You haven’t followed the How can Trump win … thread then I guess?
Feelings are unavoidable with the stakes at risk. I suspect we all have them.
To the degree that they get us to dismiss reason though, they are not so helpful?
I guess if someone had a belief that Harris was going to keep going up and up then having the new norm settle in and stay around of polling on knife edge in key swing states is a scary change from expectations.
There’s a middle-aged woman who reviews each morning’s Trump emails on TikTok. It was about five or so daily a month ago, but at least a dozen each day now. They range from love letters to apocalyptic warnings, with the frequent invitation to have a personal dinner with T, all expenses paid (but only if you donate, and they never reveal who had won in the past). It’s a hoot!
Because we like America to be a democratic nation, and not a sorta fascist state? Have you read trumps threats? He is gonna send the military to the polls, and get revenge on anyone who has crossed him,. using the power of the presidency. If trump gets in, America will never have a free election again.
This seemed like a good place to post this. Josh Marshall at TPM analyzes why Democrats have more of a tendency to freak out at the slightest bit of bad news than Republicans do.
Can you give a summary of what he says? It looks like you have to be a member to read the article.
One thing that I worry about is that it seems like the people who vote Democratic need more external motivation to make it to the polls. I feel like the people who vote Republican are more intrinsically motivated and will be more reliable voters. It seems like the Democrats are more dependent on voter drives to get people registered, get-out-the-vote campaigns to get people to go to the polls, more dependent on things like early voting and mail-in voting, etc. It doesn’t seem like the Republicans have to work as hard to get people to cast votes for them. So when a Democratic candidate makes a misstep or overall Democratic momentum slows down, I worry that the more fickle Democratic voters will lose their enthusiasm to make the effort to vote.
That’s odd - the first time I clicked on it “normally” it took me to the full article (and I’m not a member). Now it’s giving me the same “subscribe to read more” message that you’re likely getting. Can you try opening it in private/incognito mode? That worked for me this time around.
He hits on a lot of the good points being made in this thread - I was nodding along while reading most of it. Especially his point about how Democrats raise money by saying “we’re getting trucked - please send money so we can get back in the race!” and Republicans raise money by saying “we’re kicking ass - please send money so we can widen our margin of victory!”.
Sorry, it was supposed to be a shareable article. And for some reason TPM links don’t “preview” anymore.
Basically his argument is that Democrats are more likely to freak out and Republicans not because it’s sort of baked in to the DNA of the party. Let me see if I can grab a couple quotes.
Republican Party authoritarianism didn’t start with Trump and it’s not even precisely rooted in ideology, though obviously the two are closely related. Forty years ago Americans with authoritarian views about politics were fairly evenly divided between the two parties. Then that started to change. Authoritarian Americans began to migrate into the Republican Party. Those with non-authoritarian political views migrated into the Democratic Party.
This change led to a Democratic Party that is deeply identified at home and abroad with civic democracy and the rule of law. This is an, above all, rules-based way of thinking, a process-based way of approaching and litigating societal problems. People in the Democratic political coalition also tend to be more empirically minded. That is almost certainly why higher levels of educational attainment have become such a predictor of political identity in the U.S.
Since Republicans are more authoritarian, they tend to see victory as inevitable, even when polls show them 5-10 points behind. Democrats are essentially the exact opposite, where even the slightest bit of bad news, even when they are ahead, causes them to fear for the worst.
Yeah I read it and still not understanding the argument.
I won’t touch on the lack of evidence that authoritarianism is a province of voters on the Right alone (it is not; the center is surprisingly more attracted to authoritarianism than either pole). I’m more not getting the assumption that those who are attracted to authoritarianism see victory as inevitable while those not attracted to it worry more. Why assume that?
I would see a better argument for degree of belief in an active God who is on your side as a prime form of religious belief. God will make sure we prevail. There are many Ds with strong religious beliefs (and many without) but fewer with that particular sort of religious belief.
I could also buy an argument that those with higher education are more anxious and that the panic comes from that part of our party.
But I’m not following the authoritarianism through line.
I think panic comes from reading a wide variety of news and opinion. People on the right, as well as people on the further left tend to read and share stuff that reinforces their own opinion, and they outright avoid anything that doesn’t fit into their narrative. I see it in these threads, and I see it with my maga family who only listen to and watch right-wing media. They tend to be the ones who are overly confident in their side’s victory. Jmho.
I think another aspect of it is that democratic supporters hold up empiricism as a value and as a result of only being as good at interpreting data as everyone else, get anxious about sensationalized reporting of statistical noise.
When Harris supporters se that a poll has her losing by half a point in Pennsylvania they freak out over one data point of one poll among the multitude well inside the margin of error.
And it’s a cycle that feeds on itself in this election since by any objective metric the race is a coin flip so liberals seek out some sort of data to give them certainty that doesn’t exist.
Maybe in general but there seems to be less enthusiasm for Trump this year than there was in the last couple of elections.
I don’t know if the Harris enthusiasm is there either; I’d like to think so and at least there seemed to be a lot a month ago. We’ll see in the next few weeks I guess.
I look at this as Republicans setting themselves for a narrow loss and then arguing “This was obviously rigged–we were clearly winning, winning, winning, and then–a loss? Stop the steal!!” Taken collectively, this suggests to me that the Democrats are actually ahead in the polls, if narrowly.
People are panicking because the polls are close and getting closer even though Kamala is doing everything right and Trump is doing everything wrong. Which to me just screams “the polls are obvious bullshit” instead of “omg panic!”. I don’t see how authoritarianism has anything to do with it. If we went by polls alone I’d be shitting my pants too.
The other aspect to consider is that Republicans have almost nothing to lose. If they lose to Democrats, the worst thing that happens is that their taxes go up, they see more LGBT stuff, they get mocked more, etc.
Whereas Democrats have a lot of tangible things to worry about losing if they lose.
The balance between complacency and not panicking:
There are posts (on Twitter, for example: x.com ) asserting confidently that Trump is losing in the polls, and badly, and that he knows this to be true. (The polls are supposedly seeded with GOP-skewed results designed to bolster GOP-voter confidence, i.e., a rationale for going nuts when a Harris-Walz victory is announced on November 6th.). Such assertions, however, would naturally be downplayed or even dismissed by the Dems because they do not want to depress, even marginally, their own low-motivation voters into thinking “She’s got this in the bag, no need for me to budge my ass down to the polling place,” which may have cooked Hillary’s goose in 2016, so they’re playing up the panic-talk of “We’re the underdogs, we need every vote, we’re desperate, we can do this but only if YOU vote” etc.
The narrative that Trump is losing badly fits my own model, which is shared by many, namely “Of course he’s losing badly—what crazy planet would we be living on if a vast majority of voters did not see him as dangerously deranged, incompetent, and evil?” So I’m inclined to buy into it. But there is a part of me that has been permanently seared by Election Day 2016, that will never again be confident of any pre-election polling, that refuses to be lulled into complacency.
Is anxiety the price we pay for low turnout in 2016? Must I go through the next two weeks riddled with anxiety despite what I rationally believe to be the case, that Trump is a walking Worst Case Scenario for any presidential candidate ever, incompetent, incontinent, incoherent? If so, I guess it’s a small price to pay.
It’s one of the prices.
And I sure hope the D voters who didn’t show up in 2016 are anxious enough to do so this time.
I get the feeling I am far to the right of many on this board but still far from being far right. I try to follow news from a wide variety of sources. I recently had to mute Fox not because of what they were saying but because they are so good at getting their message out. I was being bombarded by stories that pushed their agenda. The volume of stories made me start to panic. Muting them made me feel better but maybe that’s a false sense of security. They are still doing it and many people are exposed to it.
A position accepted as truth in some silos just as “Trump’s was stolen last time!” Is accepted as truth in other silos, and equally untethered.
Looking exclusively at the few top tier polling houses the current aggregate is a coin flip at best.
Have confidence in the belief that the American people are not going to elect a delusional fascist wannabe or do not, but the polling aggregates are NOT gamed by “GOP-skewed results designed to bolster GOP-voter confidence.” (Although they do exist.)
They did in 2020 and while the popular vote was a blowout, the electoral college was way closer than it needed to be.
I hope she clears 80 million votes like Biden did.
FWIW turnout as a percent of voting eligible population in 2016 was tied for third highest since 1980 at least. 2020 was a huge turnout outlier.