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Trump voters will never vote for somebody like Sanders, and I think that fundamentally misunderstands Trump voters and what they want.

ajuc 2y ago
I know what they want and I know what they need. The difference is precisely the problem.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  The idea that anyone can know without a doubt what someone else needs is part of the problem. People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Political science has decades of research that consistently shows that it’s entirely correct to think that most voters have no clue about anything, including what would be best for them. Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections. [edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      I will see if I can find that book, thanks for the recommendation. I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly? More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        I’m not sure how much understanding the issues is a factor in democracy functioning well. I think it has more to do with widespread belief in democratic and rule-of-law identity, such that voters will reliably punish those who violate those tenets, and structures set up to resist the kind of rot that targets inherent weaknesses in democracy, especially to prevent capture of media and lobbying by rich minority interests. These reduce the effects of directed exploitation of voter ignorance, and block democratic attacks on democracy itself. Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem. The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        Many of the founders of the US wrote about the importance of an educated populace and feared that an uneducated voting public would ruin the system. What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking. If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    It was the other way around. People who are being treated like adults are acting like scared children.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      We should never expect people treated as children to act as anything more. Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
- jpadkins 2y ago
  Could you please implement Sander's socialist paradise in Vermont first? I'd really like to see how it works out before you try and subject the rest of us to your ideas. thanks!
  - ajuc 2y ago
    Visit EU.
  - nebula8804 2y ago
    If there was some way to isolate VT from the rest of the country then there are many strategies to make it work. This is a major cause of the homeless problem in CA> Progressive policies designated for the citizens of CA get abused by all the red states dumping the results of their bad policies into California (by way of one way bus tickets). The same would happen to VT. Its much easier to just look at the EU and see the positive results.
_heimdall 2y ago
Is there much overlap in Trump and Sanders policy views? I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.
- speed_spread 2y ago
  Trump doesn't "have policy views". Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Trump surely has policy views. Maybe they aren't consistent, and he often speaks contradictory to whatever his views are, but you're underestimating him if you believe his has no views. If you consider him a threat, underestimating him sounds dangerous > Trump _is_ the policy and the view. That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him Perhaps the reasons can't be mentioned in polite company.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        I assume you mean they're racist. Yes I do know one openly racist person who happened to vite for Trump. I don't think he voted for Trump for that reason though, he's just been a republican voter for decades if I'm not mistaken.
        sangnoir 2y ago
        No, I mean they'd rather not verbalize why they want Trump in office. Like one of his voters mentioned during his first term when she felt he wasn't "hurting who he's supposed to". A surprising number of Trump voters see him as a tool for retribution against various groups the voters' feel animosity towards. Saying this outright is probably something most are not comfortable to say to you, so they stay vague and non-specific.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
This is just a baffling attitude. Sanders is the only name that regularly gets respect from every corner of the political spectrum. His most vociferous critics by a long shot are centrist democratic loyalists.
- ars 2y ago
  Sanders means well in the things he does, but he's unfortunately very very .. how do I put this, stupid in his ideas. Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through. I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all. Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it. Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    This is a misrepresentation of the position. It’s possible that to sell a policy like a transaction tax you might overstate the potential revenue. But nobody serious actually thinks you could simply multiply the tax rate by transactions to predict revenue. But that doesn’t matter. The revenue would be non zero. And there are plenty of other reasons to tax transactions anyway (stability, realign market and societal priorities)
    - ars 2y ago
      > But nobody serious actually thinks you could simply multiply the tax rate by transactions to predict revenue This guy does: https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/229/022/738/243/original/ec16dae47f867714.png https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/2... I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot). But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior. This would make him a terrible President. And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.
jmyeet 2y ago
I distinctly remember the lead up to the 2016 election. I remember having one conversation with a friend who is relatively affluent. Not independently wealthy but a top 1% earner. I had been watching Bernie gain steam and I brought this up in the context of how unhappy with the status quo people seemed to be. This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place. 2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign. Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement. The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing. In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida). The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that. My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.
nebula8804 2y ago
12% of people who voted for Trump in 2016 voted for Sanders in the primary. 1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri... Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\ The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.

ajuc 2y ago

I know what they want and I know what they need. The difference is precisely the problem.

_heimdall 2y ago
The idea that anyone can know without a doubt what someone else needs is part of the problem. People need to be treated as adults before they can be expected to act like adults. There's always the risk that goes wrong, it has in the past, but we're doomed if we believe the only way forward is a small group of elites forcing change on us because they "know best".
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Political science has decades of research that consistently shows that it’s entirely correct to think that most voters have no clue about anything, including what would be best for them. Reasoned, informed votes aren’t a major factor in elections. [edit] see if your library has a copy of Democracy for Realists and also dig into older major works they cite, if you’re interested in more on this. For a quick gut-check, look up the proportion of US voters that understand how marginal income tax rates work, then reflect on the fact that this is something very simple that directly affects them in ways they must confront at least once per year, and despair at how bad similar measures must look for practically everything else and that if they don’t understand the basics of how things work, they can’t even begin to figure out “what’s best” for them or for anyone else.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    I will see if I can find that book, thanks for the recommendation. I'm not sure how we could untangle the issue of today's uneducated populace with our education system itself. If people don't understand marginal tac rates, for example, and most people go to public school because the government makes it pretty difficult to choose anything else, is it not the fault of public education for either not teaching it or teaching it poorly? More importantly in my opinion, if people don't care to understand it that's fine - they can make that choice. If the system still works and no one complains, great. If it becomes a problem we can either better educate people on how it works or move to a more simply form of taxation that is easier for people to understand.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      I’m not sure how much understanding the issues is a factor in democracy functioning well. I think it has more to do with widespread belief in democratic and rule-of-law identity, such that voters will reliably punish those who violate those tenets, and structures set up to resist the kind of rot that targets inherent weaknesses in democracy, especially to prevent capture of media and lobbying by rich minority interests. These reduce the effects of directed exploitation of voter ignorance, and block democratic attacks on democracy itself. Both of those factors are, to use the scientific term, completely fucked in the US, which is why we’re where we are now. We’re not here because people think that we spend 20% of our budget on foreign aid, but rather, people think that because of concentration and capture of media ownership, and intense lobbying. The ignorance would be there either way, but the direction and form of it is carefully cultivated, and allowing that cultivation is the problem. The generation of hard data demonstrating that voters (more or less) don’t know jack-shit about anything goes back to IIRC the 1950s, and the best answer Poli Sci has for why this results in a functioning system at all is that voter behavior is fairly erratic (much of it amounts to “do I perceive that things are bad, even that have nothing to do with the government or with me? Then throw the bums out!”) and (this was once accepted but is now controversial) that voter ignorance kinda balances out by virtue of being chaotic. If that ignorance becomes directed, however, both of these things are weaponizable or breakable.
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        Many of the founders of the US wrote about the importance of an educated populace and feared that an uneducated voting public would ruin the system. What you describe are both results of an uneducated voting public in my opinion. At least as I see it, those are two important effects with the root cause being a lack of education and critical thinking. If people were better educated on how our systems work and issues that impact them directly, and willing to think critically and listen to, or engage in, reasoned debates we wouldn't have to worry about what shit they may hear or see in the media, or from politicians, lobbyists, etc.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  It was the other way around. People who are being treated like adults are acting like scared children.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    We should never expect people treated as children to act as anything more. Acting like an adult requires practice and learning lessons when you mess up. Treating those you may disagree with, or don't trust, as children is a self fulfilling prophecy and strips them of the dignity of having the chance to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences.
jpadkins 2y ago
Could you please implement Sander's socialist paradise in Vermont first? I'd really like to see how it works out before you try and subject the rest of us to your ideas. thanks!
- ajuc 2y ago
  Visit EU.
- nebula8804 2y ago
  If there was some way to isolate VT from the rest of the country then there are many strategies to make it work. This is a major cause of the homeless problem in CA> Progressive policies designated for the citizens of CA get abused by all the red states dumping the results of their bad policies into California (by way of one way bus tickets). The same would happen to VT. Its much easier to just look at the EU and see the positive results.

_heimdall 2y ago

Is there much overlap in Trump and Sanders policy views? I wouldn't expect voters for either candidate to agree with much from the other candidate, but maybe I don't know their platforms well enough to see the similarities.

speed_spread 2y ago
Trump doesn't "have policy views". Trump _is_ the policy and the view.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Trump surely has policy views. Maybe they aren't consistent, and he often speaks contradictory to whatever his views are, but you're underestimating him if you believe his has no views. If you consider him a threat, underestimating him sounds dangerous > Trump _is_ the policy and the view. That may be true for voters, I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him. That has no bearing on Trump's own policies or views though.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > I know quite a few Trump voters that only care to vote for him and couldn't explain any coherent policy reason for preferring him Perhaps the reasons can't be mentioned in polite company.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      I assume you mean they're racist. Yes I do know one openly racist person who happened to vite for Trump. I don't think he voted for Trump for that reason though, he's just been a republican voter for decades if I'm not mistaken.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        No, I mean they'd rather not verbalize why they want Trump in office. Like one of his voters mentioned during his first term when she felt he wasn't "hurting who he's supposed to". A surprising number of Trump voters see him as a tool for retribution against various groups the voters' feel animosity towards. Saying this outright is probably something most are not comfortable to say to you, so they stay vague and non-specific.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

This is just a baffling attitude. Sanders is the only name that regularly gets respect from every corner of the political spectrum. His most vociferous critics by a long shot are centrist democratic loyalists.

ars 2y ago
Sanders means well in the things he does, but he's unfortunately very very .. how do I put this, stupid in his ideas. Even his own party never votes for his stuff because his ideas are always terrible. They are always emotional, but he never thinks them through. I don't think he's able to think them through. I'll give you an example from a different person: There's someone on Twitter who wants a 0.1% tax on stock transactions, and then he calculates that this little change will fund everything we could possibly want. He utterly ignores that if you put this tax people will change their behavior! There will be fewer transactions, and this tax will fund nothing at all. Sanders is the same way: He makes an idea, and completely ignores how people will respond to it. Sanders has a 0% chance of winning.
- bigfudge 2y ago
  This is a misrepresentation of the position. It’s possible that to sell a policy like a transaction tax you might overstate the potential revenue. But nobody serious actually thinks you could simply multiply the tax rate by transactions to predict revenue. But that doesn’t matter. The revenue would be non zero. And there are plenty of other reasons to tax transactions anyway (stability, realign market and societal priorities)
  - ars 2y ago
    > But nobody serious actually thinks you could simply multiply the tax rate by transactions to predict revenue This guy does: https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/229/022/738/243/original/ec16dae47f867714.png https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/114/099/2... I can't find his original post on X (although that's probably for the better because his feed is filled antisemitic garbage, and he's pretty clearly at utter idiot). But yes, some people really do think that way: They never think about the results of their proposals, and getting back to the topic at hand Bernie is the same way (although unlike that other guy Bernie really does seem to care about people), but he never thinks about the effects of his proposals, how people would react and change behavior. This would make him a terrible President. And I would remind you that despite being in congress for 34 years Bernie has never manged to get even a single idea of his passed.

jmyeet 2y ago

I distinctly remember the lead up to the 2016 election. I remember having one conversation with a friend who is relatively affluent. Not independently wealthy but a top 1% earner. I had been watching Bernie gain steam and I brought this up in the context of how unhappy with the status quo people seemed to be. This immediately got dismissed. "Everything is fine". It is a mistake to paint all Trump voters as just being proto-fascists (which the majority are). Many ended up there because they desperately wanted change and establishment candidates were just offering more of the same. Hilary absolutely was a "more of the same" candidate. And the entire GOP primary field (21 at one point) were "more of the same". That's why Trump won the primary. That, combined with Hilary's massive negatives and her generally being a terrible candidate, were why Trump won in the first place. 2020 was an anomaly in many ways. We had Covid lockdowns and were coming off 4 years of Trump chaos. Because of the lockdown, voting was made substantially easier with early voting and mail-in ballots. The more people vote, the more Democrats win. It's why voter suppression is a key part of the Republican platform (make no mistake, "voter ID" is simply voter suppression). Were it not for the pandemic, I very much suspect Trump would've won re-election. Biden was a terrible candidate and never should've been the nominee. Clyburn basically handed him the nomination (in South Carolina) and Warren stayed in long enough to split Bernie's vote, the second time the DNC had actively sabotaged Bernie's campaign. Remember in 2020, Bernie had Joe Rogan's endorsement. The Democrats are really just Republican Lite now. Kamala's immigration plan was Trump's 2020 immigration plan. Kamala abandoned opposition to the death penalty from the party platform and called for the most "lethal" military. She courted never Trumpers like Liz Cheney. Like seriously, who was that for? She refused to separate herself from Biden on any issue despite his historic unpopularity. And of course, she refused to deviate from the deeply unpopular position on Israel-Gaza. In short, she offered the voters absolutely nothing. In this election, progressive voter initiatives outperformed the Democratic party by a massive margin. For example, minimum wage increases passed in Missouri, a state Trump won by 22. Trump won Florida by 14 yet recreational cannabis and abortion protection got 55-59% of the vote (unfortunately, you need 60% to pass in Florida). The Democratic Party exists to actively sabotage any progressive momentum. We didn't get a convention primary after Biden withdrew because the DNC was scared a progressive candidate would win. They stuck us with Kamala to avoid that. My point here is that Trump doesn't have and has never had a majority. He only won each time because there was effectively zero opposition. A chunk of Trump's base are simply people desperate for change. At least Trump lied to them and gave them something to vote for. Democrats wouldn't even lie to them and tell them they were going to fix housing and egg prices and give them healthcare.

nebula8804 2y ago

12% of people who voted for Trump in 2016 voted for Sanders in the primary. 1: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-pri... Thats more than enough of a margin for a definite loss. Image if Trump lost in 2016. His supporters and the whole world wide right wing ecosphere would never had gotten emboldened.\ The article doesn't touch upon it but there was a contagion of two time Obama voters that voted Trump. This group was touched upon in Michael Moores documentary Farenheit 11/9. People like those in Flint, MI who felt abandoned by Obama switched their allegiance to Trump.