The majority of people I’ve voted for throughout my life have been Democrats. I voted for Sanders in the Primary and consider Obama to be a slightly liberal moderate and Clinton to the slight right of him. I have no reservations about voting for Clinton and hold the opinion Trump is, at best, a vulgar con man. Now that we got that out of the way.
The Democratic Party’s salesmanship is shit. It has been for decades. And this board’s plethora of Anti-Trump supporter circle jerks illustrate you guys really don’t get it.
The Democrats pull out graphs, experts and sound logic and the GOP responds with garbled nonsense and yet STILL manage to convince a majority of Americans to vote against their self interest and feel goddamned patriotic about it. The GOP has convinced Americans unions are elitist and a workers rights are more likely to be protected by their employer. How fucked up is that? Clinton’s “half of Trump’s supporters are irredeemable racists etc.” was fucking stupid, the truth of that statement is irrelevant. It’s just bad salesmanship, bad politics, to admit you cannot reach a substantial part of your audience. I get it, most people do not change their minds about deeply held convictions no matter how odious, they just die and the next generation is raised in an environment that is less ignorant. But if a large part of your audience is ignorant it does not help your case to say so.
The father of a close friend of mine, a man I’ve known for 20 years, is voting for Trump. If he wrote down his beliefs and posted them on this board I have no doubt a few would be dissected as racist, xenophobic, or sexist. And you would be right. But that’s little ‘r’ racist. You may not believe there is a distinction, but there is. The convictions he holds are not as important as the priority he puts on them. He may believe black people are not disproportionately shot by officers or, if they are, bare some responsibility for it, but that is #50 or lower on his cares this election. I would describe him as ‘a simple, common man’ and I think he represents a large body of Americans the Democratic Party has ineffectually tried to reach or just outright disregarded.
Democratic Party bares some responsibility for Trump’s popularity. He is a shitty person and a piss poor speaker, and yet he is still selling the ‘sizzle’ while the Democrats sell the ‘steak’.
The phenomenon you describe is easy to explain but difficult to change.
The ‘simple folk’ who have consistently been shown to vote against their best interest by voting for Republicans in general, and Trump specifically in this election, have been doing so because they are SIMPLETONS.
I know. How elitist of me to say that. But it doesn’t make it any less true.
They project their fears on Trump and his reflection and amplification of those fears is exactly why they are supporting him. The fact that they are largely less educated, less curious, more prone to racism and xenophobia, more likely to respond to charisma than facts and substance, makes them the willing fools they are in following an ideology that demonstrably works against them. They don’t ask the intelligent questions of “How will Trump create jobs?”, “How will he bring back jobs already lost?”, “How will he continue to fund their social nets when he plans to dramatically reduce taxes?”, etc…
They don’t ask those questions because the answers are complicated and in fact the promises themselves are completely unrealistic. They require math and science and reason. Something these willful ignoramuses sneer at out of fear and derision of those smarter than them.
So how do the Democrats go about educating these imbeciles in election cycle after election cycle, when the ‘common folks’ would rather swallow horseshit whole than chew on and process actual facts and evidence?
I read something about this online recently, but forgot to reference it (as is happening all too often these days).
Basically, it said that liberals feel you don’t have to explain, defend, or sell the obviously correct position, which is their own. The modern liberal Democratic party is the equivalent of the “cool kids” who are in the know, and simply smugly congratulate themselves on being smart, enlightened and right while treating those who may disagree as worthy of only contempt or pity or both.
I regard myself as a liberal, but I see some merit in that claim. The divide in this country is between liberals who see conservatives as irrecoverably stupid, and conservatives who see liberals as moral degenerates. Hard to get a bipartisan dialogue going on, there.
This is something I wondered: The GOP seems to be massively overperforming what one would reasonably expect.
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 20 million. The country is increasingly moving to the left. The GOP has just nominated the most repulsive, unqualified, obnoxious and boorish candidate in modern American history. Trump is running against one of the most qualified candidates in modern American history. Trump has already said or done a hundred things that ought to have been political suicide. He is a joke, a punch line, a buffoon. He just absolutely flopped in the debate. And yet…he’s only trailing Hillary by a narrow margin.
It’s like Appalachian State vs. Michigan, and Michigan is only leading by 3 points midway through the fourth quarter in a game where it was expected to cruise to a 30-point rout.
The Democrat collective seems to rely heavily on ridicule and name-calling to sell their candidate to the voters. Hey asshole, you should be voting for Hillary isn’t going to convince independents, or conservatives, or Republicans to vote for Hillary.
The easy sales have been made. Anyone can sell something to someone who desperately wants that particular item. It’s difficult to sell something/someone to people who aren’t interested.
Insulting the undecided is very poor salesmanship. Maybe if the media networks were to hire just one more comedian to make the DNC’s case against Republicans, conservatives, and independents, people other than the usual yellow dog Democrats will buy what the DNC is selling? Maybe not.
The OP is committing the very fallacy that he is projecting upon the Democratic Party: political arrogance.
The OP’s premise is that support for the GOP is unnaturally inflated beyond where it would be if both party’s had equally effective sales tactics. That’s bullshit. What we know from all of human history is that what’s extremely easy to sell is tribalism, religion, fear, and skepticism of power held by people other than those who look like you and live near you. It’s such an essential part of political success that until very very recently it was unheard of to have candidates for even lower office who weren’t Christians, indeed, specific kinds of Christians. It’s so central to political success that we debated for weeks the meaning of Barack Obama sometimes not wearing a fucking flag pin.
What’s very hard to sell is liberalism. Gay marriage is a hard sell. Paying for someone else’s kid, of a different race, to get a good education is a hard sell. Cutting the size of the military, criticizing the police, and defending the rights of accused terrorists are inherently unpopular ideas in every society ever.
It’s a goddamn miracle of science that Democrats have won the popular vote in every presidential election but one since 1988.
That means that the question boils down to: why are so many Americans apparently uninterested and indifferent about the fundamental structure of their national governance?
Having a Clinton/Kaine executive instead of a Trump/Pence one or vice versa will make a huge difference in the lives of most Americans: in the science policies that determine the fate of our environment and our technological development, in the economic and labor relations policies that determine much of our working lives, in the judiciary, in foreign policy, in pretty much everything.
How can any reasonable citizen of a democracy justify simply not being interested in these matters?
If the “undecided” are “insulted” by hearing that these fundamental issues that they “aren’t interested” in are extremely important to many aspects of their lives, and they really should bestir themselves to find out some facts about them and develop an informed opinion about the candidates, then I’m afraid their delicate snowflake sensibilities are just too fragile for any political involvement at all.
He’s selling hay. Hay that has been run through the horse once. To him it’s hay, and to the Republicans it must be hay because he said it was. To the Democrats it’s horseshit. It stinks, it steams, and it is left in the middle of the road. It is obvious what it is to anyone willing to open their eyes and look. There’s nothing anyone can do if someone refuses to see or smell that pile in the middle of the road and chooses to worship it.
This election has its novel attractions. Trump is probably the only Republican candidate who could lose to Clinton, and Clinton is likely the only Democrat who at this point would be scrambling to beat Trump. The loathsome opportunist Ted Cruz would be leading the race over Clinton by at least a handful of percentage points, and Bernie Sanders would probably be in the lead over Trump by double digits.
This is a direct result of the polarization which has been building for the last 2 decades. There are only two options, each with an entrenched set of values and beliefs. And year after year, we’ve had to choose: A or B. It’s easy to believe that if you’ve chosen A the last however many times, that you are in fact A.
Now one side has a candidate that should be unpalatable to many of its traditional followers. But it’s not so easy to switch to the other side. For one, they are the other side. And they’ve been calling you either stupid or evil or both - for a long time. Maybe easier to hold your nose. Or to be really too busy on Election Day. Or, do what makes you feel the best, and just buy into the message, ignoring all else.
Conservatives say the left has superior salesmanship, since they have academia, most corporate media, Hollywood, and large swathes of the internet. Conservatives managed to capture radio, religion, and Fox by itself has quite the audience, but it’s just one channel.
As a lefty lib, I tend to agree with the OP. Chris Hedges wrote about the collapse of the traditional left in Death of the Liberal Class. Several years ago he predicted a reactionary populism led by a Christian demagogue, veteran, or talk show host. Pretty damned close.
The Dem party is bad at propaganda. Not only on the nuts and bolts logical arguments (if they ever make them in front of a national audience), but also in the mud and blood trenches of lowdown dirty political attacks and manufacturing of consent. There’s not a liberal Fox. There’s certainly a lot of extreme liberal blogs and sites, but they don’t have much impact on the wider culture as far as I can tell.
Plus the Dems long ago turned into a corporate party, driving away or muting support. That’s one reason why Bernie caused so much excitement, especially among independents. He actually got up there and made arguments for universal healthcare and all sorts of lefty positions. Although not accurate, I especially liked when he called himself a socialist. Hillary may call herself a progressive in front of the right audience, but there was no way in hell she’d pretend to be a socialist.
An old saying is that the right falls in line, the left falls in love. Organizing the left is like herding cats. Go to any lib protest or cause and you’ll see a spectrum of a billion different partially overlapping issues. It’s what killed Occupy.
Political organizations should hand out copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People before sending out political operatives. Here’s a summary: 1. Don’t insult people. It just puts them on the defensive. 2. See the issue from the other person’s perspective. They don’t care what you want. 3. The only way to get people to do what you want is to make them want to do it.
Not what I said at all. It is ridiculous to believe someone doesn’t agree with you because they are stupid. If they ARE stupid they should be even easier to convince, regardless of the truth. Truth alone rarely sells anywhere, and it’s the only arrow in the Democrats quiver. Truth, on this board, is just a stump we smuggly crow upon.
Disagree. Of course it’s horse shit. It’s obvious. Either believe %+40 of Americans want to eat horseshit every day or decide that the quality of the product is not as important as other factors…hence my OP.
Nonsense. The South wasn’t racist by accident, a few rich white people realized how much that had to fear from poor whites AND blacks. Much safer to drive a wedge between them which profits only wealthy whites. If tribalism is indeed an ingrained motivator for human behavior there is no reason at all it cannot be harnessed for the Democratic Parties objectives.