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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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politics
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I can't imagine how anyone looks at Trump, and who he is as a person, then compares to Harris and still can't decide. The choice is so painfully clear, it's not even a choice. Trump isn't fit for office at any level, let alone the highest office in the land.
the people 'undecided' arent looking at anything. they just dont consume media in the same manner, if at all, as the rest of us. there are humans who actively avoid all politics, and in the united states this is actually very easy to do.
we have bred an entire class of humans who just do not give a shit, and its hard to get them to suddenly care 'this cycle'
I don’t understand why anyone cares about the “undecideds”. These people sound like morons who wouldn’t listen to reason anyway.
Stop begging for scraps. These people make up about three percent of potential voters, and I doubt most of them even bother to go to the polls.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-three-percent-voters-still-035900135.html
Literally every election is decided by the “undecided”. Democrats vote democrat and republicans vote republican. It rare that anyone changes party. What determines elections is if democrats can get people who wouldn’t otherwise vote to vote. Every time people turn out, democrats win. When people are uninterested they lose. Those ~50k people in suburbs of swing states are not unimportant, they are the only thing that matters.
This premise gets thrown around a lot but I actually disagree. "Every time people turn out" is always also thrown in there like some arbitrary thing--when I think the past several election cycles have shown that when there are younger, more progress candidates who make it past the primaries turnout shoots up. Courting the 3% uninformed flip-floppers by moving right is a losing strategy when you could be motivating your own party to turn out by moving left and driving turnout up. There's no money in that though, so dumb centrists get wooed
It’s also a mistruth that people don’t change their minds. Look at the rise and fall of any brand, religion or cult - some people had to change their minds.
Or some people died off, and new suckers fell for new, different marketing.
Advertising wouldn’t work if there was need to wait for generations to pass.
When/if democrats can Energize the base, they don't need to give a shit about undecideds. but until then, we are stuck pandering to the people we know will actually show up to and wait at the voting booth
No, every election is decided by the majority of those who did decide.
That and voter suppression. If everybody could vote easily, the GOP would never win an election.
It's absolutely voter suppression. Every election we have 1/3 of the electorate that doesn't cast a vote. We could court these couple million undecideds or we could fix the system and have automatic registration and even compulsory voting. And then, you're absolutely right, Republicans would never win again.
in a world where the winner is decided by < 5%, 3% is quite a bit.
The implication is that 100% of that 3% votes one way.
It's a false analysis to claim that. Using that same reasoning, you could as credibly claim that any election is decided by a single vote, the one that gives the winner the majority (or plurality). But that's not actionable information in any way, it's just tautologically true, as is any salami-slicing analysis.
Some of them are also "goldfish voters." These people only engage with whatever political message has been delivered to them most recently. They literally can go from D to R and back again bumper sticker to bumper sticker.
Then there are the obligate ego independents. Their only political belief is that they must vote for both parties some of the time. If they voted D last time then they will probably vote R this time. Because their identity is "independent" so they must manifest that, all reason be damned.
Man, I dont even live in the US, and US politics is inescapable. Of course Canada's political climate is directly affected by what's going on down there, so It's probably harder to avoid here than somewhere across an ocean.
In other words, morons.
They actually just don't believe the media that goes against what they believe, and at this point I can hardly blame them. There are enough lies, distortions, out of context quotes and mischaracterizations that it is pretty easy to simply disregard things that other people accept as truth. Political season in the United States has a huge cloud, a fog of war, and whoever says their "truth" the loudest and most persistently controls public perception, the narrative. It's discouraging and overwhelming to try to sort out the real truth because there is a rapid and continuous stream of propaganda that can't possibly be investigated and verified. So people go back to their instincts, which are mostly guided by their friends, social groups, and their self-curated media feed. Everything else is disregarded as fake news.
In court there's such a thing as a directed verdict, and also ruling on an issue as a matter of law. Basically where there's no reasonable jury that could decide otherwise, the judge directs the decision.
That's kind of how I feel - not removing the democratic process obviously, but this is a situation you can be for Trump or reasonable, not both.
I can't imagine how people could see the dip right after she took back all progressive stances and not understand the easy solution is moving to the left...
But here we are bro
It's 2024 and people constantly do irrational stuff.
She's not going to gain any trump voters, there's zero logical reason for Dems to move to the right. Except they think they can get away with being more to the right.
If they just wanted to win the election, Kamala would be out there for M4A, legal weed, affordable college plan that fixes the flawed system, and some good ole tax raises for the rich.
It's literally that easy.
Obama wasn't near that progressive, and he got a landslide and carried House and Senate.
While I can't speak on the effectiveness of the strategy, I would point out that Harris et al. aren't really aiming to recruit Trump voters. They're more aiming for more traditional Reaganite Republicans, the "never Trump" people. Think of the type of Republicans like Dick Cheney. That's the type of Republican they're aiming for. They're not aiming to convince an active Trump supporter to flip to Harris. They're trying to get Republicans who don't want to vote for Trump, who would otherwise stay at home, to instead vote for Harris.
My own parents fit into this mold. They're in their sixties and voted for Republicans their entire adult lives, up until 2016. They voted third party in 2016, and in 2020 they switched over to supporting Biden, and now they support Harris and are voting for Democrats across the board.
Whether appealing to voters like my parents or trying to appeal to younger, more disaffected progressive voters is a better strategy, I can't say. But the perennial problem of appealing to hard-core progressive voters is that they are incredibly fickle and often engage in self-destructive purity testing. Look at the leftist voters refusing to vote for Harris over the Palestine issue. Far-left voters have a tendency to find any excuse not to vote for a candidate. It's Palestine this time around, but it could easily be something else. There's always some issue that the main Democratic candidate has that some leftists will cite as a reason not to vote for the mainline Democratic candidate. In 2024, it's Palestine. In 2020, it was Biden and the crime bill. In 2016, it was Hillary's treatment of Bernie. Etc. There's always a purity test violation a certain segment of far left voters will cite to vote against their own interests. They want a perfect candidate, and they will actively seek out any excuse not to vote for the mainline candidate. As no politician will share 100% of their views, there will always be some reason to not vote for them.
The reason Democrats often tilt to the right is that voters on the far left side of things are often short-sighted and incredibly fickle. They're not reliable voters.
To be fair, it's hard to criticise leftists for not voting reliably for the Dems if they keep moving right. I imagine your parents didn't really become leftists, it's just that Dems moved to where the Reps were decades ago.
Supporting a Holocaust-sized genocide is not really "any issue" either. The reason why it still makes sense to vote for Harris is not because that genocide does not matter, it's that Trump would start another one on American soil while endorsing the former as well.
You've basically got the Goldman Sachs candidate, or Hitler from Wish. I hope people turn out for Goldman Sachs-lady, for all our sakes in the world.
Same here.
Agreed. But also see above.
I feel like it's an issue with the political system as a whole that it's ended up like this, though...
I guess my point is that a (leftist) person is smart and pragmatic, but (leftist) people are impulsive and stupid.
God I hope the US gets its head out its ass and flushes that orange turd.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. At least some of these undecided voters seem like they'd otherwise be left leaning but they have the one issue (bad experience with abortion that they want to impose on everyone, or really don't wanna give up their gun, etc) which is holding them back.
Of course it's not like it's the same one issue holding them all back - each one is different from the rest. Hence going more left and liberal - it feels right to us, but likely risk is that doing so could very well push some of these folks away.
That's all and well in a normal election but - well, i think it's obvious most of us regulars here that this election year is not that.
Trump is an unusually badly performed (even for them) WWE heel. He looks like one of the whorehouse punters in a George Grosz painting, only even more exaggerated. He looks like something my dog sniffed at but refused to eat.
Maybe a job at the DMV? It is an office building, does that count? He might be fit for that
He could never exist in a setting where there wasn't a staff dedicated to him at all times
If he weren't so obese, he could be paved over and used as a speed bump.