Spit-balling compromise ideas in today's political climate

Politics and religion
81

I get that people who have GOP-voting relatives or may have voted GOP in the past have an vested interest in bridging the aisle, but - purely looking from the outside - I think the biggest problem for the US isn’t the 22%? who vote for “grabbing by the pussy”, but rather the 40-45% who simply don’t bother to vote at all. To me, that is just an insanely large number of people who have dropped out of the political discussion (over here, we get worried when the number of non-voters creeps above 25%). That’s a 100 million or so voters who do not feel adequately motivated and represented by their elected officials, that they can be bothered to vote.

IMO, that is a/the big issue that the Democrats - or anyone looking to solve the political problems in the US - needs to work on. It’s not without reason that the GOP has become the party of vote-suppression - they realize that if vote participation rose by 15% to be in line with other democratic countries (or probably even just 5%), they would be forced to shift their positions to cater to a broader coalition of voters.

82

This, in particular.

I live in the extremely red NY-27, where today Chris Collins is defending his House seat against Democrat Nate McMurray. Collins was the first member of Congress to support Trump, way back when Trump was just emerging. He is currently under indictment for insider trading, and as best I understand it, some of the best evidence against him involves public statements made on the House floor, so the “innocent til proven guilty” thing is a bit strained in this case. The Republicans tried to get him off the ballot, but could not because the only legal method would be to have him run for some other office, and no local Republican town in western NY was willing to accept him as candidate for anything. Collins’s fund-raising has been abysmal. Lawns around here are packed with GOP signs… but almost none contains a Collins sign.

Yet, Nate Silver gives Collins an 80% chance of winning. Why?

Well, one huge factor is the advertising. I avoid ads, but while doing my daily treadmilling I watch YouTube videos of gamers, and I have seen one ad repeated for each campaign:
McMurray had more money to devote, but his ads are bland. He says little about himself, does not even defend himself against the untrue charge that he is anti-Second Amendment, which is political suicide around here. He simply shows video of staid Republicans saying how they cannot vote for Collins. End of story.

Collins’s ads show footage of a mob rioting. The voice over intones ominously how you can judge a person by the company they keep, and goes on to say how McMurray is endorsed by Cuomo, will vote for Pelosi, supports open borders, and goes along with the mob. (Justifying, I guess, the footage of the mob rioting.)

Looking at this in terms of strategy, Collins’s ad is vastly superior. His people understand the primacy of emotional video footage, and that one detail all by itself far outweighs the entire McMurray campaign. They also cash in on the visceral disgust people around here feel for the Cuomo state administration – even we Dems feel he needs to be reined in. The untruth about open borders is almost lost in the mix, but it is, in itself, carefully crafted. Collins manages to tell the xenophobic he feels for them, but does so without threatening the many big Republican ag interests that rely on cheap, compliant undocumented labor.

It’s a masterpiece of an ad designed to nudge all those “I’m a Republican but way too ashamed of Collins to ever post his sign in my yard” into, at the last moment, checking his box along with the rest of the GOP slate.

And Collins’s campaign did this with vastly less money than his opponent. It’s just that the GOP is packed with political strategists who play excellent chess. They are excellent at use of emotional video, but also at thinking tactically about issues and target groups.

Our side rebels at thinking about this as a strategic contest, and so consistently operate at a huge disadvantage. Kind of ironic when this is so true even on a gaming forum where so many posters think this way routinely in their games. Not sure what to do about the rest of our side, but if people here would just re-imagine our contest with Republicans as a giant computer game, where the goal is simply to win the House, the Senate, the Presidency, the state houses, and the courts… well, this would produce much clearer thinking on the subject.

83

Democrats do this. They read polling. They hold town meetings. Barack Obama wrote a whole book about what he learned travelling around rural Illinois listening to people’s concerns. Dems do exactly this, then try to craft policies that address these concerns. Where do you think those policy proposals come from?

Here’s the thing, non-white non-college grads broke for Hillary by 40 points in 2016. White non-college grads broke for Trump by 40 points. What could possibly be the concern that explains that difference? What are Democrats missing in their messaging? I’m not trying to be snarky here, but it’s really hard to explain that gap without using the r-word. It’s hard for me to believe that the material concerns of whites and non-whites from the same economic rung are that vastly different so as to explain their voting patterns. And I’m not just implicating working class folks here; whites of every economic demographic–actually every demographic you can come up with–broke for Trump, while non-whites broke for Clinton.

84

I suspect the first statement explains the second. There’s a similar situation near where I live. In CA-50, where Duncan Hunter is currently under indictment for hilariously inept misuses of campaign funds and is using horrible, grossly cynical, and flatly false anti-Muslim ads to smear his opponent Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a devout Christian), 538 gives Hunter an 80% of winning today. Campa-Najjar is a young, charismatic guy. He’s emphasized his bipartisanship. He’s got reasonably well-crafted campaign videos showing him meeting with a bunch of old white folks–ranchers, VFW dudes, etc, he’s also got campaign videos attacking Hunter as a criminal with no credibility. And he’l probably still lose because he’s not a Republican.

85

In some cases, sure, it’s naked racism.

But I have heard people on the other side do similar demographic breakdowns and conclude that Dem voters are all motivated by hatred of Christians. Do some of our fellow liberals hate Christianity and Christians? Sure. Are most of us pretty tolerant of liberals who talk this way? Sure. Are all (or most, or half, or a quarter) liberals motivated to vote by negative Chistian feelings? Not likely.

In my mind, the demographic breakdown you cite shows that we have been outflanked. Not so many years ago, most of those white non-college grads were diehard Dems, voting on economic issues, often led by unions. The GOP strategists undertook a multi-pronged attack. They understood the role of unions in organizing that enormous segment of votes, and attacked unions from all directions. Extremely effectively. You could write a book on the tactics they used.

They also did everything in their power to re-focus attention of those voters on cultural issues. This was 99% rhetoric, 1% policy, but until very recently, that was enough, especially because liberals so often responded with utter lack of sympathy for those voters’ cultural concerns, so the liberal rhetoric did as much to turn the voters Republican as any Republican policy did. (Ever notice how many “liberal” SCOTUS decisions came from Republican justices? Huge con game run by the GOP, enable progressive policy, then run against it)

And the “non-college grad” portion of your formulation is extremely important. White non-college grads are the group that has fallen furthest in recent decades, so rhetoric aimed at their resentments works very well, particularly when some “other” is offered up as a scapegoat. In game terms, this is a stack of doom or a very high level enemy or whatever, but definitely a serious threat to us. And calling it evil won’t sovle the problem. These people (my neighbors, my ex-students) really are hurting, so we need something more strategic than “it’s evil to scapegoat.” We need something an offensive of our own, not just policy but political strategy.

86

I specifically explained it as being based on racist sentiment, but that’s just reality. If your response is, “Well, those folks shouldn’t be racist,” then you are going to have to live with a massive group of people voting against your whole agenda. If your response to someone who says, “I can’t get a job because the illegals are taking them all” is “fuck you, that’s racist” and your response to, “My kids can’t get into good schools or jobs because they all have meet diversity quotas” is “fuck you, white people have it easy,” then you are going to miss out on a segment of possible voters whose economic interests align with your policies but whose media diet gets them riled up about a lot of nonsense that isn’t really hurting them.

A better tactic to win these voters is to agree-and-amplify while redirecting their policy goals towards things that will actually help (lily-white neighborhoods aren’t really losing jobs to diversity hires, but they might be losing jobs overall and new manufacturing and maintenance jobs supporting modernized energy sources sound pretty good), rather than to tell them their media is a lie and their positions are racist and their concerns are dumb (even if all those things are true). There are candidates who manage to walk this line successfully despite the D label, I just think many more would be able to do it if they could align with a non-D party.

87

To the initial post - compromise starts with a willingness to compromise. The GOP has shown zero willingness to compromise since the first Bush Administration. They have been playing zero-sum politics for a generation, and playing it very well through single-issue motivation, racist motivation and blatant lying.

Obama tried to compromise, and was a little bit successful in the bailout package and horrendously unsuccessful everywhere else (ACA, Grand Bargain with Boehner, etc.).

Trump has been 200% zero sum race baiting demonization and fear mongering, seeking to use those zero sum wins in the most authoritarian and anti-compromise fashion possible. In every single case, he chooses the most authoritarian, inflammatory, anti-compromise path possible, in which sticking it to teh libtards is the only goal.

And he’s winning. Compromise won’t happen until those zero sum politics are on a generational losing streak.

88

I’m not sure this is an apt comparison. Every Democratic nominee for President in my lifetime has been Christian. I could see maybe ‘rednecks’ or ‘southerners’.

Ok, granting this, what ideas do you have here? I sort of get something like what Richard Ojeda is doing, but he’s basically just using the force of his personality to convey authenticity. That’s a difficult kind of strategy to implement nation-wide. How would you go about recruiting candidates? He’s not advocating policies that are any different than what the national party espouses.

Maybe another thing that might work is to focus on the GOP’s view of their voters as a bunch of gullible marks.

No Democratic pol says this. This is purely Republican grievance politics at work. It is always possible to cherry-pick soundbites to make someone believe people like them are being persecuted/mocked/whatever. Given the existence of a closed media environment like that offered by Fox News and amplified by Facebook and Twitter, it’s impossible to counter.

89

Absolutely. A bunch of those folks who voted for him in states like PA were absolutely Democratic voters in the past.

You don’t need to go with Trump’s racist message to get them, but they were/are fearful people… Things are rough for a lot of the old industrial and mining regions in places like PA.

Some of those folks are just racist fucks… but SOME of them just felt ignored by the powers that be.

You can get those folks to vote for you… Hell, Casey gets them to vote for him. Same goes for guys like Connor Lamb. He got folks who voted for Trump, to vote for him.

Some portion of those guys can be courted, and you don’t need to be overtly racist to do it.

90

Yeah, this actually goes a long ways to explain my level of despair, my desperation to convince liberals to think more strategically.

Cherry picking soundbites and, even more, video clips, has become easier by many orders of magnitude using current and near-future technologies. I don’t even know what it would be analogous to in terms of warfare technology. Aerial bombing?

Anyway, this technological development greatly magnifies the importance of strategic thinking. There are thousands of sound bites out there, people on each side saying alarming things. Thousands of actions documented on video that look awful, or can be clipped in such a way as to make them look awful.

So selection and timing are going to make all the difference, going forward. And, as I am seeing it, the liberal side chooses on the basis of which of these things they, personally, find the most awful. Which puts voters already on our side into a lather, but accomplishes little else. (The anti-Trump campaign in 2016 was a textbook case of this. Seriously damaging bits were mixed in with poorly chosen trivia only the solid left would care about, and this seriously undermined the gravity of the things which were being documented.)

Meanwhile, the other side uses such resources to achieve specific purposes, to subvert a particular group, to distract at a particular time, to shore up a particular wavering constituency, to elicit extreme liberal rhetoric on particular topics, etc.

91

Don’t forget gerrymandering, vote suppression, hacking, collusion with foreign governments, etc.

I get what you’re saying, and I agree somewhat. But, I’m skeptical that there aren’t Dem consultants out there who are aware and already trying this. I suspect that the Democratic constituency just isn’t that amenable to gross manipulation in the same way and/or that Dems just don’t have the media apparatus that the GOP has. I also think that ethics and honor are at least kind of important?

92

Gillum’s great line from the debate cuts both ways: if the people who support you say something, you have to work extra hard to be clear you aren’t saying it. Silence implies agreement.

Right, I wholeheartedly agree that compromise with GOP politicians is neither possible nor desirable. It’s their voters than need some outreach / reeducation / wokening.

93

Another Gillum quote I love.

Now, I’m not calling Mr. Desantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.

94

+1

Actually, you do not have to be racist at all. The place to start is by siding with them in their basic grievance, which is that the world has turned against them, and so many people think it is more acceptable to say horrible things about them than they would never think okay about other downtrodden groups.

Wanna be cynical? If I were running for office around here, I’d start by planting a question or comment that included a slur against poor whites, and I would respond in the same vein that I would respond if the comment had been anti-black or anti-Jew.

I’d respond to widespread drug addiction among poor whites in the same vein as we respond to drug addiction among inner city blacks. I would respond to anger issues among poor whites in the same vein we respond to anger issues among poor blacks. And I sure as hell would bite my tongue regarding doubts about poor white religion, in the same spirit that we all bite our tongues regarding doubts about poor black religion.

Easy for me, I suppose, because I taught thousands of poor kids, both white and black, and it was always clear to me that the poverty was the overriding issue, with race running a significant but distant second. And easy for me because it’s so obvious that behind their so-clever subterfuges, the goal of the core GOP is to distract from that fact, and expand inequality by promoting a massive food fight among the have-nots.

95

In the words of Barack Obama:

I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader’s ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.

What does this mean? In general society has responded to drug addiction among inner city blacks by stigmatizing them and putting them in jail.

Fear?

I actually don’t see an economic component to religious identity in this country. There isn’t really a “poor white religion” or a “poor black religion.” Evangelicalism isn’t confined to people who are poor.

Again, though, I get what you’re saying. We should listen to what white folks are saying, repeat them back in our own words to make sure we’ve understood correctly, and then validate their feelings, right? Sure. I think that would work in some circumstances. Richard Ojeda again. But this:

is a bullshit grievance. It is in no way true. And I’m not sure if pandering and lying to people is the right way to go. Maybe it is. Maybe we should do whatever it takes to win elections. But, I think once a political party starts betraying principles routinely, it makes itself pretty vulnerable to capture by nefarious interests.

96

Hey, I think that Trump supporters earned my criticisms of them. They deserve to be called ignorant fools. That’s what they are.

But, that being said, they are not all lost to the Democratic party.

A lot of the folks in the rust belt actually cling to the populist bullshit that Trump spouts out… the stuff that backs idiotic moves like Tariffs.

But remember… up until 2016? That kind of bullshit was a DEMOCRATIC talking point. That’s straight out of the playbook of guys like Bernie Sanders.

I mean, as a more economically conservative person than most of you guys, I always opposed tariffs. Because they don’t work. They are bullshit. But lots of democrats used to support them.

Honestly, one potential silver lining on Trump’s seemingly endless cloudbank, is that it seems like now Democrats all oppose tariffs, and have seen the arguments about why they are bad. The flip side is that now apparently the GOP has forgotten all that stuff.

97

But… the actual Democratic nominee for President was and has always been a free-trade advocate, as was every Dem nominee since at least Bill Clinton in 1992.

98

Perhaps (I honestly don’t know how it fit into the platform for every democratic presidential candidate), but tariffs were traditionally something pushed by democrats (primarily in order to gain support from labor unions) in certain regions of the country, like the rust-belt.

Up until 2016, protectionism was the realm of the far left, not the right.

99

Historically that may well be true, but I don’t recall any national Democratic politicians pushing anything even LIKE a tariff in a very long time. Not since before Clinton, so Carter, if not before.

100

Badly written on my part. Throughout that post, “we” refers to liberals like us.

Very few liberals think the best way to respond to drug addiction is through blame and incarceration or stigmatization. Very few liberals think the best way to respond to anger issues among poor blacks is to give up on them.

And from my experience, it does not require pandering. Watching a generation grow up, and then watching their kids grow up gives me a different perspective perhaps. And as to it being a bullshit grievance, I think we as liberals have gotten better and better at understanding all the nuances of how minorities, particularly blacks, are treated as lesser people. But almost all my political allies have tin ears when it comes to the same sorts of things when directed towards poor rural whites.