Having a chance to talk to more people in meatspace this year, it was a surprise to find out how many people have only a passing interest in politics, but still vote. Like, the average user here probably reads 5+ news articles a day, but there are plenty of people IRL that will read one a month, or maybe just skim a headline. They don't really keep up-to-date with the race. They mostly vote by feel and pragmaticism.
People always talk about "shy" Trump voters, but what makes me more curious are voters that match the description above. If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
They have 401ks. Own small businesses. Have Mortgages. Send their kids to public schools. Budget for their families. Hell, even farmers are trading commodities and are very familiar with the markets. There are so many legitimate factors that go into who they vote for.
Then the last paragraph shows you have a long way to go.
> If you put someone in a voting booth who isn't interested by news, who do they vote for? I mean, Trump has a lot of surface-level qualities - he's a tall, confident white man who's a successful boss of business and an anti-establishment outsider - and maybe that's enough to capture this demographic.
I live in a rural working class region. I have beers with these guys all the time. They're my best friends and I'm the odd coder guy that works from home.
They do not care about the surface level qualities, besides the fact that he's hilarious. They might not read articles but they listen to podcasts a lot on their commutes at 4AM in the morning.
They don't want war with Russia, they're pissed about the COVID stuff, and they aren't happy with the price of gas.
They don't care that he's tall.
This is what America needs more of — people from different worlds just having beers together, and realizing that we’re all normal people trying to get by.
Do you know of anyone who can articulate a compelling case of why Trump would make a good president? I’m left-leaning but I want to understand where others are coming from.
1. Don't want war with Russia. Trump's presidency was relatively low-war. He's also expressed a great desire to end the Ukraine conflict. If the Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war, I'm on board. The moment that switched me to deciding on Trump was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.
2. Protecting kids. I don't think kids can consent to medical gender transition. It amounts to state sanctioned child abuse. I have kids. Once you're 18 go ahead do what you want.
3. Illegal immigration. I lived in South America for 4 years. My wife is Colombian, we just moved back to the States. Legally. It was a long and arduous process to come in legally. That should be made easier (something Musk at least has espoused) and coming in illegally should be made harder. I know quite a few illegal immigrants and they are being abused by the urban elite to build their summer homes. They're not living a better life and they're stuck here.
4. Federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has become a parasite on our progress. Just look at what's happening with SpaceX. This ties in with the immigration thing. The problems we have with immigration are actually that the lazy and corrupt bureaucracy takes years to process something that should take 2 hours. (and does! even in "third world" countries like Colombia)
5. Trust. Everyone who hates Trump likes to talk about how much he makes stuff up. But he's authentic. Meaning he rarely reads from a script. He talks off the cuff. He's not controlled. I'm tired of having politicians that basically hate half the country and think we're dumb because we don't like to listen to their corpo-bureaucrat speeches
On the contrary, the risk of nuclear war increases when Putin gets Donbas and Crimea. Because what he wants next will be even more valuable to nations with nukes.
Appeasing sounds great but at some point you run out of other people's countries.
Russia is gettin North Korean troops to fight for them because they are losing so bad, but Russia is also an aggressive superpower hell-bent on invading even more countries with far better defenses than Ukraine.
This isn't accounting for Russia's disastrous demographics problem. The biggest reason they are moving so slowly is because they can build new artillery, but are demographically forced to do everything they can to minimize casualties.
It also isn't accounting for Russia trying to get a permanent peace deal 2 months into the conflict. That's not the behavior of a country bent on conquest.
Finally, I can't take people seriously when they are basically asserting that Russia believed they could take over all of Eastern Europe with just ~200,000 troops. When Ukraine changed from regime toppling to an actual war, Russia was caught with their pants down. They had to hire Wagner and draft prisoners to buy time to start pushing soldiers through training. If they'd been planning some large invasion campaign, they would have started serious troop training a handful of years prior and have millions of already-trained troops.
When invading powers think they've prevailed and have their prey over their knee, and attempt to seal their conquest with a treaty -- they always call it a "peace deal".
You knew that, right?
It's because it's not based on fact. These people (rightly so) hate Putin. But just because you hate Putin does not mean he is capable or intending to be Hitler.
Same actually goes for Trump actually. Just because you don't like the guy doesn't mean he's literally Hitler.
It's like Charlie Brown and the football.
If Putin ever gets tired of war, he seems to quicky recover and start again.
Pretty much the entire reason I stopped being a loyal democrat. It’s hard to call the other team a bunch of fadcists when your own party set up hotlines to dime out your neighbors for having a picnic in their backyard. Or close your kids school for two years. Or destroy your community by shutting everything down (except protests, but only for certain topics). Or threatening your job unless you take a medical procedure. Etc…
And let’s not forget the massive economic damage caused by all that. This election is basically the result of democrats absolutely horrible covid policies.
It's a spectrum of course. The friends you describe sound like they fall somewhere in the middle of caring about politics vs not. My point of discussion is on the people at the low end, as these are likely to swing. People past a certain threshold of attachment have had their votes locked in for years.
What happened with covid? Trump was a complete clown, but they still support him? Sounds again, very, very surface level.
You say they don't care about his height, or his gender maybe, or his race, but if he were a short female minority, that would 100% affect their opinion, even if they didn't understand it or wouldn't admit it. Very surface level no?
We're now 8 years in of the elitists calling anyone who disagrees with them stupid, shallow, and racist.
You have learned nothing.
Your first sentence is based, if you can't see how following a couple of simple talking points like "herp derp gas is to spensive" isn't anything but surface level, you're actually stupid, because I'm telling you, there is a shitload more to gas than it coming out of the pump at a price someone wants it to be. You can't just vote for cheaper gas, trump isn't an oil well.
Also price of gas isn't the only things I mentioned. You hilariously omitted war with Russia, and all the other plausible reasons one might vote for Trump, like making illegal immigration harder than legal immigration, reducing bureaucracy, wanting to cut red tape to go to Mars, lower taxes.
You could assert all these things are somehow superficial, but that doesn't make it true.
You went off topic and started defending all trump voters.
It does seem like Russia will continue to push west once they take Ukraine. At this point it seems like this is almost inevitable without US support.
We have a lot of Ukrainian people in Canada and they are mortified by this event. To them, US support was a lifeline. Some friends were literally crying over this turn of events because they’re terrified for their family back home.
If Russia takes Ukraine and is emboldened to continue west, how will this impact the USA? Will you want to remain uninvolved and isolated? Does it really seem safe to allow this to continue?
Or do you think nothing much will happen and this hand wringing is unnecessary? Or perhaps that Russia won’t move further west, or it’s fine that they might?
It strikes me that a lot of Trump’s policy is that of a remarkably uninformed person who struggles to connect dots and anticipate the results of these actions.
Do you seriously think Russia was going to be able to attack another country if they took over Ukraine? 170,000 wouldn't even be enough to actually hold on to Ukraine (in Kosovo, we needed 1 soldier for every 34 people to preserve peace, that would be over 1 million Russian soldiers in Ukraine to occupy it).
This assertion simply doesn't make any sense to me.
This. The Neville Chamberlain comparison has been used to involve us in every major war since WWII and literally all of them turned out to be total disasters.
That's why this is so dangerous, he's a con man, and everyone supporting him has bought into the con, because I never see any trump supporter posting a clause that says they will stop supporting him the moment he crosses line x, they just support literally anything he does or will do.
But I've come to the realization that both sides have an ugly component that is winning out on online forums. It's the classic tale of the vocal minority controlling the narrative.
So to answer your question, being habitually online, and using that as a basis for your opinions on the world will very much make you vulnerable to a serious blind spot.
The amount of shit-flinging on Reddit, from both sides, is shocking to me as a non-American. That people can espouse so much hate towards their literal neighbours is unreal to me. This country is so divided that I'm not sure how things will be fixed soon. Online has become such a cesspool that it's not possible to sit around the same fire any more.
I like to think that the majority of people are waaaay more moderate than what you might think from looking at social media. And I would encourage anyone to try and interact with more people in meatspace. Don't try and convince anyone of anything, but try to understand why they feel the way they feel, and have some goddamn empathy.
I blame two things for our current situation:
1. Social Media. In hindsight it makes perfect sense, but polarizing content will generate more engagement, and since engagement is a primary KPI for many platforms, that is what the Algorithms will select for naturally. It's a positive feedback loop, that resulted in people defacing their neighbours front-yard political posters, and then smugly posting about it on social media. Because of course that's how you'll convince them to vote for the other party.
2. Two party system: I like eating meat, and I would like to continue doing so if I can. But I also care for the protection of animals and sustainable utilisation of resources. But because meat is part of the Carnivore party's platform, and everything else is part of the Herbivore party's platform. People might support more worker's rights, but now in order to get that they must also be anti abortion. It's a broken system and it breeds deep deep divisions.
And these same people are gonna be pissed about a bunch of the stuff Trump does, because they truly had no idea what he was saying he would do.
This is how "thermostatic public opinion" works.
Imagery, vibes, personality, all of these have powerful effects on people, educated or not.
Few can express how these intangibles impact them, and if they can they are usually won’t say it out loud,
This is why you NEED to run a primary, to debug your campaign. You don’t know how your candidate looks and feels to people in Tennessee, etc until you try it.