11 ms·

> I don't think that the problem is that Democrats didn't explain the technical definition of inflation well enough. it's clear that at least half all American

• nwienert 2y ago
  This (incorrect) attitude is another big reason beyond economy for the D loss.
  • drekipus 2y ago
    as an outsider this is the biggest thing. It's like D-voters don't even understand how unhinged they are. "Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem. "I have the makings of a plan" is 100x more attractive to people who need change.
    • robotnikman 2y ago
      >"Everyone is stupid but me" doesn't do anyone any favors and doesn't fix any problem. This, this, so much this. No one has ever been persuaded by calling them idiots, bigots, or any other insult. In fact, it does the opposite and drives them further away from what you are trying to persuade them to do/ I recommend people read 'How to win friends and Influence people' and 'Rules for Radicals' if they wish to learn on how to better persuade people.
  • mistermann 2y ago
    Isn't it amazing? "Chat, is this real?"
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    If that 5th grader rhetoric, and lack of any comprehensible policy, didn't resonate with Trump voters, he wouldn't have used it consistently. So the criticism is on point. We can debate whether Harris' proposed policies would have worked or not, or good for the economy or not, but at least they were comprehensible.
    • kelipso 2y ago
      Harris had proposed policies? That's news to me... Only think I remember is abortion abortion abortion.
      • pajdziu 2y ago
        https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_Book_Economic-Opportunity.pdf https://kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_B... Not a single mention of "abortion" in this document.
      • hackyhacky 2y ago
        > That's news to me See, this is the problem. Actually, serious policies (meaning, more serious than "drill baby drill" or "build a wall") are long, complicated, and boring. They don't fit neatly into a soundbite or a chant at a rally, so people who don't have the temperament or capacity to seek out and read such documents think the policies don't exist. In seriousness, the solution is that Democrats need to be better at messaging by crafting policies that are understandable to their audience.
        • tarsinge 2y ago
          No, the problem is the medias (and campaign strategists) didn’t even try to communicate on these policies, and again thought social progressivism alone would do. That worked for a time in the early 2010s but they have yet to realize that when there are economic troubles it’s not enough to win elections, as this vote demographics show. No need to insult the intellectual capacity of the other camp.
          • hackyhacky 2y ago
            It's not an insult, and I wasn't addressing either "camp." It's an observation that most people don't have the interest or ability in understanding government policy, and there isn't a good way to communicate the facts of the matter in a way that's accessible to most people. This is a problem of the media, who want everything broken into 30-second sound bites; but of course the media don't exist in a vacuum: they serve the media consumer, who won't listen to anything longer than 30 seconds, which unfortunately isn't enough time to explain the relationship between tariffs and inflation. Voters demand simple explanations for complex realities, and simple solutions to complex problems, and as a result, the successful politician must fabricate simple explanations and simple solutions, even if they're wrong.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    It is both factually right (let's face it, the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T), and supremely stupid as a campaign strategy (you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric).
    • Shocka1 2y ago
      > the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T This fits the Kamala voters well too, but a citation that doesn't exist is probably needed. > you have to inspire people to vote in you, if the other guy does it better you fail, no matter how low his rethoric Agreed here. 8 out of 10 people on both sides wouldn't know what happens to the price of a bond when it's yield increases/decreases, let alone what happens to the price of a consumer product when tariffs are attached to it. My theory is that this election was won through a combination of economic timing due to COVID/inflation, and the left providing perpetual unhinged social media material.
      • andrepd 2y ago
        > This fits the Kamala voters well too It does! > and the left providing perpetual unhinged social media material Well the right also provided such an uninterrupted stream of unhinged material, so
        • Shocka1 2y ago
          And this time they lost the meme war. Apparently it's time to come up with new material.
    • 71bw 2y ago
      >It is both factually right (let's face it, the vast majority of trump voters fit that description to a T) Thank you for your kind words. Don't you think you're generalizing a VERY big group a bit too much?
• Tempest1981 2y ago
  Yep. They're voting on emotion, not logic or facts. Emotions are much stronger.
  • baggy_trough 2y ago
    Who is "they"?
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Trump voters
    • firen777 2y ago
      Democrat non-voters
    • Tempest1981 2y ago
      If you watch the "undecided voter" focus groups being interviewed after the debate, most of the comments were very abstract -- about how the candidate made them feel. Nobody mentioned policy specifics.
  • ComplexSystems 2y ago
    Yeah, emotions like "I wish I could afford to buy food."
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.
      • tarsinge 2y ago
        Except voting for massive tariffs make sense from an environmental and workers point of view. Logic instead of emotions was lacking in the democrats camp too.
• oceanplexian 2y ago
  > it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations What you are essentially saying is that over half the public has a low level of comprehension which simply isn’t true. You can’t insult millions of people and expect them to meet you in the middle on any issues. And the issues are far more nuanced than cheap gas, like the fact that 1.7 million people work in the energy industry and happen to vote in swing states.
  • staticautomatic 2y ago
    I don’t agree with the parent but given that mean IQ is 100, it is literally true that half of the population is dumb.
    • davrosthedalek 2y ago
      <Nitpick mode on.> It seems the average IQ of the US is 98, not 100. But even if the mean would be 100, and <100 would be "dumb", it does not follow that 50% of the population is <100. Actually, since IQ is bounded on the low side and not bounded on the other side, it is actually likely that if the average is 100, more than 50% are below average. But that is not guaranteed. You could have only one dumb person with everyone else >100.
      • drawkward 2y ago
        IQ is well known to be normally distributed. One property of the normal distribution is that median = mean, so it follows that less of the population would have an IQ below 100.
        • runlaszlorun 2y ago
          I’m no expert, but isn’t it a normal distribution by definition?
        • davrosthedalek 2y ago
          Still nitpicking: Since IQ<0 do not exist, it cannot be a true normal distribution. It is true that IQ distributions over large groups resemble normal distributions in their core, i.e. close to the median.
• tarsinge 2y ago
  More like it’s clear that trying to gaslight voters by using technical definitions to hide that food had increased more than 30% didn’t work. You can’t tell the people the economy is the best when they can’t afford food, no matter your technical indicators.
  • gwurk 2y ago
    but "the economy is good" and "I have lots of money" are not the same things. it is perfectly possible for a country to have the best economy ever while still having a massive amount of people who can't afford food.
    • tarsinge 2y ago
      Sure, but the problem is that it seemed democrats used "the economy is good" to imply "people have money" and avoid addressing the struggle. Maybe because they were afraid of tainting the results of the presidency. Even here there was reluctance to admit most people were not doing good and only tech workers were complaining.
• coldtea 2y ago
  >it's clear that at least half all American voters don't understand technical definitions or explanations They don't need to, when they can very trivially understand the impact it has on their pockets. ("Why would they believe their own lying pockets, over our nice technical explanations, graphs, and citations telling them that their income is fine and things are affordable?!")
  • cjrp 2y ago
    It's easy for them to understand the effect, I think it's harder to explain the cause in a way that resonates.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • treebeard901 2y ago
      The cause of higher prices was the spending... From Trump and COVID to Biden and the infrastructure bill. The war in Ukraine which drove up food prices and oil prices. Then the Saudis not necessarily going along with the Biden Admins requests for oil. The thinking goes that Trump and the GOP will gut the Federal Govt and the spending with it. Then Trump will give Ukraine to Putin solving the food growth and export problems with Ukraine. Then MBS in Saudi Arabia will be more than happy to accomodate requests for more oil. All three will reduce inflation and lower prices. Who knows, it could go so far that four years from now voters are complaining about deflation.
      • l33t7332273 2y ago
        This USA centric view doesn’t hold any water when you look at how much inflation there has been all over the west. If anything, you should find an explanation for why USA had lower inflation than many other countries.
      • insane_dreamer 2y ago
        Oh my. Is this what Fox News teaches? - Gutting the Fed Gov doesn't bring down inflation or prices. These are not correlated issues. - The US is a net exporter of oil, doesn't depend on the Saudis. - "Giving Ukraine" to Putin won't happen, as much as Trump would like to help his buddy out, but because the EU won't let it, because Congress ultimately controls spending, not POTUS, and they're the ones (mostly the GOP) pushing for more military aid and a bigger budget (they upped Biden's military budget and aid to Ukraine). But even if Trump did drop all US military aid to Ukraine, the Ukraine won't just collapse, that would take time. And even if Russia did fully occupy Ukraine and "end" the war, that doesn't impact food prices in the US as food imports from the Ukraine are a tiny percentage of total food imports, very little impact. Sunflower oil, maybe. These are not factors that will bring down prices.
• osigurdson 2y ago
  Note that intelligence is normally distributed.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • aydyn 2y ago
    Actually, its not. IQ is normally distributed because it is a statistic explicitly transformed to be normally distributed with respect to the population. But intelligence itself is more like exponentially distributed. Think of a chess grandmaster versus a range of people of various ability. What does the distribution of winning odds look like?
    • Scea91 2y ago
      Normal distribution has an exponential term in it. Your intuition is mostly correct for the >100 part of IQ but thats totally in line with it being normally distributed. Intelligence is not exponentially distributed. That would mean that the density is monotonically decreasing which its not. There are more “average people” than extremely low intelligence ones.
      • aydyn 2y ago
        No, you are missing the point. The point is the scaling is all wrong. The IQ distribution, normally distributed by design, is what people think of when talking about intelligence. But it does not give proper intuition as there is no evidence that _intelligence itself_ is normally distributed. More concretely, someone with 140 IQ is not 40% more intelligent than someone with 100 IQ. It would be more correct to say that 140 IQ person is orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average person. Perhaps a better analogy is the decibel scale. 100 dB vs 110 dB is only a difference of 10% on the scale, but in actually represents an order of magnitude change. A similar effect goes on with intelligence and how we measure it.
        • osigurdson 2y ago
• subpixel 2y ago
  Much of the electorate is uninformed and can be induced to vote against their own interest. A critical issue is that Dems imagine there is a path to success that goes around an uninformed electorate. In an era where the news media is largely disintermediated, the only way to success is by engaging the type of voters Dems shun. That means listening to them and giving them some of what they want, and less of what they don’t want.
  • cudgy 2y ago
    Well, much of the people that are “informed“ can be induced to vote against their own interest as well. One could argue that the “informed” people that went through similar college experiences and came from similar backgrounds, listen to similar news sources, hang out with similar people are prime targets for manipulation. Certainly the congruence amongst mainstream news that we’re seeing these days is a sign of that.
  • ashoeafoot 2y ago
    first we made them poor, then we declared them of unfit mental state to decide their own fate, which they had no decisions on in the first place being poor. this is how a silent coup from above looks like
• feedforward 2y ago
  Lenin did pretty good with "Peace, Land, Bread"
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    At least Lenin was actually trying to give people peace, land and bread, and was arguably a real step up from the Czarist regime, until Stalin came along after Lenin's death. Trump's actions and words have made it abundantly clear he only cares about himself, not the American people.