Excellent point!
The problem with this logic is that it assumes that voters vote on a logical, rational, business-analysis approach and ignores people’s visceral feelings.
Ever tell an angry person, “Calm down?” 99.9999% of the time, it does the opposite of calm them down.
Hillary was the “Calm down” candidate. She tried to present angry, frustrated voters with long memorandums, complicated policies few people truly knew or heard of, a bureaucratic approach, more stuff that went over everyone’s head.
Donald was the “Fuck you” candidate. A middle finger, a “fuck you,” an appeal to visceral gut-feeling that resonated with angry, frustrated people far more than any 20-page long policy memorandum presented with glossy binder covers and PowerPoint presentations could.
You can’t win voters just by being “right;” there are countless failed marriages, relationships, job situations, diplomacy breakdowns that illustrate that being “right” often is of no avail or use whatsoever. To win people over, you have to get into their head, see things from their perspective, and then come up with a message and deliver it in a way that clicks with them from their perspective.
The thing is, even if Hillary had tried to do all those things, the rhetoric from her and her party has just about never directly referenced the Ed Earls of the world. They’re just supposed to read between the lines and assume that the policies aimed at all the Democratic pet interest groups are also going to help them.
Which is probably true in reality, but to a somewhat lower-information/lower-education voter, it may not be obvious if the Democratic party seems to be hitched up to ethnic minorities, gays and other groups of which Ed Earl isn’t a part. These guys see Democratic politicians making a big deal about immigrant families, or Black Lives Matter (and opposing the police), but not opposing the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas, or of the shutting down of coal mines and coal power generation, and assume that their concerns are not those of the Democratic party.
I think the one thing that we all knew, both Trumpers and those of us against him, is that things were likely to be very different under Trump than under any past president, Republican or Democrat. And to the Ed Earls of the world, that was a GOOD thing, as the status quo wasn’t getting him anywhere.
I think discounting the Ed Earls of the world as stupid, benighted, and credulous is what ultimately got Trump elected, and continuing to do so isn’t going to do the Democratic party any favors.
Indeed.
She should have also spoken about creating programs to help the work force in an industry that fell through, like coal mining instead of implying they were disgusting.
This is where the crucial issue of class cuts across that of race. Bob Dylan said it first in “Only a Pawn in Their Game”
Yes, lumping the CEOs of businesses together with the coal miner who lost his job is an error.
My family. For purely racist reasons.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
- LBJ
The Democrats don’t discount the Ed Earls. They’ll do more for the Ed Earls than the Republicans ever will.
Look at the news; the Supreme Court just issued a decision that weakens unions. All the conservative justices voted in favor of it.
Do you think a working class guy like Ed Earl is going to benefit from weaker unions? Of course not. The people that benefit from weaker unions are corporate executives like Donald Trump. By appointing justices like Neil Gorsuch, Trump is making his life better and he’s making Ed Earl’s life worse.
Do you think Trump respects Ed Earl when he does this? No, Trump laughs at Ed Earl for being such a sucker. Trump and the Republicans are the ones who are counting on the Ed Earls to be “stupid, benighted, and credulous”.
Bump’s complaining that the Democrats don’t respect the Ed Earls of America. And you’re complaining they respect the Ed Earls too much. You’re saying a good candidate should be out there pandering to the voters and telling them whatever they want to hear.
What they intend to do in office isn’t nearly as important as the message they convey when trying to get elected, and that’s what you and the Democratic party is missing.
If it’s not clear to Ed Earl that the Democratic party is looking out for him, his family and his community directly, as in tailoring policies and aiming political rhetoric his direction, then it’s not going to be nearly as obvious as you seem to think, that he should vote that direction.
The Democrats have a history of portraying themselves as “Democrats & blacks/hispanics/gays/atheists/rich coastal liberals (all groups of which Ed Earl is not a part) vs. Evil White Men & Republicans”, which plays terribly anywhere you’re NOT one of those things.
It’s like the Democrats think that policy counts when getting elected, when in fact it’s more of a popularity contest than anything else.
I think it’s also substance, and not just message.
It’s true that some of the Democratic policy proscriptions will benefit the guy in some way, but the guy knows - correctly - that his concerns are lower on their list of priorities than a lot of other concerns. The way things work with politics (and life) is that sometimes you need to prioritize, whether because your various concerns are in conflict with each other or because you only have a finite amount of political capital, and in such cases what counts is how you rank each concern.
So this guy knows that yeah in principle the Democrats would be happy to improve his life if that were possible. But he also knows that their bigger priorities are racial and gender equality, justice for immigrants, environmental concerns, feminist concerns, and so on. So if these come into conflict (e.g. jobs vs environment, or public safety vs racial concerns) then he’s pretty confident that the Democrats are going to come down on the other side from him. Not that they don’t care about his job or his safety, of course, but these are not the Burning Issues Facing the World at this time in that worldview, and they are going to be outranked by other interests which are.
Which is not to say that low information on the part of the populace is not also a part of it. But there’s a part of it which is accurate as well.
The important thing isn’t whether Democrats will help Ed Earls more than Republicans will. It is whether Ed Earls feel that Democrats would do more for them or not. If they do not feel that way, then they’ll vote Republican. If you want to win, you have to make voters feel a certain way.
You touch on a fair criticism on both sides: many conservatives actually believe that justice for immigrants etc. is the top priority of Democrats in general, when really the top priority for Dems generally are things like health care for all, education for all, saving Social Security, etc. Just look at the Dem platforms for the last several election cycles: kitchen table issues like jobs and taxes were always the top items, and you had to get halfway through before you saw any substance on the things you mention.
I think this misconception is a bit of both side’s fault: Dems have trouble communicating on those issues, and people who trend conservative often just don’t want to listen to the party that actually talks about civil rights sometimes.
I think that something else that is overlooked is that Democrats as a whole don’t really want Ed Earl or like Ed Earl and I would go so far as to say that they actively despise Ed Earl. They say they want him, but it’s just not true. If you look at this thread, they have been called bigots, morons, low-intelligence, racists, fascists, immoral, deplorable and a host of other things by people that one presumes are Democrats. I mean, I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but if you want me to put someone who says that about me in power, I’m gonna need a lot of evidence that they are really going to support my interests.
It’s something that I have struggled with as well. I’m a white, rural, religious, middle-class male. I’m a Democratic voter (though to be fair, I’m registered Green Party.) I feel though that I am rarely addressed by the party. I feel that I am much more likely to be classified as ‘other.’ I’m willing to overlook my own interests for the sake of the morally right, but I’m not completely sure that Democrats really have my interests at heart. I can think of many specific policies that going into it I knew they would hurt me for the sake of others. I supported them because I feel we have a religious duty to place the interests of others above our own, but I knew that Democrats weren’t thinking of making my life easier. Obamacare as an example. I knew before it passed, that it would seriously hurt me. I supported it, but I knew that Democrats weren’t thinking about me when they proposed it and they knew that people like me were going to suffer for it. Another example is that while I am left on almost every issue, I’m a Tolstoyan pacifist and I extend that to pro-life positions. I don’t think that we should kill people even for the greater good or to alleviate suffering and I define people differently than many of my leftist brethren. There is less than a hair’s breadth of room for pro-life Democrats to exist. We know that by voting for Democrats, we are voting actively against our interests in that matter - period. I know that simply by holding a pro-life position, I am anathema in Democratic circles and referred to disparagingly. I know that if I ran for office, they would not support me and actively work to defeat me even though we agree on 95% of the issues. This is from absolutely personal experience, in spite of the fact that I typically vote full ballot Democrat only occasionally veering off party for people I personally know or for Green or Mountain Party candidates in non-close races, I often feel like Democrats don’t want me and don’t like me. I think that that’s a problem.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” James Carville 1992
There’s so much truth in this statement. You can pile up all the fringe issues, like immigration, terrorism, discrimination, abortion, women’s rights, LGBT issues, etc. etc. And yes these things make headlines, and people do care about these issues, but when most people go into the voting booth, they think, “which candidate am I going to be economically better off with?” Whether their presumptions are true or not, is a different story, it’s each individual voter’s perception that counts.
Oh, and I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016.
With all due respect, it sounds like the Democrats don’t appeal to you because your political views aren’t exactly in the mainstream of political debate and sound rather uncompromising, instead of Dems not liking you because you’re a white male who is religious.
To say it another way, I’m not sure if there’s any party that you’d feel quite at home in.
You are just as likely as any other American to need health insurance one day while suffering from a preexisting condition. I’m sure they weren’t thinking about your pocketbook, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t thinking about your interests.
We’re talking about people whose top priority (or near-top priority) was ISIS, who voted for the guy who had a Super Secret Plan to defeat ISIS in 30 days that he couldn’t tell anyone about. Those people are low-information voters, pretty much by definition.
But we’re not talking about all the people who voted for Trump anyway. We’re talking about Trump’s base - the voters who will support him no matter what. Those are not the same sets of people.
Just looking at raw demographic data:
- there is very strong correlation between voting for the devout Romney, and voting for the immoral Trump. (I find this rather frightening.)
- whites have tended to vote R, non-whites D. This correlation, already strong, accelerated sharply with Trump.
- education level didn’t correlate strongly with party in the past; now uneducated whites are a major part of the R base. Americans with post-graduate study have never leaned D as strongly as now.
- sex didn’t correlate strongly with party in the past. This has changed: now white males vote R by a huge margin. I think all female cohorts lean D except women married to white males.
- Mormons and white evangelical Christians lean R by a large margin. Presbyterians and American Baptists split D/R evenly. Some religious groups lean D, some strongly so.
- Voters who “feel wonder about the universe” once a week or more lean slightly D.
- Income is almost completely uncorrelated with party!
- Older voters tend to vote R, but this correlation is much weaker than that of sex, education and especially race.
Summary: Trump’s base is white males, especially uneducated white males.
So Ed Earl has some problems. And he asks two political candidates what they’ll do about his problems.
First candidate: “I’ll help you with your problems. But your problems are serious and we’re going to have to put some hard work into solving them. We’ll have to make some hard choices and sacrifices. It’ll take a few years and cost some money but we can solve your problems. Let me explain what we’ll do for you-”
Ed Earl: “Whoa. Too much talking. Yo, other guy, what will you do about my problems?”
Second candidate: “Vote for me and I’ll solve all your problems by waving my magic wand.”
Ed Earl: “See. that’s what I want to hear. Why didn’t the first guy say that?”
If Ed Earl decides that voting for the second guy is a good idea, then he deserves to be called stupid and gullible. Because he is stupid and gullible. People are telling Ed Earl everything he needs to know. It’s Ed Earl’s fault if he refuses to listen. Ed Earl needs to stop asking people to respect him like he’s a adult while also asking that he be treated like he’s a child. At some point, Ed Earl has to take some responsibility for his own life.