Controversies frequently arise in comments here and elsewhere when the topic of Trump voters comes up. It goes something like this:
PERSON A: Fucking Trump-voting assholes! They’re either racist, sexist, xenophobic shitheads or didn’t think their candidate’s racism, sexism and xenophobia were deal-breakers. So fuck those motherfuckers!
PERSON B: Neo-liberal losers gonna keep neo-liberal losing with that neo-liberal voter outreach strategy! Just get ready for eight years of Trump, neo-liberal establishment purity mavens!
Setting aside the fanciful notion that anyone venting on an almost top-10,000 left-leaning blog is officially in charge of Democratic Party voter outreach and is sharing tactics here, let’s review some pertinent facts in graphic form, put on our thinking caps and tackle the hard questions:
Assuming that this data is accurate, the question is, would it make more sense for Democrats to pursue the “Voted Trump” group (19.5%) or the “Didn’t Vote” segment (29.9%)? Now, I’m really dumb at math and statistical inference, but I’m pretty sure that not only is the second group larger, its members have not already signaled outright hostility to our coalition.
So, if I were the Democratic Party’s outreach coordinator (I’m not!), I’d make the second group my top priority — helping folks overcome registration issues, building relationships at the local level, etc., to get them off the sidelines.
Now, let’s consider variances among the Trump voters. I don’t claim any special insight, but I have observed over the years that people aren’t always rational in their actions. They don’t always take their civic duties seriously. Some folks just aren’t all that bright.
Sometimes people will vote for an asshole because they “want change” or they “hate politics” or they have a dumb but typically American reverence for rich people and a belief in plutocrats’ superhuman powers. Maybe their minds were poisoned by Iron Man, I don’t know.
Anyhoo, is there a meaningful distinction between those folks and hardcore Trumpers? I’d say yes. Here’s a crude drawing to illustrate how that difference might look:
So, to recap: If I were in charge of outreach for the Democratic Party (which I’m not!), my objectives would be to 1) keep the base that voted with us in 2016 and won the popular vote by nearly 3M on board, 2) see if we can get folks who DIDN’T vote and who share our values off the sidelines, and 3) hope some of the dumbasses who zigged toward Trump last time zag toward Democrats in 2018 now that they see what a fucking disaster their candidate is as president. The end.
sharl
Excellent post Betty! I have both types of Trumpkins in my family, though they are “midwestern nice” about it (e.g., they would never say “Trump that bitch!”).
efgoldman
Yup. You’re right. The arithmetic works (and I was a music major – I only needed to count to four).
It’s all about acting like us old people and getting the hell out to the polls. If we did nothing else, that would change the equation in all the close states and a lot of districts.
It’s great that people are super motivated now. Why the hell does it take an existential threat and crisis to get us off our asses?
schrodingers_cat
One pie chart for the entire country is not that useful for meaningful analysis. You need to look at break down of voting patterns in all the states. Focus on the ones that flipped from 2012 to 2016.
schrodingers_cat
Lovely infantilizing of the woman, am I supposed to feel sorry for her because she doesn’t know what she is doing?
SFAW
@efgoldman:
Unless you were playing for/with Brubeck.
efgoldman
@efgoldman: I HATE WHEN FUCKING FYWP SAYS I DON’T HAVE PERMISSION TO EDIT MY OWN GODDAMNED COMMENT!
Greg
The biggest problem, at least among people I know personally, is the people who didn’t vote because they said “There isn’t any difference between the two parties” or “Clinton and Trump are both just as bad so why vote?” or “I’m not going to vote because my vote won’t change anything.”. This combination of apathy, ignorance, and laziness is the biggest hurdle.
Chad
Top 10,000 blog. Hehheheh. WE WILL BE HEARD DAMN IT!!!!!
For some reason that just cracked me up. :-)
SFAW
Could be wrong, of course, but my sense of Shitgibbon Voter B was more of a “Well, yeah, Shitgibbon’s a racist and misogynist, and all that other stuff, but there’s just something about Hillary that I don’t trust.”
Not saying ALL “B” voters were like that, but I heard enough of that during the campaign to make me think it’s a good portion.
? Martin
No, this is exactly the right question the Democrats should be asking. The argument to target the Trump voters is – they vote! And the case for the non-voter is slightly weakened due to how difficult the GOP is making it for them to convert to voters.
That said, in places where the GOP doesn’t run the show top to bottom, Dems should be siding with the non-voter. In those regions, they can negate the vote suppression advantage and actually enable greater engagement with the electorate and make voting easier. California did automatic voter registration and will be a vote by mail state next year. Lots of blue states can follow if Dems push for it. In CA that could be instrumental to voting out GOP reps in the state.
In business parlance this is known as ‘competing with non-consumption’. Dems should look at those non-voters as not currently being served by the political process – what needs to change to bring them in as voters?
Ian G.
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m guessing the states that flipped have a lot of “Trump voter B”, because “Trump voter A” sure the fuck wasn’t going to vote for Obama twice, which must have happened a bunch in places like Michigan.
As for Trump voter A, I’d never want to be part of a party that could appeal to them. I’d want nothing but to treat them Conan “best in life”-style: crush them, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of Tomi Lahren.
germy
Voter A: At first I thought he had his finger pointed up, but the more I look at him, I think he’s got a bic lighter in his hand, ready to start a world conflagration.
Yarrow
@SFAW: Agree with that. Along with, “I just don’t like her.”
Ruckus
Spot on Betty.
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, some places will remain red no matter what is done or said. The point isn’t to capture those people but to capture enough of the didn’t vote folks that those 80K or whatever the number was, don’t get to decide. And that if done in enough places we can take back congress as well. It is possible and it should be the thrust going forward. Some are just lost and you couldn’t make them change with a baseball bat and no scruples.
StringOnAStick
@Greg: I wonder if these sorts of folks are paying any attention to what has been happening in the last month? Not being sarcastic here, I really do want to know what it takes to get their attention.
This is one of the many reasons why it is important to go to as many actions as possible, it might be the only way these marginally interested people start to get a hint that something serious is happening, and maybe they should find out about it. I’m loving that no-show town halls are getting local media attention!
Yarrow
@germy: I thought it was a knife!
Another Scott
This BasicInstruction seems kinda applicable to this topic.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
randy khan
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t think you’re going to find a particularly large difference between the national stats and the state stats in states that aren’t deep blue or red. There will be variation, but in contestable states the non-voter cohort pretty much always will be much larger than the “Trump convincible” cohort, as many Trump voters will vote R no matter what.
germy
@Yarrow:
Could be a knife, could be a lighter, could be his finger. He’s unreachable; that’s all I know.
I’m interested in empowering people who didn’t vote (because they think their vote doesn’t matter?) and people who are prevented from voting.
? Martin
@schrodingers_cat: It’s adequate for this purpose. There are variations across the country, but in nearly every state the number of eligible non-voters is more than enough to tip the scales. Since Clinton only lost by a few hundred thousand votes in states with millions of eligible non-voters, it’s clearly enough there. In 2008 and 2012, had eligible latinos in Texas voted at the same rate as whites, Obama would have either won, or lost narrowly.
Now, it’s not realistic that the entire non-voter population would swing to one party or the other, nor is is reasonable to assume that they would massively shift from the general dynamic in the state (CA nonvoters are extremely likely to lean Dem than GOP simply because the state does broadly), but there are so many close races in the country that growing the pie on the Dem side without shrinking it on the GOP side would easily work.
efgoldman
@SFAW:
Way above my pay grade
efgoldman
@Greg:
You forgot ignorance and stupidity.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
Still…. my musical accomplishments consist of listening. And that’s better for everyone with ears.
Brachiator
You go for everybody. Who are the “Ineligible to Vote?” Are they too young, felons, non-citizens?
Who are the “Didn’t Votes?” Are they apolitical? Do they hate one or both parties?
A good number of Trump voters supposedly were people who were previously “Didn’t Votes.” They liked what they saw in Trump. Democrats have to give these people something worth voting for.
Getting someone who is politically motivated to change their vote may be an easier play than trying to get someone who doesn’t want to vote to get up and support your candidates.
MattF
It’s hard for people with strong opinions (like us!) to understand that there’s a lot of people who just can’t make up their minds. And that these are the people who decide close elections. It seems to me that these are the people one needs to focus on, but I’m not at all sure how to do that.
SFAW
@efgoldman:
Above most people’s, but you could always have done karaoke with “Take Five” or “Blue Rondo.”
SFAW
@efgoldman:
“Amongst their weaponry …”
lgerard
My favorites are the people who don’t register to vote because of the slim chance they might be called upon to serve as jurors for a few hours one day
patroclus
@efgoldman: 6/8 time? 5/4 time (i.e, the Mission Impossible theme)? Didn’t you ever play jazz or Twentieth Century music? Ravi Shankar and the sitar? Didn’t you ever take Composition? 12-tone scales? Chinese 5th’s and 8th’s? What kind of music did you learn?
satby
@Ruckus: agree with you and Betty’ s post entirely. The non-voters I’m aware of just are disengaged from politics in general as not being relevant to their lives and politicians not being responsive to their needs. It’s supremely frustrating to try to convince them that their lack of voting enables politicians to ignore them and their needs.
clay
Awww, don’t go slagging off on Iron Man. Sure he’s a rich a billionaire a-hole, but he’s a smart and good-hearted billionaire a-hole. Notice that his main villains (in his solo movies, at least) are other billionaire a-holes.
We need an Iron Man to save us from the current crop of billionaire a-holes. It’s times like this that I wish the fervent conspiracies the nutters have about George Soros were actually true.
Eljai
@Greg: I know people like that as well, and I live in a liberal area. When I was canvassing last fall, I would sometimes meet people who told me that they just didn’t do politics. I’d like to come up with some persuasion tactics to show people how “politics” affects their daily lives and convince them to take their civic duty seriously.
Chris
I love that second picture so much.
Betty Cracker
@? Martin: Good point about the Trump voters actually being voters! I haven’t seen much hard data about how many new people / infrequent voters Trump brought into the process, but from what I understand, it was significant in places where it hurt Democrats the most.
I hope we not only work on making it easier to vote in blue states but also help folks who are targeted by voter suppression efforts in red states to overcome the obstacles. That’s important work, IMO.
sharl
@StringOnAStick: “Getting their attention” is a necessary condition for success, and also a formidable challenge. Based on my observations, a lot of these folks have Fox news droning in the background for many hours, and while they are often not paying undivided attention to the TV, that constant cranial jackhammering of bullshit has to have some effect, even if mostly on a subconscious level. Also, there is a long term effect that I assume develops deep roots; remember that the Arkansas Project started back in the 90s, and was basically continued in one form or another by right wing media in the years after Big Dawg left office. It’s hard to dig out nasty roots that go so deep. Hell, if not for the disastrous results of Dubya’s Administration, I have doubts that Obama would have won in 2008; it took something as severe as the economic crash and (probably to a lesser extent) the failure of the Glorious Iraq Adventure to jolt normally complacent people out of their stupor. Hell, even some racists voted for Obama back then.
PST
@schrodingers_cat:
You aren’t supposed to feel sorry for her, or like her, or respect her, or feel her pain. You’re just supposed to try to flip her. It doesn’t require empathy, just cold-blooded understanding of what it is that pushes some people’s buttons. The things we hate about Trump were, for some, bugs and not features. We may despise them for undervaluing those characteristics, but getting some belated atonement votes at the midterm can still reduce the damage. I feel special disgust for acquaintances who say they didn’t like Trump, but they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for “that crook.” But I don’t want to discourage them from buyer’s remorse.
hovercraft
Um Betty, I know it’s your birthday and all , but why are you singling me out? ;-(
Haydnseek
@WTF??? California has been a vote by mail state since christ was a corporal.
schrodingers_cat
@PST: I will leave the job to you, I told my ex-friend who voted for JS and was defending the Muslim ban to go fuck herself. My patience for the people who makes excuses for the current inhabitant of the WH is less than zero.
ETA: I intend to spend time helping those who are hurt by the people like the clueless moron depicted in the illustration. You know like the students stranded because of EO who can’t come back and resume their studies.
Haydnseek
@? Martin: I’m sure someone has already beaten me to this, but California has been a vote by mail state since christ was a corporal. Seriously, WTF?
satby
@Eljai:
Molly Ivins talked about this, and this quote always stuck with me.
Cacti
One election postmortem that I read that actually did make sense was that Hillary made the mistake of not being partisan enough. Rather than portray Trump as the toxic culmination of all that has been wrong with Republican politics since 1980, she portrayed him as someone even reasonable Republicans disagreed with, and that these reasonable Republican unicorns should vote Hillary.
Trump won 88% of Republican voters, about what any generic R candidate would be expected to get.
Trying to reach out to Republican lifers is a huge waste of time.
schrodingers_cat
@Cacti: Word. That’s what was wrong in the deplorable speech. Reaching out to R voters is futile. They are already a part of the R collective. The ones who were decent and sane are no longer Rs.
kindness
The only way a Trump voter will even remotely consider voting for whom ever the Democrats put up will be if/when Trumps policies collapse the economy &/or bring on massive unpopular wars. See 2008 as an example. Sadly 2008 also showed us many of those same people will revert to hippie punching as soon as Republicans & the MSM start lying about the Democratic hopes/expectations/policy positions which is the very next December following the election and before this mythical Democrat is sworn into office.
MomSense
The one thing I would add to this is that we have to make sure we are protecting voting rights. I’d like to know how many people had to file provisional ballots because they didn’t have the necessary ID or were purged from the rolls. We have to find out WTF happened in Michigan because half the voting machines in Detroit weren’t working on Election Day. Did that mean votes weren’t counted? Were the lines so long people couldn’t wait to vote? What about the limited early vote options in states like NC?
My hunch is that the number of people who were disenfranchised or had numerous obstacles putin the way of their voting cost us the election.
ETA putin should be put in. My dog I’ve typed that name far too much the last year.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Cacti:
Yeah. I can’t exactly be angry with her for trying to appeal to the inherent goodness of humanity, but it was a mistake. She gave the Republicans an out. Never again.
ingressus sum
Such language! But, yeah, dead on!
Alain the site fixer
@efgoldman: I didn’t know that was an issue. Pop me an email and let me know browser/device, etc.
jacy
@Betty Cracker:
I’m thinking there are a segment of Trump voters who aren’t regular voters. They are the “cult of personality” voters, and they’re not going to show up for midterms, because their football team already won the championship. They don’t understand that Trump can’t rule by fiat (much as he’s going to try), because they don’t really understand how things work. They see him signing things and think that’s the end to it, that he’s going to change things by his sheer force of will. Either they’re blithely going to go on believing this, or they’re going to get frustrated when they realize he’s not all-powerful. Add that to the number who are going to be discouraged/embarrassed because supporting Trump makes them look like fools or disrupts their personal relationship, and I think we have a good shot at making considerable gains in the midterms, if we can channel our energies and work at getting the people who are upset about the situation both registered and to the polls. I see outreach to Trump voters as a waste of time, compared to what we could be doing to energize and educate non-voters.
Roger Moore
@Greg:
And it shows one reason to focus on people who voted the wrong way in the previous election; they have a proven willingness to vote. It may be easier to change somebody’s mind about who to vote for than about whether voting is a good idea.
hovercraft
@? Martin:
Something we all need to remember is that a big reason Obama won, was that he and his team organized, remember they were on the ground in Iowa for almost two years, that’s how he won Iowa, without Iowa, he probably doesn’t win the nomination. Iowa made many of us who had hoped, believe that he could win. It takes real organization, real engagement, over years not weeks or months, the Harris County (Houston), Texas example I linked to downstairs shows that it takes time and real engagement, in 2012, Latino participation rose only by 5%, but they kept it up and by last years it was up so much that they swept the entire ballot, they won one office for the first time in 36 years, this is in ruby red Texas. There is a road map of how to do this, it just isn’t showing up a couple of months or weeks before the election to ask for votes. We are at a disadvantage because we don’t have a Wurlitzer churning out shit every day, but if we care enough we all have our own communities where we can organize and form relationships so that when we ask these people to come out and vote and why it matters, they believe us.
PS, yes I will keep posting that link over and over again, it’s promising and we need good news once in a while ;-)
? Martin
This is an interesting report.
For the uninitiated, Apple has arranged for Foxconn assemblers of their products to earn more than Foxconn assemblers of other products. As part of their work to improve working conditions, they raised pay, forbade forced overtime, and implemented some important safety measures. This report notes two positive things:
1) Foxconns hiring is heavily focused on getting engineers with degrees. In most cases these are likely 2-year Industrial Engineering degrees (something basically unheard of in the US) which are extremely common in China.
2) Workers in China are increasingly sensitive to both wages and working conditions. While they still strongly trail US wages and working conditions, parity isn’t necessary to make US workers more competitive – they just need to tighten enough to encourage manufacturing here.
There are two negatives:
A) If these workers are unwilling to move to other products, that likely means there are other competitive jobs in the area. China’s engineering talent is growing, and they are increasingly competitive with advanced US companies. That’s a much bigger threat than offshoring for the economy overall.
B) Even with those trailing wages, they can justify investing in automation over labor. That’s a reminder that any new manufacturing in the US is going to be heavily automated. While that creates jobs, it doesn’t create jobs for the people that lost manufacturing jobs in the past. Bringing manufacturing to the US doesn’t much help previous factory workers, but it does help engineers.
Planet Money’s podcast is on Argentina protectionism and the lessons from it. That’s a similar formula to what Trump is proposing (but Argentina actually put effort behind their plans, unlike Trump) and it reveals two major challenges:
1) Most companies stay in the S&P 500 for an average of 15 years, where it used to be 60. What that means to workers is that companies cannot afford multi-year startup sequences (like automakers have) because they’re unlikely to survive much past that phase. And the likelihood a worker can rely on a job life is extremely low. Healthcare and retirement need to be portable today where they didn’t need to be as portable in the past. Protectionist policies exacerbate this problem – you get heavy investment to bypass the tariff, and the company flames out even faster because their ability to respond to market changes is now hampered because of the tariffs.
2) Tariffs made more sense when durable goods were larger, it was expensive to travel, and where the cost-to-market was high as grey-market goods were not cost-effective. Smuggling a blender to bypass a tariff was expensive to do and finding a market for that good was extremely difficult in the 80s. But a $500 cell phone is easy to smuggle in, cheap to do, and thanks to the internet finding the market is trivial. Hell, too much of what you get at Amazon is grey-market. Products are smaller, airfare is lower, and matching buyer and seller is easy. The arbitrage opportunities in the grey market are massive compared to the past for many goods. That makes tariffs unworkable in many cases.
jl
@hovercraft: thanks for link. I’ll read it.
? Martin
@Haydnseek: Only by mail. No in-person voting.
JPL
I’ve been making phone calls today for a local city council race. It would be nice to reach all voters, but sometimes even on a local level that is not possible. Phone calls are going to those who vote all the time, and if time allows we will start making calls to those who vote less often.
I understand the importance of reaching those who didn’t vote, but it’s more complicated than it seems.
TenguPhule
Trump Voter A: Firing Squad
Trump Voter B: Offer Chance for Repentence, otherwise mandatory sterilization and lobotomy.
Barbara
I totally agree that It is important not to overthink things. And while I might sound like a broken record, I do think that gender was a bigger factor than we like to admit. There are some people who will never vote for a woman, those that assume that women are incompetent and interpret any negative news as validation of that assumption, but who would vote for another woman without the same kind of baggage, fairly assigned or not, those who would never for Hillary Clinton, and those who will never (again) vote for any Clinton. Between those four groups, there were enough voters who either didn’t show up (clearly, given overall low lever of turnout) or voted for Trump. But the more voters you have registered and motivated and habituated to vote, the less those kinds of things will matter. So the lesson is almost always the same whatever the problem — get more people likely to support your side registered and enabled and accustomed to voting.
? Martin
@Betty Cracker: It is important work, but you go about it in different ways. Blue states need to lead and instead of just not doing the ugly shit that the red states do, they need to take the normative voting expectation and open it up. They need to be proactive – automatic registration, etc.
In red states, that argument won’t fly because the GOP is only interested in protecting the GOP. You either need to flip the state, or fight in court. So there you fight to ensure things don’t get worse, but you need to work equally hard in the friendly states to raise the bar.
Mnemosyne
@Greg:
As I keep saying, this is the two-part con that the Republicans have been running since at least Gingrich: Republicans and Democrats are the same, so therefore it doesn’t matter who I vote for.
And, unfortunately, a lot of liberals fall for that con even if they would never vote for a Republican. When it comes to winning elections, getting the other side to vote third party or stay home is almost as good as getting them to vote for your candidate.
TenguPhule
@lgerard:
That should warrant 10 years of involuntary servitude cleaning public toilets.
Cacti
@Barbara:
Even here, we still get the occasional diatribe about “Queen Hillary” and her “sense of entitlement”.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
Uh no. If they liked what they saw in Trump, they’re civilization’s enemy and need to be marginalized, silenced and ultimately rendered extinct for the good of humanity.
Barbara
@? Martin: To your point about the grey market, my extremely stubborn daughter found an older version smartphone that she loves. It was one of my early ones that I bequeathed to her (what happens when I get a new phone). She had opened it up and removed a substantial number of the OM apps when the battery started sagging, but eventually she couldn’t keep tinkering and it wore out. She looked and looked and looked, and found a replacement that was sent from . . . Doha, Qatar. Since it wasn’t the latest of anything, I assume there is some guy somewhere who buys ancient phones at super low rates and refurbishes them for people who want cheaper phones, typically not in the U.S.
SatanicPanic
This is too sensible. I come here for the arguments.
hovercraft
@jl:
No problem, it’s her take on a very long piece about the Harris County example, click through from Nancy’s piece, when you get a chance, it has some good stuff in it.
Stephen Westfall
@Betty Cracker: They just never had a white nationalist candidate to their liking before. This was the year the Republican Party decided to go all in.
cokane
problem with that analysis about non-voters being a bigger bloc is that so many of them have been and are going to forever be non-voters.
I’m not here trying to preach some “we need to reach out the trumpsters” bs. just saying, that opposite analysis is a bit imprecise.
bupalos
@Betty Cracker: It’s a great point. The impulse I’m arguing against most vociferously here is not to see these groups as static, quit thinking about “the trump voter,” especially where that term causes us not to realize that today’s trump voter was (in the decisive instances) yesterday’s undecided. Make up stories about who that person is and how bad you want them to DIAF as you want, it does nothing but strengthen the Trumpublican’s (tiny) hands.
Trump came up with a big, mean, frightened, atavistic, so-stupid-it’s-genius marketing campaign that drug out just enough grey ooze from the “didn’t vote” category to technically tip the scales. Don’t even tell these people they are Trump voters, don’t even think about that. Craft a platform and message on our side that drags some of them back out of their column into ours.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
I think that’s true about “normal” RWNJ Republiklowns (W, Mittster level). Tangerine Tumor is another matter. The mouth breather flying monkeys who pushed him to the nomination view him with a medieval religious fervor. Forget them. When the jobs don’t come back and their miserable lives get worse, they’ll blame it on anybody EXCEPT Mango Messiah.
And the lifetime suburban R voters are so habituated, nothing’s going to change them, either.
The gettable slice of R is small enough not to matter.
We have plenty of natural Dems out there who just don’t bother – and they didn’t bother before voter suppression, either. Motivating even a small percentage of them, in a few states, is the key.
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
Read that article that hovercraft linked to in #50. Three organizers found and energized non-voters in Harris County, TX, and it went blue this year.
It’s a lot of work to find and energize those voters, but it can be done.
? Martin
@lgerard: That’s another thing that can change. In California, it’s not the voter rolls that they pull from, it’s the drivers license (or state ID) database. That can be made true in every state, and the state should make a clear point to advertise that change to encourage voter registration.
Brachiator
Damn.
efgoldman
@patroclus:
It was a whatchacallit.
Oh yeah, a “joke.”
My degree is theory and comp
Ruckus
@satby:
They are, as so well stated in Blazing Saddles, the common clay, the dirt farmers, the fucking morons.
Of course there are those who are discouraged and feel that their vote doesn’t matter. Those have to be convinced that there are actually a lot of them and that if they vote it will matter positively and if they don’t vote it will matter negatively.
silvery
@Eljai: that was my husband when we first met 20 years ago. I started small, by finding local issues he cared about, and showing him the vote totals for the city/county. This convinced him that his vote could make a difference, and once he got in the booth he would vote the whole card. He’s been voting ever since.
LAO
@Brachiator: Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.
Smedley the uncertain
@efgoldman: ‘Take Five’ ?
eclare
@hovercraft: Thanks for posting that article, it was very interesting and hopeful!
chromeagnomen
we could probably persuade at least 1 of the 8 people in trump voter B group to switch sides.
Betty Cracker
@Barbara: I agree it’s a bigger factor than generally acknowledged and am somewhat astounded that angle received so little coverage — particularly since women are leading the anti-Trump resistance. Gee, could it be because millions of us see the elevation of that leering asshole as confirmation that we’re second-class citizens, which pisses us off? But for every post-election analysis that mentions sexism, it seems there are 10,000 that natter on about the white working class, focusing primarily on blue collar men. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, but it sort of does…
Amaranthine RBG
The assumptions here are 1) there is only one message that a candidate can deliver to all audiences and 2) there is no overlap in the views, emotions, leanings, concerns, etc. of “Voted Trump” and “Didn’t Vote”.
Both of those assumptions are false.
Mnemosyne
@bupalos:
Yes and no. Single-issue abortion voters are lost to us. So are single-issue gun voters. So are out-and-proud racists.
Whoever’s left in the Trump camp is who we look at, but I tend to agree with Betty that we look at the non-voters first, like they did in Harris Co., and see what they need.
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
Isn’t this what Trump is leading up to when he talks about “the Enemies of America?”
Raven Onthill
The last time I did call-out-the-vote, I found that people who don’t vote are just as convinced of their reasons as people who do. Very hard to change those minds.
We need to attack the anti-abortion and firearms issue, but this is a long-term project.
hovercraft
@SatanicPanic:
Say something stupid or mention Beetlejuice and your wish shall be granted.
ETA: add stupid
les
@Roger Moore:
I can’t see it. People who voted for Trump don’t live in reality. I really don’t think there’s an honest argument that will reach them, and they’ve got a party that specializes in the lies they like.
randy khan
@schrodingers_cat:
The other way to think of it is that the woman is more persuadable and, therefore, less evil, than the man. (And, not to engage in gender stereotyping, but I think it’s reasonably accurate to have the class A jerk shown as a man, given the voting patterns.)
les
@TenguPhule:
The latter seems redundant.
Ruckus
@MomSense:
In 2004 I lived in a suburb of Columbus, OH. On election day there were 2, count them 2 voting machines for something like 6 precincts at one polling place. I waited over 4 hours to vote, in the rain. I was part of the Ken Blackwell ain’t letting any democratic leaning precincts have a fair vote program. He was and still is a major fucking asshole. BTW he supported the Republican president and worked on the transition team. I believe that certain people on this blog would call him a slave catcher. I’d support that 100%.
Jeffro
@lgerard:
Automatic registration: not only does it expand/protect the franchise, it doubles the pool of available jurors!! Who’s not down with that?
EBT
@efgoldman: It’s offical, Older than syncopation!
schrodingers_cat
OT: I am eagerly awaiting Rangoon, hoping to see it in theater. Hopefully, I can find one not too far from where I live. Love story set against the backdrop of WWII, and Indian Independence. I have been totally fascinated by the INA trials and the role they played in the accelerated timetable for Indian Independence.
Long story short, after they had lost the allegiance of the British Indian armed forces, the Brits realized that their days in India were truly numbered. So they left in a ungodly hurry, with the parting gift of the Partition. Bastards.
jl
HRC was not the best at electoral politics, and she won the popular vote by a wide margin. Less than 200,000 voters in 3 rust belt states and Florida put Frump into office. So, I think a mistake to over think the presidential election, and a mistake for Democrats to thrash around over a crisis that doesn’t exist at that level. A lot of strategies and tactics will work of help fix the 2016 results.
The Democratic failures in Senate and House, and state level elections more important to address. I do agree that focusing on trying to convince hard core Frump voters to change their minds is not promising. And to the extent that special catering to white working class voters is essentially code phrase for white bigots and xenophobes, not good to focus on that either.
I think a good argument for the ‘did not vote’ potential voters will carry a long most of the low info and enraged and frustrated knuckleheads who went for Frump.
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: Hey, you! Pu_ssyhats arrived yesterday! That’s the fastest I think I’ve ever received an item I ordered online! Thank you! (Been sporting the magenta one – I figure it will serve as a sekrit bat-signal to any of the hidden progressives in our community).
Jeffro
@Stephen Westfall:
Well yeah, with a Kenyan-endorsed History’s Greatest Monster, whaddya expect?
Eljai
@silvery: That’s very encouraging. Thanks for sharing your process. Starting small, identifying local issues of concern — those are steps anyone (even me!) can duplicate.
A Ghost to Most
@Stephen Westfall:
This is what worries me
Due to family connections, I know of many people who have been stockpiling weapons and ammo for many years. This includes cannons and mortars and automatic weapons. My own family owns a mortar.
They have been gathering all this for when the time comes. Let’s hope they don’t decide the time has come. Hopefully, they will remain cowards.
Ruckus
@? Martin:
Back in the 80s I was approached by Sony to maintain the molds for large TVs. The cases and large internal parts were all made in the US because shipping costs for a completed TV were so large. But air freighting a 3000 lb mold to Japan and back to spend 20 man hrs to fix it was also cost prohibitive. (We were capable of doing the work but the shear size and weight of the tooling was at our outer limits.) Now with plasma and LED TVs that expensive shipping is no longer the case and they can be made anywhere.
schrodingers_cat
@jl:
Thanks! Fuck this interminable and never ending analysis over a decimal place.
bystander
@TenguPhule: You’re a regular libby Hammurabi.
Meanwhile, take a break and meet Finland’s greatest ambassador. I think of Boston terriers as adorable only to their owners. They never seem to have the least interest in anyone outside their family. Not this guy.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: Which is why it needs to happen to him and his supporters FIRST.
RAM
I covered our local school board beat, especially tax referendums, for almost 30 years and I found it’s just about impossible to change people’s minds. If they’re either against or for something, you’re largely wasting your time trying to reason with them. The most effective tactic was to get “yes” voters out, not waste time trying to persuade “no” voters to change their minds, because that proved virtually impossible. Same is largely true with regular elections. Trump voters are NOT going to change their minds, their personalities, or their personal biases and suddenly see the light and vote progressive. Is not going to happen, so don’t waste time and money trying to do it.
the Reverend Lowdown
Two years ago, I made the decision to get rid of the hard core repubs in my life. I ended up losing two 20+ year friendships and a younger brother in the process. I don’t regret any of it. The absence of their fox news driven toxic ignorance is a continually refreshing thing. Back when I did allow them in my life, I used them for motivation around election time. I would tally up all the repubs in my life and that number was the goal of people that I would try to get to the polls. My aim was to cancel out or surpass their votes. I instinctively went for people who were not part of the voting process, generally younger people. Like Hovercraft said a few comments back, pertaining to the Iowa ground game, you have to start early and not when everyone’s hip deep in election hype. It’s as simple as having a conversation from time to time, and building on that. I am always looking for ways to amplify my vote.
Ruckus
@TenguPhule:
And it should result in automatic registration. You are a citizen, you are automatically able to vote and as Martin has reported, vote by mail. You no longer have to take time off work to vote. One excuse gone. Of course in CA we’ve had vote by mail for a long time. But depending on where you live that may be an issue. I lived in my business during the recession and the county didn’t want to/couldn’t register me to vote there as it wasn’t a residential area. (BTW in my non residential area I knew of at least half a dozen people who did the same as me, lived in their businesses) I asked them how does a homeless citizen register? And also surly a citizen/vet has to be allowed to vote. They completed my registration in about a minute. That was however in CA and they are a bit more tolerant of voting rights than lots of other places.
Lyrebird
@Jeffro:
Yeah, I don’t like the Onion.
I wish they weren’t so right about that White-Hot Sphere of Rage,
and I wish he hadn’a won.
In the meantime, I like Betty’s emphasis on big picture, not because different states are all the same, but yeah we can nitpick each other forEVAH and more weasels will get elected…
It’s probably not helpful, but I still like this video about
Tr_mp glasses, and I hope people keep playing the Humanity for Hillary videos, because need to keep our morale up to do what we can in our various ways.
hovercraft
So I gave you all an optimistic post of how we can get back on track and remove these jackals from power, here now is a WAFS post, enjoy.
Donald Trump is dangerous when he’s losing
Trump’s failures at governing feed his illiberalism.
Updated by Ezra Klein@ezraklein Feb 22, 2017, 8:40am EST
A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump titled “How to stop an autocracy.” The essay began with the premise that Trump has a will to power and a contempt for the basic norms and institutions of American democracy, and then explored how to limit the damage. The answer, basically, was that Congress needs to do its damn job.
But after I wrote it, smart people argued the piece was built atop a mistake. Trump might have the will to power, but he doesn’t have the discipline for it. Grim scenarios suggesting his presidency would grow too strong missed the likelier scenario that it would be extremely weak.
Yuval Levin, editor of the journal National Affairs and a leading conservative intellectual, made the case to me over email:
I think the more plausible cause for worry is that he will be a dysfunctional president. He seems to have come in without a clear sense of the nature and character of the presidency in our system, and he’s not playing that role but rather using the presidency as a platform for playing the role he has always played. And for now the White House team seems to be reinforcing that rather than counteracting it. The result of that seems more likely to be dysfunction than autocracy.
……………..Trump’s slipshod executive orders are being easily batted back by courts, and his agenda hasn’t even made it to Congress yet. How is he going to go from here to strongman?
I felt better. And then I talked to Ron Klain……………………
n Klain’s view, it’s Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the government that catalyzes his illiberal tendencies — the more he is frustrated by the system, the more he will turn on the system.
“If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state,” Klain said. “It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”
……………….Trump held a press conference to lash the media for its coverage of his presidency. It is worth, before digging into what Trump said, to establish a basic fact about the Trump presidency so far: He has received mostly negative media coverage because he is running a chaotic, leaky, and ineffective administration. The press corps would breathe a great sigh of relief if they felt able to cover Trump more normally — an impulse you can see in the overwhelmingly positive coverage that Trump gets when he reads a clear speech off a teleprompter or names a qualified candidate like Gen. Jim Mattis to his Cabinet………………….
………………Trump’s response has been to blame the institutions recording his incompetence rather than to fix the underlying problem………….
………….Mounk studies the way liberal democracies tip back toward authoritarianism — a phenomenon we’ve seen most recently in Hungary and Turkey, and I am asking him whether the media has tipped into hysteria. Whether I have tipped into hysteria. Isn’t all this talk of authoritarianism, of autocracy, crazy? This is America, after all……………….
The distinction you need to make with Trump, Mounk argues, is that he’s not an ideological authoritarian but a contextual one. He is not entering office with a program to weaken the judiciary and bulldoze legislative roadblocks, as Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. His dangerous tendencies, rather, are reactive to the situations in which he finds himself.
“In a world where institutions let him do what he wants, he doesn’t have a problem with institutions,” Mounk says. Think of Trump’s friendly relationship with the media back when he felt the media was friendlier to him — a comparison the president himself made at his press conference. “Remember, I used to give you a news conference every time I made a speech, which was like every day,” Trump said, almost wistfully.
“But,” Mounk continues, “in a world where they don’t let him do what he wants, he thinks these institutions are unpatriotic and need to be destroyed.” That would have sounded hyperbolic to me if, later that day, Trump hadn’t tweeted that the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN were “the enemy of the American people.”………………….
This is a strange facet of Trump’s persona, but it’s an important one. His illiberal instincts come out when he’s losing, not when he’s winning…………………
Trump’s anger at the press or at the courts or at Congress poses little threat if his approval ratings linger in the 40s or 30s. But imagine Trump spends years being stymied by the system and marinating in fury toward the institutions he feels have foiled him. He spends years telling his supporters that the courts are making them less safe, that the press is their enemy, that the congress is corrupt. And then, all at once, Trump gains the power and popularity to do something about it.
Once again it’s a long read, click over to read the rest.
Suffragete City elftx
A bit off topic as I want to express condolences to Cain from the prior thread. Our house has also lost it’s heart.
Today we said goodbye to our aka “old man”, aka “big shot”, aka “The Devine Creator” our Shadow.
He was with us almost 17 years and yes there is a big hole in our hearts knowing he is not coming home. Maybe later today I will be able to pick up his food dish and dispose of his litter box and remove his Quantam Box he loved to lay in, but not yet.
He is not coming home and that hurts so much as I am aware so many of you understand.
He was a participant in a Balloon Juice calendar one year. We no longer have the calendar (sorry all!), but his picture from it has been on our fridge ever since. So thank you all for the chance and being the community you are.
TenguPhule
@bystander: Letting the Republican Nazis be treated as respectable human beings has led to the Overton Window moved to the point where TORTURE is now viewed as acceptable by almost half of American voters.
If civilization is to endure, some lines need to be drawn and never crossed. And the consequences for trying to do so anyway need to be brutal and terminal just to get that point across.
Because humanity keeps forgetting its old mistakes and makes them again and again and again.
It needs to stop.
ruemara
I can’t link it here because I’m at work and I don’t access FB on my work machine, but there’s a good article on why fighting voting laws requires boots on the ground. There’s a lot people need to know about voting, even if they are registered. There’s helping with ID, helping with paperwork, teaching people their rights, even handholding them through the process as some need motivation. It’s bigger and messier but more doable than appealing to either Trump voter. Because if you seriously felt Trump was the best one could do versus Hillary, there’s some level of cognitive dysfunction that nothing can fix beyond self-exploration.
JMG
There is a group, a significant one, of Trump voters who might well leave him, the 5-8 percent or so who voted for him despite not liking him because they were in that “change” camp or disliked Clinton more. But the only person who can get them to change their minds is Trump himself, by making them feel he’s betrayed them. Fortunately, he’s more than capable for that job.
TenguPhule
@Ruckus: I think South Park was on to something with that episode “Vote or Die”.
schrodingers_cat
@hovercraft: No time for doom and gloom porn, either. All this speculation of how we are all going to die does not hold great attraction for me.
bystander
@TenguPhule: I agree. I put myself to sleep at night populating my imaginary tumbrels in order of offensiveness.
I would really like a good reason to take up knitting.
hovercraft
@ruemara:
Is this the one?
Fighting voter ID laws in the courts isn’t enough. We need boots on the ground
By Molly J McGrath
Ruckus
@bystander:
Not to put too fine a point on it but there is an old saying, something about how owners and dogs begin to sort of merge. In your link that old saying has never been truer.
TenguPhule
@JMG:
Again, facts not in evidence.
He’s ripped off contractors who know his history ripping off contractors, have actually been ripped off by him before and those morons still voted for him. Women who know what he said, have readily available access to public records of his behavior….and think he’s actually not that bad and just getting a bum rap from the dishonest media. Men who blame the Democrats for REPUBLICAN STONEWALLING and the Free Market they supposedly believe in.
These people can’t be saved.
Another Scott
PK on his blog recommends that we follow the sun as his colleague Nate Cohn writes:
I think we can, and must, do more than one thing at a time. We need big margins to turn the ship of state around, and that means winning every possible seat.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@Suffragete City elftx: Aw, sorry to hear that. It sucks to lose a faithful companion. :(
Miss Bianca
@Suffragete City elftx: oh no, another kitty companion gone! Condolences to you.
@Betty Cracker: On a more cheerful note, they say it’s your birthday, BC – HBD, and many more!
hovercraft
@schrodingers_cat:
Agreed, but yo know that some people need something to scare the bejesus out of them to get their off their asses and do something. I think that just his presence is enough to motivate me to make sure that Christie is replaced by a democrat in November. Ezra’s doom and gloom is useful so that people don”t just assume that because he is awful we will defeat him easily, people need to understand that his hold on his people is very strong and it will take more than just pointing and laughing to defeat him.
He continues to do dumb shit, like pissing off our neighbors. These are the things that can pry away some in that second group, incompetence will tarnish the idea that a “successful” business man is the solution to all of our problems.
Mexico says it ‘will not accept’ Trump’s new immigration plans, and it could retaliate
Christopher Woody, Business Insider
“We have been a great ally to fight problems with migration, narcotics,” Mexico’s economy minister, Ildefonso Guajardo, told The Globe and Mail this month. “If at some point in time things become so badly managed in the relationship, the incentives for the Mexican people to keep on cooperating in things that are at the heart of [US] national-security issues will be diminished.”
ETA: Also too this
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mexico-says-not-accept-unilateral-u-immigration-policies-172004968.html
Threatening to send all “illegals” to Mexico regardless of nationality, for some reason is not popular in Mexico.
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
Purrfect.
schrodingers_cat
@MomSense: I needs one too. How does I contact you?
Doctor Science
The data are *not* good, or at least the graphic isn’t. That “ineligible to vote” slice? It includes under-18s.
Of the adult, eligible voter population, 58% voted. 28% of the eligible population voted for Clinton, 26.8% for Trump.
Ruckus
@TenguPhule:
Doesn’t Australia have automatic registration and mandatory voting? And no, they don’t. Registration and going to the polling place, yes. Actually voting, no.
SatanicPanic
@Another Scott: The OC is a very interesting example. I know I’ve seen at least a half-dozen people flip from Republican to Democrat in my lifetime in southern California and not one go the other way. And that’s 100% due to them being young and not interested in the GOP’s dumb culture wars. In every case it wasn’t people trying to convince them, they just saw how crappy Republicans were being, especially towards LGBT people. Change is coming, but it’s slow and fitful.
schrodingers_cat
@hovercraft: Yeah and slapping import duties in violation of WTO which was mostly a creation of the United States is going to go great with China and India. They are going to wilt like the spineless Republicans.
ETA: This will also play beautifully with the part of the economy that depends on exporting stuff, IIRC its substantial, upwards of 30%.
Mnemosyne
@Another Scott:
In 2018, I want the entire California delegation to Congress to be Democrats, and I’m starting to help work towards that goal. CA-25 is now my adopted district.
NR
I can agree with most of this post. Going after non-voters can potentially be quite fruitful. It’s worthwhile to have a look at the Texas Organizing Project (TOP), which managed to boost the Democrats by 150,000 votes or so in Harris County, Texas, and they did it by going after people who didn’t regularly vote.
However, there’s a caution in their experience, too:
The absolute disaster that is Donald Trump may give Democrats a chance to get back into power. If and when that happens, they need to actually deliver on the progressive promises they make and not just give people a bunch of excuses for why they can’t. There is a way out of this mess, but only if Democrats actually live up to their promises.
ruemara
@hovercraft: Yes, that one. Thank you!
LAO
@MomSense: I got my hats too! Thank you!
eclare
@Suffragete City elftx: I’m so sorry, sounds like your kitty had a great and long life. That doesn’t erase the sorrow, I know.
Gravenstone
@A Ghost to Most:
For the love of God, WHY?!?!?!
schrodingers_cat
@Gravenstone: To make chutneys and salsas, of course. They would need also need a pestle.
Aleta
@Suffragete City elftx: I’m sorry. It hurts so bad for awhile. All I figured out so far is to give mine a big warm dwelling place in my heart now.
SatanicPanic
@Mnemosyne: A bunch of us down south are trying to get Issa out. Hunter Jr. might be a bit too much to ask though.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
What about C – “With the almost willing aid of a news media more intrested in it’s Both Sides Do It narrative, Trump was able to promise magic ponies to enough foolish voters he was able able to game an Electorial Collage win that’s almost instantly came back to bite him on the behind’?
Mnemosyne
@SatanicPanic:
Hunter Jr would be a heavy lift, but it’s worth a try.
If we could turn those 14 House seats Democrat, we’re more than halfway to the needed 24 flipped seats to take back the House.
MomSense
@LAO:
Yay! I’m making more now.
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m just about to put a new batch on etsy.
schrodingers_cat
@MomSense: Will you post a link, thanks. Also can I write you check instead of Paypal?
SatanicPanic
@Mnemosyne: Absolutely we’ll try. Who knows, miracles can happen.
The Moar You Know
@lgerard: In CA, where you get paid a whopping $20 a day for jury duty, employers don’t have to make up the difference, and rent in my part of town is $1600/month for a one-bedroom apartment, it amounts to a day without pay (at least one day) that you can’t afford. And it’s not a “slim chance”, not here. You WILL be called. And if you serve, you will get called to do so every year.
I’d hate to think of what red states have on offer.
I don’t bitch about people not registering because of jury duty. I was one of them a long time ago, back in the bad old days when I was a working musician and as poor as it’s possible to get without living out of a shopping cart.
Kay
I’m not that creative and I can only do one thing at a time so I spend a lot of time telling people that Trump is incompetent. It’s working! :)
It’s an easy sell because he is incompetent and it doesn’t involve a value judgment- it’s no one’s fault but his. This isn’t strictly true- it’s the fault of the people who voted for him but we can play the blame game later. For now we can just agree on “incompetent” :)
I’m hoping people get to eye rolling soon when he talks. I took this training once to be a mediator and eye rolling = complete contempt. There’s no coming back from it. That should be our goal.
bupalos
@Mnemosyne: Even at that, “single-issue abortion voters” and categories like that can blind one to the fact that real live human beings drift into and out of these categories. I personally know someone who converted to Catholicism and with all the fervor of the convert became an “abortion voter” for 2 cycles. And now she’s calmed down and is still a Catholic but seems to see more of a balance and understands the Republicans don’t acually represent much of her faith. I can’t guarantee she didn’t vote for Trump but it sure doesn’t sound like she did. Which is just to say you can’t forget you’re talking about humans and humans do change and frankly that’s our only hope as a species anyway.
gratuitous
Someone posted that pie chart on Facebook. Here’s how I responded:
Wjs
I know this is naive and that we live in a pretty racist country, but what Trump did works once and then it doesn’t work ever again. Litigating the last election is foolish. Find better candidates and keep reminding people that they love liberal policies when they think they originated with common sense ideas.
Another Scott
@bupalos: Yup.
“Jerry Falwell couldn’t spell ‘abortion’ five years ago.”
It takes a long time, but cultures and people do change their political views.
We have to fight them every single day…
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m not sure that etsy takes checks but they do take debit and credit cards.
StringOnAStick
@? Martin: I think in CO your name goes into the pool for jury selection from driver’s license records, not voter registrations, so it isn’t just CA that does this. I’m so glad we managed to get all mail-in ballots passed a few years ago.
Ruckus
@gratuitous:
That’s all well and good but…..
There’s millions of us who voted and not for the shitgibbon. How many of us went to jail? I believe the number is ZERO. I can remember a very few cases of actual voter fraud and every one of them was a crank trying to prove that one could fraudulently vote. Now of course you are correct in that some people are scared of their own shadows and some of our media has been stroking that fire for a long time but I see no point in feeling sorry for them. I do however have lots of sorrow to expend on those who are going to continue to suffer because they couldn’t be bothered.
schrodingers_cat
@MomSense: Etsy links your credit card to PayPal. I have had spurious charges twice when I went that route (one was upward of 10,000), I managed to resolve the charges but I am wary of PayPal.
Mnemosyne
@MomSense:
I think it depends on how your Etsy seller account is set up. You may be able to accept checks, or make an exception.
Shalimar
Thank you for the chart, Betty. I suspect a decent percentage of the people protesting now are in the did not vote column for last election. Whether decent in this case is 5% or 25%, it is still enough for a massive wave election if those people stay involved for another 21 months and convince some of their non-voting brethren to vote against Republicans next time too.
Jinchi
@The Moar You Know:
In California you get signed up for jury duty if you have a driver’s license or other state ID, so I doubt anyone refuses to register to vote on that account.
Jinchi
@Shalimar:
I suspect the overwhelming majority of people protesting now, voted in November.
PST
@schrodingers_cat:
I could never say that to Mom. She’s 87 years old. It’s strange: she voted for Obama twice and then Trump and can’t explain why. People like that have no more business voting than my cat does. (I should add that the cat still votes despite having died, but it’s Chicago.) I think Mom reflexively votes for whoever strikes her as more outsidery. But I don’t even care why. Next time, I want her vote no matter what I have to tell her to get it.
Mnemosyne
@PST:
I think Trump managed to hit a lot of white supremacist buttons that older people had almost forgotten they had. There was a whole lot of demagoguery involved with his victory.
TenguPhule
@Wjs:
I remember when this was said about Bush the Lesser.
Look where we ended up because of that line of thinking.
No First Chances. No Second Chances. And for the love of Dog, NO THIRD CHANCES.
JimV
This post strikes me a very astute analysis (why am I so not surprised?).
I’d like to see some further breakdown in the next post, please. What’s with that 30% who didn’t vote? Too confused by the hate machine to make the obvious choice? Vote-suppressed? Just don’t give a damn?
I tried to Google something factual just now about HRC, and there is a ton of hate-noise about HRC out there. I couldn’t find the historical article I was looking for by typing the names (of which HRC was one) and the subject. Often she was attacking from both sides of an issue (e.g., both by Israel-supporters and Palestinian-supporters).
wjs
@TenguPhule: Bush the lesser didn’t call for a Muslim ban, the deportation of millions of immigrants, or condemn Islam. He did exactly the opposite of those things while sucking momentously as POTUS. Good thing you’re on top of all of this, otherwise we Democrats wouldn’t be learning anything.
TenguPhule
@wjs: Republican schenanigans in 2000 went unpunished. They got bolder. Come 2004, again there is no investigation or pushback on suspicious circumstances in Ohio. They got bolder. Come 2012, Rove’s freakout and Anon’s claim they stopped a dirty play in the act. Not even a hint of an investigation into allegations of potential GOP fraud. Even after it is conceded that such a play was theoretically possible given the poor state of Ohio’s computerized system.
2016, look where we are now. Good men and women did nothing.
artem1s
we keep getting lots and lots of info on the Trump voters. They are pretty much who we know they were. Typical GOP voters. Maybe there were a few who were pissed at Shrub and voted for Obama in 2008. But they were pissed because the GOP wasn’t odious enough for them or they were full metal New World Order whacko’s voting anti Rino. They aren’t reliable. Less people voted for President Bannon that either Bush Mobster, Mittster, McCain, and St Raygun.
Those non-voters, I don’t see much effort being made to find out more about them. What are the demographics? What percentage are because of suppression? Where do they live? I see a lot of assumptions about them (young, urban, poor, POC). but never any firm numbers. I’d like to know more about them.
sharl
@artem1s: There certainly hasn’t been enough work along those lines, but there have been some efforts. Read hovercraft’s comment (#51), and go to his link from that comment, which discusses in some detail such an initiative in Harris County, Texas (Houston area).
Shalimar
@Jinchi: I do too. if 5-25% didn’t vote, that means the overwhelming majority did.
Omnes Omnibus
From an earlier thread: The first thing I would do is work on getting those who want to vote the tools they need to do so. A strong effort to get a valid ID into everyone’s hands. Next everyone needs to be pointing out to everyone they know that this election was so close that just a few more people in a few precincts would have swung it the other – that their vote matters. I was talking to a young AA woman the other day who expressed fear about Trumpism but also said that she did vote because her vote didn’t matter. We need to reach people like her.
Wjs
@TenguPhule: bullshit. Obama won. Twice.
Stan
@Brachiator:
That has traditionally been the case.It is really, really hard to get people who don’t vote into the habit of voting. Huge respect to anyone who can pull that off on any scale.
I have worked on a lot of campaigns and this argument comes up every single time. And, every single time, the idea of trying to change nonvoters into voters is discarded as too much of a lift for any one campaign. That said, maybe it is exactly what a *party* ought to be doing. I used to think I knew the answer to that.
Stan
@schrodingers_cat:
The British Indian Army was an all-volunteer force of 2.5 million men, fielding some very highly regarded units.
The INA was maybe 40,000 men at most, and made essentially no contribution to the Japanese war effort.
I am not sure it’s true either that the British Indian Army ever stopped supporting the raj nor that, if it did, it was a major factor in the British decision to quit India. I have always read that british bankruptcy after WW2 was the major factor.
Perhaps also worth noting, the post-1948 Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian Armies all originated with the British Indian Army and all three retain most of those traditions.