You raise some excellent and insightful points, but I still can’t cross the bridge you and @Strollen have.
Why engage them if they’re voting only based on an emotional response and they willingly refute any evidence that how they are voting not only doesn’t improve their lot but objectively and materially makes it worse? You have already laid out they’re not voting based on rational thought, and I completely agree with that. But if their emotional response is to scapegoat and blame other people for their travails, what then? They are actively opposing policy positions that would improve their lives, and the lives of their children. ((That said, one aspect of the “trump vote” is probably motivated by (and @triggercut pointed this out in another thread) an anti-establishment sentiment. It’s just beyond ironic they ended up voting for the king of the establishment; the emperor indeed wears no clothes, they just choose to ignore it.))
The trump voter isn’t some powerful voting block that needs to swayed; they’ve made their decision, and further they are unreachable through evidence and facts. I think it’s far more important to reach out to the people who didn’t vote**:
But voter turnout among black voters fell almost seven percentage points, to 59.4 percent, the Census figures show — after hitting an all-time high of 66.2 percent in 2012.
Fewer than half of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans turned out to vote; 49 percent of Asians and 47.6 percent of those of Hispanic origin showed up to the polls last year.
Demographers point to declining black turnout and relatively low Hispanic turnout — two voting blocs on whom Democrats are increasingly reliant — as two of a handful of reasons Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton fell short in a handful of key battleground states last year.
Black turnout fell 2 points and Hispanic turnout tumbled by a whopping 34 points in Michigan, a state President Trump won by just over 10,000 votes after Clinton fell short of matching President Obama’s vote totals in Detroit.
In Wisconsin, another state Trump barely won, fewer than half of black voters cast a ballot; four years ago, when Obama carried the state, 78 percent of blacks voted.
Turnout among black voters fell seven points in Florida, and turnout among Hispanic voters there, who make up critical voting blocs stretching from Miami-Dade County to Orlando, fell eight points. That ended a streak of four consecutive elections in which black and Hispanic voters showed up in increasing numbers. At the same time, white voters, who disproportionately backed Trump, turned out at a slightly higher rate in Florida than they had in 2012.
**I think [a] reason why Clinton’s campaign missed what was happening in the Mid-West (and maybe FL, though they did pour a lot of resources there) was that their likely voter model was off. I’m no polling expert, but I’d wager Clinton’s data team and their likely voter model informed their decisions late in the campaign. ((Turns out that they were wrong, but they couldn’t (and obviously, didn’t) know that at the time. Robbie Mook led Terry McAuliffe to victory in VA, despite McAuliffe not being terribly popular in that state. I’m sure they would have done things differently had they known what we now know after the fact.))
