Nobody wants to say it, but maybe the problem isn’t that Democrats suck at messaging or that the media is wired for Republicans. Maybe too many American voters are just…dumbasses.
A New York Times interview with a Democratic pollster who conducted post-election focus groups with suburban Virginia Biden-Youngkin voters got me thinking about this. (A caveat: the pollster, Brian Stryker, was commissioned by Third Way, and they have an agenda.) Some excerpts from the interview:
Q: What is [the Democratic Party’s] branding problem, in a nutshell?
A: People think we’re more focused on social issues than the economy — and the economy is the No. 1 issue right now.
Huh. I’m not in Virginia, but I saw a Youngkin ad featuring a weepy white mom talking about how McAuliffe let Toni Morrison hate-crime her son. Not seeing the economic angle there, and actually, the economy is pretty damn good.
That said, we know there is a disconnect between perceptions and reality. Stryker says his focus group participants were fixated on the cost of gas and groceries. He also said this:
Voters don’t think that in general a lot of Democrats felt really bad about closing the schools or felt like it was really a negative on people. I think showing some empathy on that could go a long ways in terms of: Yes, closing schools was hard on kids and hard on parents.
Grownups shouldn’t require that level of hand-holding, but okay, there’s probably some truth to that. Biden ran on reopening schools safely, but some people probably just heard local squabbling about it, saw their kids regressing and understandably got pissed off. It costs nothing to acknowledge the difficulty. It’s real.
Here’s the part that made me want to fill a half-empty, two-liter bottle of Coke with a pint of bourbon, drop in a handful of Mentos and chug the resulting geyser:
Q: One of the things you also said in the memo was that McAuliffe’s strategy of linking Mr. Youngkin to former President Donald Trump was ineffective. What in the conversations with your groups made that clear?
A: The respondents kind of laughed at that approach. They said, “Oh, these silly ads that compared Youngkin to Trump — he just doesn’t seem like that guy.” The thing that these people disliked about Trump was that they didn’t like Donald Trump the person; it wasn’t Donald Trump the constellation of policies…
Q: How much does Mr. Biden himself take the blame with these voters? Is his name invoked?
A: It’s Biden, Democrats — they all come together.
Q: But it’s not like with Trump, where voters single him out?
A: No…
Got that? Almost without exception, Republicans behave like servile worms, propping up the most unpopular president in American history as he bungled a deadly pandemic, presided over an economic collapse, lost the presidency, House and Senate and then tried to overthrow the government to cling to power. None of that sticks to them. Democrats hold power during an unprecedented jobs boom, but gas and chicken part-pack prices go up. It sticks to every single one of them. WTF?
Open thread.
Final Preview of 2022 Pets of Balloon Juice: Calendar B!
polyorchnid octopunch
I’ve been watching Americans discuss voting for many years on various social media. I am forced to conclude that a majority of (at least) white America are as children with schoolyard beefs about their franchise.
Kent
Who the hell did they actually focus group? A bunch of stealth local GOP operatives like the NYT usually goes to when they want to do “man on the street” interviews about political topics
Although I do sort of get the part about Trump. A lot of low information “swingy” voters actually do vote the person not the party. I have aunts and other relatives who do that. Makes me want to tear my hair out. But it belies a total ignorance of how government actually operates.
Antonius
Media. I could rewrite every panicky MSM headline to emphasize the actual positive news currently buried in paragraph 23.
Gozer
Politics is like Survivor for most white people. They might be invested in an outcome to the extent they have a favorite, but even then, the outcome is largely irrelevant (or assumed to be irrelevant) to their day-to-day lives.
*Everything* in the political realm is relevant to the daily lives of people in out-groups. Policy, political figures, media dynamics, our very existences, etc. It’s all political.
VOR
As George Carlin said “Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that. “
Alison Rose
Got it in one.
UncleEbeneezer
And seeing as CRT Panic/Whitelash was a big part of the narrative in Virginia, here is a great Atlantic article by Ibram X. Kendi: The Mantra of White Supremacy
The idea that anti-racist is a code word for “anti-white” is the claim of avowed extremists.
“Some Democrats have predictably made it a bipartisan affair. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, recently told the Los Angeles Times, “This idea that racial reckoning has gone too far and now white people are the ones suffering is the most predictable thing in the world if you understand American history.”
Centrists told abolitionists that they’d gone too far and provoked the backlash (causing southern secession). Centrists told King and other civil-rights activists that they’d gone too far and provoked the backlash (causing Democrats to lose elections in 1966 and 1968). Some centrist Democrats today say “woke” politics have gone too far and provoked the “wokelash” (causing Democrats to lose elections in 2021). “Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” the Democratic political strategist James Carville said after the 2021 elections. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.” Actually, GOP operatives are expressing (or whistling) an anti-white language that anti-racists just don’t use—and there’s a backlash and frustration at that.
“Anti-racism is anti-white” is the mantra dividing the Democratic Party, especially since the 2021 elections. It is the mantra unifying the Republican Party, especially since the 2020 election. There are numerous variations on this mantra. “Wokeism” or anti-racism or critical race theory or the 1619 Project or “cancel culture” or Black Lives Matter or anyone challenging racial inequity is said to be anti-white or racist or an anti-white racist. And variations on this mantra have become so ubiquitous in the American political discourse that people can easily dismiss or deny its origin in white-supremacist thought.”
Kendi details how this sort of attempt to make anti-racism a deadly/existential threat to White People has been used time and time again throughout our history. Sadly, it still works on way too many white voters.
Dorothy A. Winsor
A lot of people reacted to the fact that TFG was crude and low-class. Which he is. And I reacted to it too. But that wasn’t why he was a terrible president.
Also, re Betty’s original point, it never hurts to remember that half the people have IQs below 100. (Or what VOR said)
As a semi-related factoid, the price of gas around here seems to have dropped 5 cents or so in the last week.
bluegirlfromwyo
From what I saw, the sole economic proposal Youngkin had on ads in NOVA was cutting the grocery tax. Everything else was crime, CRT-adjacent, look I play basketball, and see I have a black friend ads. It was probably pretty palatable for a suburban voter who considers themselves a good person for being polite to individual black people while blaming minorities for every other problem at the dinner table.
SiubhanDuinne
Boy howdy, but Chris Cillizza [ptui!] sure has the knives out for Vice President Harris. I made the terrible mistake of going to the CNN site to see what was going on in news this afternoon, saw a big piece titled “What In Heck Is Going On With Kamala Harris?”, thought to myself “That has to be a hit job by Cillizza” … and then?
Reader, I clicked through. It was an unforgivable and stupid thing to do, and it gives me no satisfaction at all to report that it was by Cillizza and it was a hit job.
I need to take a nap now, and hope I can dream this away.
Cermet
Easy to explain – fascism is innate to amerikans; look no further then the slave based constitution. Racism, fascism are as amerikan as apple pie (which, of course, isn’t amerikan at all but that is what amerikans do – TAKE CREDIT FOR GOOD while doing the worst.)
Edmund Dantes
@Gozer: you can see this when people complain about “why do you have to bring politics into X” (sports, movies, recreation, any activity they’ve designated as a safe place).
White (males mostly) people have a huge blind spot for how much of their life is actually political cause they just see it as default and not as the outcome of very political decisions in the past (or currently).
Edmund Dantes
@Dorothy A. Winsor: and this is where the Dem political strategy of talking up the “good” Republican Party was always stupid. It plays into the fact that Liz Cheney is a-okay even though her positions are just as atrocious as Trump’s. She just puts a better face on it.
zhena gogolia
@Edmund Dantes: Yeah.
Poe Larity
The Democrats problem has always been the hard bigotry of lifted expectations.
jeffreyw
Makes no more sense than a cat-run B&B
MikefromArlington
Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.
Ruckus
@polyorchnid octopunch:
As is always true, no group of any large size is completely uniform in it’s beliefs, actions and words. In general though our current politics gives a bit of a run to that concept and most of that is down to our current “news” organizations. They may have their shinning moments of actual truth but mostly they are the output of the owners/publishers ideals, morals and money. Well over half of my working life was working for my father or for myself and the majority of that, I was the boss/owner. I wasn’t anywhere near the size of the national news organizations but I still had say on what went on, because they were my businesses and I signed the paychecks. That doesn’t mean I controlled every working moment but the output reflected my opinions and directions. That same concept goes at most every business ever. The owner/boss gets their way because they are in control and sign the paychecks. There is no magic in the news business, any more than there is in any other business. You do what you were hired for and what the boss wants or you walk.
danielx
Yes, a great many of our fellow citizens are morons. You’re telling me you just noticed? Say it ain’t so!
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
Very good analysis.
Hildebrand
People are dumb, no doubt about it. But when we are assigning the ‘dumb’ tag to folks, lets not let McAuliffe and his campaign team off the hook. I mean, honestly, it takes some work to fumble away a win to a one percenter like Youngkin.
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Some stations are down a few cents most are not around here in socal.
Kay
I’m just not that impressed with the analysis.
That’s from the memo, not the article about the memo.
Normal voters really said that? “I think you’re too focused on social issues”?
And then there’s no mention of the “social issues” voters supposedly object to! Paid leave isn’t a “social issue”
I was actually disappointed in the quality of the thing. It doesn’t tell me anything.
Biden can say he’s “getting people back to work” all he wants and there are still going to be Help Wanted signs because we’re at full employment. He can’t produce more (and more subservient) low wage workers out of thin air. The reason they need all those workers is these same people are spending a shit ton of money. If they notice that chicken parts have gone up 20% one would think they would notice that they’re buying a ton of other stuff, so it doesn’t even work as a “out of touch with the common man” analysis.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Party holding the White House always gets blamed for anything. Doesn’t matter who’s in office.
A very popular guy like Eisenhower lost 19 seats in his first midterm and 49 seats in his second midterm.
Even the Great Communicator, Dutch Reagan, who personally tore down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands, lost 26 seats in his first midterm and a whopping 8 senates seats in his second midterm.
Kay
I’m sorry but the only people who say “you’re too focused on social issues” are political people.
I need verification and actual quotes. These normies sound like pollsters.
LeftCoastYankee
A New York Times interview with a Third Way guy.
OR another attempt to legitimize/whitewash dumb advice for Dems to throw their base (and democracy) overboard to make the corporate class less nervous about voting against the fascists they’ve enabled for the last 40 years.
Yeah… no thanks Mr. Stryker.
Kay
The same voters who are intensely sensitive to gas prices are spending on other things like there’s no tomorrow, so their gas price anxiety seems weirdly detached from their perceptions about all non-gas purchases. Is this how thrifty people operate? No, it is not.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I would also add the party holding the White House has lost the Virginia governor’s race for 40 consecutive years.
When Reagan/Bush Sr were in the WH they lost the state house 3 consecutive times. When Shrub was in the WH, during an era declared by the liburl media as a “permanent republican majority”, they lost the state house both times.
etc. etc.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
She is popular, democratic, successful, smart, good at her job, and black.
That the major media outlets would not attack her is unrealistic. It goes against the entire political concepts of the majority of media outlet owners, and that is that money is the end all be all of life and taxes and government are evil.
OGLiberal
@Kay:@Kay: “Social issues” = free stuff for those “other” people who don’t deserve it. Paid family leave? Only lazy black people want that. Or gay Secretaries of Transportation.
Villago Delenda Est
Third Way is a group of parasite fuckwits who would be Rethuglican, but they can’t live with the dog whistles. Or, in the TFG era, the air raid klaxons. As for the Village, well, Ripley’s advice is appropriate.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: The media owners? Tumbrel rides for the lot of them.
The Moar You Know
@Alison Rose: assuming this is true, and I don’t see any compelling argument that it isn’t, here’s the trillion dollar question: how do Democrats compete effectively in an electorate comprised of morons?
Because they’re going to have to.
OGLiberal
@Kay: Also, as I noted in a previous thread, the worst part was this:
“A big part of the problem was that people didn’t feel they knew enough about McAuliffe and what he had done.”
I can understand this because McAuliffe never held office in the state. Wait, he held office but it wasn’t governor. OK, he was governor but it was way back in 1972. No….scratch that….he was governor – and popular – four fucking years ago!
Stupid and lying assholes. Y’all just don’t want your white suburban ass kids to learn that white people once owned black people, it was bad, and your fucking state was the epicenter. And that’s not history or fact – it’s this weird liberal commie plot called CRT.
Meyerman
I teach in a high school in Massachusetts. I have been wondering about why it has been so hard to stay focused on my job lately. Today, as I ate lunch after work, it hit me. Teaching is about the future, but I am not sure we have one. Not sure how to deal with it, as I have two teenagers.
Poe Larity
I’d missed this gem: Judas in SF ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ Arrested For Role in Capitol Insurrection
His Michael Jackson jacket gave him away.
sab
@Kay: My stepson a young machinist got fed up with all the gas price bellyaching at work. He told the last whiner ” Well why did you buy a $65,000 pickup that gets 12 miles a gallon? I’m doing fine with my Honda Civic.” He hasn’t heard any gas price whining since.
OGLiberal
@The Moar You Know: Fear. It’s ugly, it’s gross, it’s often filled with lies but the alternative gets you a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS.
Time to play nasty.
Villago Delenda Est
@jeffreyw: Management doesn’t value the customer. Management values the customer’s money.
UncleEbeneezer
@Ruckus: Also applies to Feminism, which has forever been framed as a threat to men, the backlash of which we see/saw with Gamergate, CrookedHillary, Kavanaugh and are now in SCOTUS.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The genius of the right is that the wealthy own the major media outlets and yet most of them have been branded “the liberal media”, except the chosen few conservative outlets. All the rich guys had to do was buy everything up, spike a few news outlets with the right hated liberal types (Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper and so on) and then have the politicians they own train their peeps to hate the news. Freedom of the press today means that the owners of the media are free to fuck us all. We are kept stupid and fighting because it allows the crooks to keep the rubes in line.
Our news is absolutely worthless. If a conservative can watch something being reported on in the news and come away less informed than they were before they watched it, then the news has done its job as intended. The news is designed to keep the public misinformed and at each others throats, just like the wealthy and their politicians want. Why?
So we don’t go for THEIR throats. Divide and conquer. It works.
Brachiator
I don’t know. I think that a lot of the problem is that Democrats keep playing the media’s game and buy into the lie that “messaging” and “branding” are meaningful or important.
I have no idea why gas prices are high. It is not a though the evil Democrats have shut down the oil industry. Nor am I certain that there are any quick solutions here. Maybe more electric cars.
With groceries and other goods, much of this seems to be companies making up for losses during the lockdown, and adjustments related to supply chain issues. I listened to some great podcasts on the public radio programs Marketplace and The Indicator that noted that in many cases, goods produced for supermarkets and home use (garlic or even toilet tissue, for example), were not quite the same as products headed for restaurants. So, lockdown adjustments often required shutting down one distribution flow and ramping up another. And now, we are adjusting again as we more or less return to normal. And there is some greed in the mix as well.
And some media outlets are intent on painting the Democrats in a bad light, and a chunk of the populace are willing to believe them.
Republicans and lazy pundits keep pushing the lie that “massive” spending by Democrats cause inflation, even though economists and the financial markets keep saying that the total amounts already pumped into the economy and the amounts projected to come from Biden’s BBB plan are not a problem. But very important people (looking at you, Senator Manchin) cannot get past the conventional wisdom that tax cuts are good, but government spending, which can have a similar effect, is bad bad bad baddie bad bad.
And Trumpsters. Some of these people seem to be willing to die to support lies, conspiracies and nonsense. That is some grim dedication to a lost cause. But I don’t know how you can counter this.
mrmoshpotato
@Edmund Dantes: Yup. And then there’s “Oh look! Liz Cheney voted with the Democratic majority on these two bills! She’s our ally!”
What about the mountain of atrocious shit she’s voted Yes on in the past? What about the other atrocious shit she votes for these days?
Gvg
@Edmund Dantes: Um, since she is against overthrowing the government and may lose her next election because of it….her positions are in fact better than Trumps. Yes she is abortion ban and tax cuts for billionaires and too pro war plus supporting things like shutting down the government to I guess prove the republicans are bully’s but accepting election results is a pretty big deal to me.
zhena gogolia
@sab: Haha, my Honda Civic is also doing great.
Hoodie
I’d say a lot of Americans are not necessarily stupid, but more ill-informed because they’re too lazy and/or harried to become informed. Our educational system generally sucks, particularly because it’s undermined by a lack of social support for families and children and a heavy dose of tribalism that leads some groups to wear ignorance and shitty behavior as a badge of honor.
I recall reading an account of how Finland reformed their education system to become one of the best in the world. At one point, they had one of the worst systems in Europe. They finally came to a group acknowledgement that they sucked, but they had no one to blame but themselves.
I think a lot of (mostly white) folks in America don’t want to acknowledge know how shitty they’ve become, so they avoid such a reckoning by creating myths about their own greatness and blaming social ills on other groups. That’s much easier to do than looking into your own soul. Shameless politicians and media grifters exploit this.
Brachiator
@Edmund Dantes:
Sez white peeples as military jets fly overhead, American flags get waved, a color guard consisting of Armed forces personnel and a cordon of cops strut by, and some guy dressed as a Confederate general rides a white stallion and waves a sword while galloping across the field.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: As they say, you are merely factually correct.
This all feels like a bunch of addicts looking for an excuse to stick a needle in their arm again “sure, heroine landed me in the ER and my heart stopped twice, but I’ve been off it for two months and my life still sucks. “
OGLiberal
@Brachiator: All of what your wrote makes complete sense and is about 1,000 levels higher than the large majority of voters are ready to consider, research, listen to, etc.
Like my best friend – who actually did some part-time poli-sci professoring recently – said, the founders didn’t anticipate voters being so clueless, among other things. Of course, back then voting was pretty much reserved for the white, male, landed gentry and pretty sure we don’t want to go back to that, especially since that demo is the primary problem we have today.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The one I like is “Why do you have to bring up politics and racism in a discussion about the American Civil War/Germany in WWII”
hueyplong
All GOPers are shits if you look at their positions on issues we care about, but when some of them indicate a willingness to help on something important, why on earth would anyone refuse it? The mere presence of a pair of GOPers on the J6 committee has FoxNews playing defense and the rest of the media declining to talk about how “partisan” it is, the better to “both sides” acts of actual treason.
No doubt further digging will be done on the subject, but it looks like VA was lost on a totally made up issue that only exists because “Dems’ Imposition of Sharia Law” got stale and difficult to take seriously. They will always make something up just before elections. Attack the newly made up thing aggressively, but don’t turn down GOPers, however repugnant, who are willing to walk the walk with Dems on an important issue.
Kent
HS teacher here too. And I also have two teenagers. Teaching is actually what keeps me more positive and optimistic than I otherwise might be if all I did is wallow in the news.
Walking to class at 8 am this morning I passed the band room where the kids were working on beautiful brass renditions of Christmas carols that they will be performing at our local town Christmas tree lighting festival tomorrow evening. In front there were groups of students busy with the “stuff the bus” food drive for local food banks. Various universities were setting up for college fairs and visits. Various LGBT and trans kids were hanging out socializing openly which would have been beyond inconceivable when I was in HS decades ago. Teaching quickly makes you realize that the kids are very much all right. And they, more than anything else, are what keeps me hopeful about the future. Not always optimistic perhaps, but at least hopeful.
The other thing I remind myself is that one can dial back the historical clock and find any other moment in history when there was reason for despair and loss of hope. If you were in Europe in 1940. Or a black family in South Carolina in 1850. Or a Black or Hispanic girl in 1950 who wants to be a doctor. It might have been Norman Rockwell’s America if you were white and middle class. But not for anyone else.
The Soviet Union was an impregnable monolith for decades and decades until suddenly it wasn’t. Today’s GOP monolith is built on far shakier foundations than that. And in a country that is changing far faster than they can control.
That doesn’t mean I’m ever complacent. The orcs are always at the door so to speak. Except when they are already inside. So we can never let down our guard. But I don’t lose hope.
Ksmiami
@Villago Delenda Est: and the shareholders
jeffreyw
@Villago Delenda Est:
Show me the peanuts, pal.
Brachiator
BTW, true Southern California lockdown story. Supermarkets didn’t have any toilet paper on their shelves. A local eatery was only doing takeout. After ordering a sandwich to go, the owner asked if I needed any toilet tissue. Since he no longer was serving sit down diners, and nobody was using his restroom except staff, he had an excess of paper supplies that he had ordered before the pandemic, which was just locked away in a storage room.
For weeks, while the news blared about how people could not get tissue and paper towels, I was in double ply heaven. And for a reasonable price.
Also reinforced what I had learned about consumer and restaurant industry supply chains.
NotMax
‘Twas ever thus. While I know better it really sounds as if the turnip truck you fell off is still in sight. FDR was the exception which proves the rule.
UncleEbeneezer
Just started reading Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler and holy shit was she prophetic:
“By the time she began working on the Parable books, in 1989, Butler was in her forties and had written nine novels. The series, she decided, would be her “If this goes on…” story. In colorful diagrams, Butler extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. (“More Hispanics,” she writes in one notebook. “More High Tech.”) Butler took a cyclical view of history. She also thought social progress was reversible. As the public sphere became hollowed out, a fear of change would create an opening for retrograde politics. With collapse, racism would become more overt.
The sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.””
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again
Spanky
@The Moar You Know:
All politics is
personallocalemotional.Make them afraid.
It’s what Republicans always do, and what Democrats have always been too “go high” to do. They want to operate above the lizard brain, and that’s right where the Republicans beat them.
Make them afraid.
Right now the GOP propaganda machine is in high gear coming up with tropes to assuage everyone’s visceral response to the upcoming Supreme Court decisions in order to tamp down backlash in the 2022 elections. Right now the Democrats should be cranking out the messaging about what a world without Roe will be like. I’m not holding my breath.
sab
@Brachiator:Well that was interesting. Big city communities are tighter than we small city people think.
My husband hates the single ply I bought in that era. Same brand I used back when I lived with a septic tank. Seemed fine to me. He still gripes that that is our backup for the next shortage.
Spanky
@Hoodie: No, I can guaran-damn-tee you that half the population is of below average intelligence.
NotMax
@Kent
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
/pedant heaven
;)
Hoodie
@Spanky: Yeah, but what is the average compared to, say, cocker spaniels or fence posts?
Brachiator
@Kent:
I used to think that the worst thing to happen to America in recent history was Trump.
And then the pandemic hit. First in Europe in small numbers and assurances from Trump that it was nothing. And then it swelled and almost overwhelmed us.
The development and deployment of an effective vaccine in record time almost seems miraculous.
This is history. This is our and world history.
We are not totally out from under.
And maybe he did it already and I missed it, but if I were Biden I would add some kind of big fat celebration and remembrance on top of Christmas, so that those of us who did all the good things in relation to the pandemic could pat ourselves on the back and take a moment to remember and maybe even gloat a little bit.
And throw it in the faces of the GOP and anti vaxx fools.
NotMax
@sab
Geminid
I would not read too much into the Virginia election result, much less “focus group” commentary. I would just observe that Youngkin was a much more attractive candidate than someone in the liberal bubble might believe. Youngkin may have been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but he was well tailored and came across as a very acceptable ram. And Youngkin made the most of a narrow path to victory by running an efficient and effective campaign. McAuliffe, on the other hand, did not.
I did not follow this campaign too intensively, but I had the impression that McAuliffe took Youngkin lightly, and may have been overconfident.
My friend Debbie happened to come out this afternoon to feed her bees (she has two hives on the property I caretake). Debbie brought up the election, so I asked her if she thought McAuliffe was overconfident. She snorted, and said McAullife was “confident enough to put up thousands of f##cking signs with just his first name on them.” Being a practical person, Debbie said that plenty of voters don’t pay enough attention to know who “Terry” is. And even if they knew, here was a politician, acting like he was a voter’s buddy.
I’m hoping there will be some good in depth reporting on how McAullife’s campaign blew a winnable election. People probably will want to just move on, though. But they may move on with the wrong lessons.
schrodingers_cat
It is simple actually, and it boils down to race. The Republican party is the party of majority of white people and the Democratic party is the party of everyone else. Hence Rs get all the passes and Ds get none
Liberal white dominated spaces have their own issues too but that is a comment for another thread.
Kent
@Brachiator: Yes. Wonderful idea. But has to be done right or will be perceived to be spiking the football before you reach the end zone. Like Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” tour.
Trump was horrible but so was Bush and I am of mixed opinion of who’s legacy will be worse long term. Trump didn’t start two wars and set the world on fire. And I will take Pence over Cheney any day if you put a gun to my head. I think we forgot how absolutely horrible the Bush era neocons were.
Trump is a seminal figure in our recent history. He is either going to bring the country down in ruin. Or he is going to bring the GOP down in flames around him. It is going to be one or the other and I’m not sure which yet. I’m not sure anyone really knows yet.
schrodingers_cat
@Kent: Tangerine Tantrum set this country on fire with immigrants as the kindling. W didn’t try to stage a coup after his defeat either.
There is really no comparison on who was worse.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
The GOP also makes pitches to Hispanics, Asians and others on condition that they take an oath to a conservative filtered vision of American values.
And so you get people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Yes one can always find self serving individuals in any demographic but Democrats have won all the groups you mentioned by healthy margins for at least a decade if not more.
In the last election this was the breakdown for Biden
43% white
92% black
59% Hispanic
72 % Asian
Brachiator
@Kent:
Or both.
ETA: To those always on the lookout for it, I am not just doom mongering. If Trump brings ruin, it will be because the Republicans and the fools who follow them, persist in wanting to throw away democracy. But good people defeated Trump and see through him. And I think they will continue to do so.
But Republicans are fighting hard to cling to failure, fear and stupidity.
janesays
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: 40 consecutive years, save one – 2013. Terry McAuliffe was elected VA governor that year, with a Democrat in the White House.
FlyingToaster
I’ve been convinced for 40 years (!) that the movie Stripes said it all:
Link to full Quote
Fair Economist
@Kent: The focus groups I saw were mostly Biden-Youngkin voters. So they were selected to be those who fell for Youngkin’s charade. It wasn’t blatantly false like the typical NYT “undecided voter” (who is actually a Republican operative) although the results have been overstated – most Biden voters did NOT fall for it.
Fair Economist
@Geminid: My main takeaway from the VA election is that if the media isn’t *forced* to acknowledge a Republican is a Trump flunky by his own bad behavior, we can’t win by tying him to Trump. We have to attack him on his own lack of merit – which fortunately is always there.
OGLiberal
@Spanky: As I stated above, fear works. Sad to sad, though, that Roe is the wrong issue. I have no scientific data to back this up but even among supporters I think their belief is they, their kid, their grandkid, etc, will never need and abortion and if a circumstance, by rare chance, comes up where it’s something to consider, they’ll have the baby and deal with it. They may empathize with people for whom that choice is not really an option but they won’t go to the barricades to fight for it. It’s “somebody elses” problem. Have to find something more universal, less “uncomfortable”, more could happen to me tomorrow. In VA, apparently, suburban voters thought that every teacher, right now, today, was telling their white kids that they are to blame for all that ails this nation and that they are the actual second-class citizens. True? Fuck no. But it worked. We need to scare, exagerrate and maybe even lie a bit because, again, not doing that gives us a 6-3 SCOTUS where it’s too late to raise Roe fears even though, I fear/believe, that wouldn’t really work anyway. If voters were so scared of Roe being overturned we wouldn’t have gotten Trump – or any Republican (because Jeb Bush would have nominated the same fucking judges from the spoon fed Federalist Society list) in 2016.
What do we scare people about. Not sure. Maybe follow the GOP playback and make shit up because the real stuff people should be afraid of is just too complicated – not really – for them to understand. I mean, fuck, say that the next GOP presidential candidate is in cahoots with Saudia Arabia and gas is going to go up to 6 dollars a gallon. Hell, that may even be true but say it even if it isn’t.
Betty
@Antonius: Dan Froomkin is doing that at Press Watch and on Twitter.
UncleEbeneezer
@Fair Economist: Very good point. Probably “Never” Trumper Republicans. They are exactly the type who would give these sorts of answers to justify voting GOP. The Dems Made Me Do It!
drunkenhausfrau
I would like the first few sentences of this post embroidered on a pillow. Then, I would like to order a gross of them, to gift to everyone I know. Merry holidays.
Dave
@UncleEbeneezer: my feelings exactly. Just finished it last week
Steeplejack
@Dorothy A. Winsor, @Ruckus:
I paid $3.36 a gallon this morning at my neighborhood station in NoVA. That’s unchanged from November 8 but up 30¢ from September 28. (I get gas only about once a month.)
trnc
Huh? I don’t remember anyone glossing over the difficulty of school closings. That was pretty well acknowledged, but it was outweighed by the possibility of serious illness or death. Most dems I know of were super psyched about schools re-opening. as long as there were some safety precautions. If everyone had gotten on board with those precautions instead of fighting them tooth and nail, we might not be talking about this right now.
Geminid
@Fair Economist: Almost all of Biden’s voters did not fall for Youngkin’s slick act. Enough Independents fell for it to make good Youngkin’s narrow path to victory. Independents comprise almost a third of Virginia’s electorate. Probably only a fifth of them are true swing voters, but they exist and Youngkin went after them hard and, I think, successfully.
And Republicans were unusually united compared to their recent history in Virginia. Youngkin’s tactic of pushing Critical Race Theory worked well here. It rallied the radical Republican base just as effectively as hollering about babies being killed or guns being grabbed, but without alienating moderately conservative Independent and Republican voters.
kindness
I don’t think that poll is very good. Third Way has an agenda.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: It does not boil down to race. I am white British/Swiss/Scandanavian background.
Trumps’s mom and my ancestors came from the same tiny island in the western Scottish Hebrides. He and mine don’t think alike. His own cousins hate him. This talk is stupid.
I have nephews and other race grandchildren. I have brothers in law from other countries and cultures. Also a brother in law and a husband from another religion.+aq My acceptance of the possibility came long before there were children. Otherwise I would have rejected them, an easy option in our America
ETA My mother’s family have been Republican since Lincoln. Her father had sisters who spent twenty years teaching in southern Sudan before WWII. They loved their time there.
Geminid
@Fair Economist: I have several tentative takeaways from the Virginia election, and some are speculative. One of these is: did Terry McAuliffe spend so many years hobnobbing with elite Democrats that he forgot how to talk to regular voters as people? McAullife rode his gladhanding fundraising prowess to his first term as Governor, and may not have learned skills Democrats like Tim Kaine and Ralph Northam learned on their way up.
Like McAuliffe, Mark Warner moved from business into the Governor’s office. But Warner put in a lot of hard work to make himself a good retail politician. Warner may come across a little clunky, but he seems more authentic than McAulliffe.
trnc
@Alison Rose:
No surprise when “common sense” (ie, refusing to think through anything) is King, intellectualism (thinking about stuff) is reviled and teachers are targeted for abuse for not basing lessons on the Bible.
Honus
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: more like 50 years, until Obama’s second term. That was McAuliffes first term.
Kalakal
@Edmund Dantes:
This. Drives me crazy when I hear the “Oh, I’m not interested in politics” crap. Really?
Their salaries, healthcare, drinking water aren’t the resuit of some ineluctable force of nature. Politics determines the quality of their kids education not the 2nd law of thermodynamics
lose cousin to the “Both sides do it”.
UncleEbeneezer
@Dave: I read Parable of the Sower about 6 months ago and loved it. Especially since I’m in Los Angeles (generally) and Altadena (specifically) where Butler lived for many years. So alot of the references are very local, for me.
Big Picture Pathologist
I figured out Republicans weren’t particularly discriminating voters when they nominated a transexual satanist for county sheriff, surely just because she was clever to put an ‘(R)’ by her name.
I mean, she’s cool as hell, but you can’t tell me the majority of voters intended to do that:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/transsexual-satanist-anarchist-wins-gop-nomination-for-nh-county-sheriff/ar-BB1950ql
Kent
@trnc: I don’t think people were that critical of school closings. I think more were critical of failure to reopen. How long, for example, has it taken San Francisco schools to re-open? Are they even open yet? I think lots of parents (and I’m both a teacher and parent) perceived a complete lack of urgency to reopen schools, especially this past fall after schools had all summer to prep and vaccines were universally available for staff. Dems may or may not be to blame for that. But if they are running the state they are going to get the blame rightly or wrongly. My understanding was that lots of VA schools were pretty slow to reopen.
OGLiberal
@Big Picture Pathologist: This is hilarious but I also think it was a case of just straight ticket voting …checking your party’s candidate from top down even if you don’t know half of them. (Full disclosure – I usually know them all but may not like some and may not know a few but if they have a D next to them, I’m voting for them. I never voted for a Republican and this is the worst time to start) So I think this was likely a case where the local GOP didn’t even bother because they weren’t going to win and this woman stepped in and took advantage of that
ETA: She probably knew all of this as well and took advantage of it.
OGLiberal
@Kent: Could the delay have been related to some asshole teachers/staff not getting vaccinated, an expectation that under 13 kids would be vaccinated already but aren’t, delays in getting better ventilation systems in place and, finally, figuring out how to deal with the lunatics with guns who may surround your school if you say unvaxxed kids need to wear a mask?
Related, I watched some scary videos by students from that recent school shooting in Michigan. Almost all of them were wearing masks, even while a classmate was shooting up the school. If they can do that why can’t adults just put the fucking thing on in the grocery store?
SiubhanDuinne
@UncleEbeneezer:
Jesus. This is a scarily accurate description of TFG’s daily security briefings.
Kent
It honestly makes no fucking difference what the excuses were. Much of the country re-opened schools by last spring, at least in hybrid mode. Most by last fall. If you were in an area or district where that wasn’t happening then local politicians were going to get the rage, whether they had anything to do with it or not. That’s life. It might not be fair. But I think it explains part of the VA elections.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
Not sure what “defeat” you’re referring to. W served two full terms.
OGLiberal
@Kent: OK, so was opening schools the right thing to do no matter what? In Fall 2020? My company (not a small one and certainly not forward thinking) only opened like a few weeks ago and you have to be vaccinated to go to the office and only 3 days/week) Schools are a petri dish of germs in normal times – sending unvaxxed kids back without requiring masks was a great idea why? I get that people don’t always have childcare options but why not work on that v. forcing kids back into a germ pool
ETA: Or maybe make companies let people who sit at a desk all day work from home. Something tells me that most of those Biden to Youngkin suburban voters weren’t working at an Amazon distribution center or grocery store.
ThresherK
The “problem” with Dem messaging is that it’s whatever Meet the Press, CN (InflationOogedyBoogedy)N, the NY (But her Emails) Times, and Wa (Fred Hiatt) Post say it is, which is in stark contrast to GOP messaging which is always successful and memorable and brilliant even in the great number of times it leads to a loss.
schrodingers_cat
@SiubhanDuinne: Good catch, my bad. Correction: Didn’t try to install himself the President after his 2 terms were over.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: I was talking not talking about individuals but about how Rs are treated by the media vs. the Ds. I am not sure I follow your comment.
OGLiberal
@ThresherK: The GOP doesn’t give a fuck what the media says. Trump was fact checked 9 million times and, while he lost, he got millions more voters than he did in 2016. Just say shit that will scare the fucking bejesus out of folks inclined to vote for you and fuck what Chris Cilizza says. That’s what the GOP does and it usually works. 95 percent of the country doesn’t read the NYT, WaPo, or watch CNN…fuck what they – the media folks – think. Again, that’s what the GOP does and it works. Trump lost because the pandemic sucked and he appeared to not care about it enough. No pandemic or Trump even acting somewhat serious about COVID and he’s still president, with another potential SCOTUS seat looming. You have to terrify people about what the other side is going to do. Trump did that, in a time of relative prosperity and calm, and it worked. Biden won simply because he was an old, white, calm dude and the old white irrational dude they really did like wasn’t taking the pandemic shit seriously. It was so obvious they didn’t even need the news to tell them that Nobody cared about the racism, the sexism, the insanity – it was that pandemic life sucked and Trump wasn’t making it better and maybe worse. Now, Biden isn’t making it better and there’s still mask shit so he sucks.
Make people terrified about what will happen if a Republican wins in 2024. Not my job to figure out how – people get paid good money to do that shit…just need to get them to stop focusing on winning back the “Reagan Democrats”. (eg, Third Way – FOD) They’re gone or dead. Their kids (I know a lot of them) are gone. Terrify the people you know are on your side and get their asses out to vote. I think we outnumber them – have to vote like they do, which is thinking that every election is an existential threat to society as we know it
Felanius Kootea
@sab: Unfortunately, it does boil down to race for those who embrace the GOP’s views that critical race theory is anything they don’t want their children to learn about what grandpa might have done during the civil rights era. It isn’t a coincidence that Democrats haven’t won the majority of the white vote in decades and Republicans get a pass on their lunacy as the default white majority party. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that there are no white Democrats or no Black or Hispanic Republicans.
schrodingers_cat
@Felanius Kootea: This!
If say 55% of white women consistently voted D, this country’s politics would see a sea change.
OGLiberal
@Felanius Kootea: And that is why it is a fool’s errand to chase those voters, regardless of what Third Way folks say. Joe Manchin can do what he needs to do in WV…I appreciate having his vote. Have no idea what Sinema’s play is given that her state is not trending red and is not at all like WV, which isn’t trending any direction because it’s all white people and minds are set there. Get the people who agree without you out to vote. Do stuff – even if unsuccessful…and point out that the other side is in the way of that success – that makes them want to vote. Reducing carbon emissions is great but you pretty much need to say, “your kids are going to die if we don’t.” May be true, may not be true. It will certainly be true in 100 years or so but most folks don’t care about 100 years from now. Has to be presented as a “tomorrow” equation, even if that’s hyperbolic. Just say it. If reducing carbon emissions was a GOP position that’s what they would do. Obama once said , “If they bring a know the fight, we bring a gun.” He never really did that – and I love the man – but that ‘s what you have to do. Not advocating Joe does it – not his style, nor was it Obama’s (and Obama also was tied down to never being able to be Luther) – but others can and should.
OGLiberal
@schrodingers_cat: Why don’t they?
Kent
It’s not a right or wrong question. I’m just explaining why it was an election issue. And we are talking fall of 2021 not fall of 2020. Washington Post just did an article about what happened when San Francisco schools stayed closed for 18 months. It isn’t pretty: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/12/02/high-school-pandemic-effects-virtual/
OGLiberal
@Kent: I mentioned Fall 2020 because you noted that a lot of schools opened last Fall. Do I think schools should be fully open now. Not sure. If there were a testing protocol and mask requirement at all schools I’d be a lot more comfortable about that but we know that ain’t going to happen. Last Fall, when schools were opening, or even this Spring, my company – thousands of employees globally, not some small business – wasn’t even thinking about having people back in the office. So keep the adults – many of whom could get vaccinated – at home but send the kids – most/many of whom couldn’t get vaccinated – back into the germ pool? Seems unfair and unwise. Does it suck? Yes. But irrational? Not at all. That people can’t understand the risks is, yes, their problem, but also a problem for politicians to have to explain those risks. But I still think it was stupid of people to say shit like “We haven’t gotten sick yet and I read that kids don’t get sick so send junior back.” It ain’t that simple. But as my wife has noted of her Trumpy friend and that friends family, people who vote for a jerk like Trump like their shit simple, even though most of life is not. (and their life experiences show them this time and time again but they still want “simple”)
Noskilz
Unfortunately, I think that there is a non-trivial number of voters out there who have no idea how anything in government works and absolutely no interest in finding out. And I don’t think it’s limited to just government: I get the impression that for a lot of people, the world is just a bunch of black boxes that they just imagine should automagically do whatever it is they imagine they want them to. All this information can be had more readily than at any point in history, but looking things up, much less understanding them, is someone else’s job and they can’t be bothered.
khead
Yeah this. A LOT of this. If I had a dollar for every time I tried to explain to some white dude from high school that his “it’s just common sense” solution is actually a GOP talking point I’d be retired.
OGLiberal
@Noskilz: As I noted above in this thread about my wife’s best friend and family who vote Republican (friend not exactly a Trumper but voted for him, parents may be the flag waving types), they just want things simple. The GOP presents issues as simple – immigration=bad….with simple solutions “build a wall”. People love that shit. Nothing is ever that simple but people want simple. The Dems are all nuance and bullet points and detail. You know, reality. But people hate that – makes them uncomfortable. And the last thing they want is bad news…even if it doesn’t affect them. But they often attribute bad news to Dems because that’s how they are conditioned. Kid kills 4 others kids in Michigan school…why weren’t there armed guards there? Why weren’t the teachers armed? Not, why the fuck did that kid have a handgun? Instead of dancing around the shit just say, “no fucking guns outside of hunting rifles that have to be fully licensed with a background check and not bought at some pop-up gun show at the drag race track parking lot”. (I am not being a region bigot here – I live in Central New Jersey and we have drag race track that had commercials on local radio back when I was in grade school) Seriously, the people who would be pissed at you for advocating this were never voting for you anyway and the NRA is fucking bankrupt. There are probably a lot of people who don’t vote but are scare shitless of guns how, when hearing that, might go out and vote instead of saying, “well, this has been a problem forever and it concerns me but when the party that says they care about it are in power they don’t do shit so why bother?” Folks don’t give a shit that you make bump stocks illegal. Get rid of the fucking guns and don’t worry about the gun humpers because they weren’t voting for you anyway.
Bonnie
There is one thing that can be done that will resolve our election problem: GET RID OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have had people push back with the excuse: Oh, but it is so hard! It takes too long! My answer to that is that is why you need to start now! It is NOT IMPOSSIBLE. I will help for as long as I can; but, I am 76 years old. I spent my youth protesting the Viet Nam war and working for the ERA, which still has not been past. I still hold out hope for that one. One other thing we can do is get out the vote for the 2022 election just as we did for this last election. All Americans who support Trump and some of the other scumbag Republicans need to be shown that there are MORE Americans who are PRO DEMOCRACY that pro authoritarin! Recently, the truth has been shown, that the Republicans ARE NOT pro life! One more thing to drum into the minds of thinking Americans. Republicans are AGAINST life and AGAINST living in a DEMOCRATIC country.
Citizen Alan
@trnc: You mean not basing things on what half-literate boobs think is in the Bible. I stand by my belief that the majority of conservative Christians actually worship Satan but are too dumb to realize it.
Citizen Alan
@SiubhanDuinne: One wonders what Bush’s response would have been had Kerry taken Ohio by a very narrow margin.
nasruddin
Democrats oversold their competence.
People need to feel safe – at least the feeling, if not the reality.