question:
KFC and Taco Bell are both owned by Pepsi, as you know. They’re one company, sharing the same suppliers, working from the same pool of money, etc. But, let’s say that KFC decides that they want to be the biggest fast food franchise inside Pepsi, beating out Taco Bell.
The top boss of KFC sets out his strategy. He’s going to raise prices for the customers - that will make the KFC brand more money. He wants the stores to all go “local grown” so he’s going to start his own supply chain and, to finance it, raises the price of supplies to all the franchise owners, putting the extra money they pay towards trying to set up farms and factories near urban centers - that puts the farms near their franchise outlets. Obviously, that will be more expensive for the franchise owners in the short term, so he takes a giant loan out from the parent company, Pepsi, to subsidize the KFC franchises while he rebuilds everything.
What do you think happens to KFC? Is this a successful strategy? Will they win against Taco Bell? Will they even last very long? Will customers come buy their stuff while it’s still just the same old stuff, but priced higher? If they actually succeed at “going local”, but had to buy expensive land near the city, in climates that aren’t necessarily very good for growing their produce, and hire workers at prices high enough that they could all live near the city, do you think that the cost of KFC products will go up or down as part of this process? Do you think that they’ll end up with a good and competitive product anytime soon? Which businesses make more money, companies that run things cheap and low-quality or ones that are expensive and up-scale? Is there any chance that the franchise owners will start cutting corners, because they’re having to pay more for supplies and so try to reduce their purchases? What do the suppliers do when the franchise owners are reducing their purchases and they catch wind that the whole plan is to abandon them? Do they stick around or do they look for someone else to buy all their produce and dump KFC? What happens to KFC when the suppliers dump them and they haven’t yet gotten their local farms all set up and workers trained? What happens if no one in the city wants to start working in a farm at anything like a price that KFC could afford?
