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This is mental.
There is empirical reality. If its raining your feelings that it's sunny are just fucking wrong.
The root problem is people being isolated within media and social bubbles where they are not being told the truth. Being barraged by “your feelings are knowledge”. They're not.
Did the Democrats reach those voters? Clearly not. But the fact remains the economy is not a legitimate reason to opt for policies that are all but certain to make it worse. Quantifiably so.
To wit - I feel like there's no rational basis for the outfome of the election. Does that change the fact? Is embracing my feelings going to make them real? How then to refute aside from “no, that's wrong?”
But a person's feelings about their economic and financial situation is not something that can be proven "wrong" empirically. If a person feels stressed about making rent, or frustrated about higher grocery prices, or pessimistic about their job prospects, there is no study or experiment you can conduct that can empirically prove those feelings or anxieties are "wrong."
It's not so much that people are claiming that the economic indicators are false or incorrect, because that is something that can be definitely disproven, it's that they don't feel great about the economy DESPITE the indicators being good, which means the economic indicators might not be very good at actually indicating how people are going to feel about the economy.
Sure and I get it. I'm not on a yacht to be sure.
But how do you respond to a nebulous feeling? Biden took millions of loans off people's shoulders. Kamala was specifically citing lower tax bills and home loan support. The GOP will deliver no such relief.
I heard time and again the economy is stable - AND people are still struggling. Hell she pointed out high prices and corporate profiteering. It wasn't ignored.
That's where I slam into a wall. Opting for “likely way worse” when “ok but could be better” was on the table.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
I don't know what messaging would have worked better, and I don't know why people chose Trump over Kamala. I don't believe Trump will make their situations better, in fact I think he likely will make them worse, but a majority of voters didn't see it that way. Again, I don't know why that is, other than at some point it became a popular idea that Trump was simply "better on the economy."
What I really, really want people to understand is that while I don't understand why people chose Trump that doesn't mean the economic anxieties that drove them to do it are not real. They are real, and their feelings about the economy should not be dismissed because they don't necessarily align with what the economic indicators seem to be telling us.
Yeah man agreed.
We are not dealing with an electorate that believes in empirical reality. Anyone who runs a campaign expecting people to believe statistics over their own lived experiences is bound to lose. As we saw on Tuesday.
Agreed - but how then do you reach someone not acknowledging the reality of their world?
If Timmy believes with all his heart there's a monster under his bed is the answer to agree with him or show him time and again that, no there isn't until he realizes it to be true?
Are we supposed to embrace it's now a post-factual world?
Apparently we do if we want to win elections.
As for Timmy: I'd find a shiny rock and have him participate in a ceremony to make it monster repellent. Then when he's scared he can rub the rock and the monster will go away.
If you want someone's support you need to meet them where they're at, not where you'd like them to be.
I sadly think that's an excellent point. I truly believed a message of hope and compassion woukd resonate far more than grievance and retribution. I believed most of my fellow citizens want optimism in leadership.
I think they want optimism, but they're also demanding change. There's a broad feeling that the situation we're in is untenable, and liberal parties around the world are losing to right-wing populists because they don't seem to get it.
But what represents that change when things are quantifiably pretty good? Opting for chaos? Change for the sole sake of change?
If he was an unknown quantity sure - but there's recent experience of his first term and it was a shit show. Embracing authoritarianism because…grocery prices? There's something more afoot. The logic doesn't hold and there must be a shred of logic in there somewhere.
I disagree that things are pretty good, and so did most of the country. Grocery prices are up. Housing and child care prices are insane. A significant injury or illness can still send you into bankruptcy. Income and wealth equality are still worse than before the French Revolution.
And I also disagree that people embraced authoritarianism. Trump won by default because the message the Harris campaign was sending didn't motivate people to get to the polls to support her.
But they did because his first administration did nothing to address any of those issues and in fact made them worse. Based on his record their choice (deliberate or no) was to choose demonstrated incompetence and malfeasance instead of moderate change.
The chicken is too meh so order the shit sandwich?
Look at the vote totals. Trump got about the same as he did the last two times. Democrats dramatically underperformed compared to 2020. The people who want to embrace authoritarianism did so like they always do, but the loss was from people who couldn't be bothered to go vote for continuing the status quo
Yeah, discussing that in another thread. People just blowing off voting….insane.
It's insane to us, but unless we can figure out how to get them to do it we're never going to have a Democrat in charge again.