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 Post Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2016 3:26 am 
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So the Democratic Party is basically a smoking crater. The urban-rural divide is starker than ever. Cities may be the engine of economic growth, but the way the US political system is set up gives disproportionate weight to the rural regions. The Democrats have a bunch of mayorships but only a handful of governorships and state legislatures. Congress has been gerrymandered to hell.

Now it looks like they're going to spend the next 2 years arguing about whether they need to stop talking about racism so much to avoid scaring away white voters. What do you think they need to do?

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 Post Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2016 6:13 am 
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Personally i think they should become more audacious and less concerned with whom they scare. As it is the democrats by and large give out carefully worded statements without any edges, and life experience shows that people, who word their statements carefully, likely try to hide something. And it makes them look like they are trying to sell something that people still needs to be convinced about, rather then simply stating what "everybody" believes in anyway.

Like when the "basket of deplorables" came out, they tried to get the geenie back into the bottle. I think it would have worked better if they had some reaction like "Yeah and if she wins, she'll cut their balls off. And given she is married to Bill, that's no problem for ordinary men, even if they are a bit macho, that goes only after thoose who are deplorable, and who cares about them".

I also have a suggestion for a slogan for the next elections: "Is America great again?"

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 Post Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2016 11:10 pm 
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Worth noticing; according to the Brookings Institute the 500 counties that Clinton carried generate 64% of the U.S. GDP. The 2,600 counties that Trump carried (officially, anyway) generated the other 36%. An interesting challenge will be getting the folks in those 2,600 counties to admit that voting Republican is a good deal of why they're economic basket cases, but if the Democrats can pull it off then they'll be in a much easier position.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:11 am 
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Well, to get them to stop doing that, you're going to have to get them off the cultural resentment train. The train that Trump just rode to victory. He just proved that lots of people vote on their emotions more than their wallets, considering how his policy positions were all over the bloody place and nobody seemed to care if he made any sense as long as he promised to blow up the technocratic elites and their coalition of lazy/entitled/criminal minorities.

In any case, nobody actually knows how to reverse the effects of globalization and technological advancement. Nobody can change the fact that manufacturing is cheaper in poorer countries. Nobody can change the fact that humans in factories can be replaced by robots. Nobody's going to bring back all the coal mines (and we wouldn't want to). Nobody can revive a town that doesn't have a reason to be there anymore. The Democrats can alleviate the pain a little by tinkering with the tax code and the social safety net, but that's a meaingless band-aid as far as the people who still live there are concerned. And they've been convinced that the benefits go to useless layabouts anyway.

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 Post Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:43 am 
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Also i think often respect is more important then wealth, even though thoose are often correlated.

If you have a job, that is considered important by the population at large and where there are few people qualified (or willing) to do that job, you get respect.

For many people in the West nowerdays the choices are welfare recipient, employee who's job is kept due to goverment subsidies, that aim at preserving jobs (i.e. indirect welfare recipient) or easily replacable drone in the service sector. None of thoose give you respect.

The strategy of rightwing populists is to brown nose a (often vaguely defined) sector of that population (for their demographics mostly, because they have little else to offer), while going out of their way to insult other parts of the population (elites, minorities, if possible also vaguely defined). So theese people see someone who is making an effort to court them, while he is mean to other people, so they assume they respect them.

And this is hard to counter. Attempting to treat everyone with respect does not work, since then you might look like a saint, but if you are not already respected by less saintly people, being respected by saints feels just like being pitied.

The only idea i have is to tell them (as vaguely defined as possible), that they are at least better then the other ones (even more vaguely defined). Basically a conjuring trick, where you ostracize a supposedly large segment of the population, where you never ever give single example, because for everyone you can come up a reason, why that spezific person is not part of the group.

Edit to avoid doubleposting:

An other factor about wealth is wealth security. If you are on welfare (direct or indirect) or easily replaceable, your wealth is not secure, it depends on the whims of your employer, or on the whims of the goverment. You probably can sell welfare (direct or indirect) to voters facing such problems, if you can come up with a viable plan to secure that it does not go away in the foreseeable future. I have no idea how to do that though.

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 Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2016 4:05 am 
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The number-crunchers are finding that income itself didn't have much to do with Trump support - it was education that was the driving factor. In other words, while more educated people are generally richer, Trump lost well-educated but poor people (broke post-docs) but won less educated but affluent people (successful plumbers). I suppose even though they had some money, they didn't feel like they had respect. And arcosh is probably right about them needing somebody to look down (or be afraid of) on in order to feel respected.

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 Post Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 7:41 pm 
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It looks like the Democrats will try to reconnect with lower class whites, most of whom don't much care for blacks or Muslims, by turning to a black Muslim. Or perhaps not. I guess it depends on how they want to read the tea leaves on this mess, and whether they look to simply get their base out or try to expand it.

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 Post Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 3:46 am 
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Well, the base is going to be extremely unhappy if the Democrats push them off to the side in favour of trying to win over white people who break into hives at the mere mention of racism. Especially when the Trump administration is going to actively screw over several minorities. On the other hand, I doubt playing the turnout game is going to wrest the Senate back. How many states are there where boosting urban turnout during a mid-term election is going to be enough to overwhelm the rural and senior citizen vote? Forget the House; unless that Wisconsin anti-gerrymandering court case gets taken up by the Supreme Court, it's hopeless. Round and round the debate will go, unless the Trump administration does something supremely stupid.

Which it might do, if the Congressional Republicans are crazy-stupid enough to try to privatize Medicare. Wrecking Obamacare is one thing; that'll screw what, 25 million people out of a nation of 300 million? Which means everybody will probably have an acquaintance who'll lose their Obamacare but half of those people will go "Pfft, get a real job Steve". However, privatizing Medicare will make people go ape. The Dems seem to think that's their silver bullet.

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 Post Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 12:24 pm 
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I don't know anything about said black muslim, so i don't know if he would be a good idea. But it's not my impression that you can connect to lower class whites* by pussyfooting around anyones sensitivities, including the sensitivities of lower class whites.

I would guess someone who is not white male has it easier to adopt a less cultured, refined and less concerned about stepping on anyones toes, discourse, that i think is neccessary to win lower class whites, and still keep the base behind him.

* or however you call the cultural majority population

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 Post Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:28 pm 
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The said black Muslim politician is Congressman Keith Ellison. Apart from the fact that he's on the left wing of the Democratic Party, I know little about him.

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I would guess someone who is not white male has it easier to adopt a less cultured, refined and less concerned about stepping on anyones toes, discourse, that i think is neccessary to win lower class whites, and still keep the base behind him.

Huh? I thought it is widely believed that non-whites and non-males have a much harder time expressing anger without being perceived negatively. Obama spent 8 years not getting visibly angry because he was afraid it would alienate the (largely white) public. Hillary Clinton was so careful and poll-tested because earlier in her career when she did express undiplomatic opinions or exhibit unpolished behaviour, she was called shrill, harpie and trashy. Her most damaging gaffe was when she called half of Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables", which is a very mild insult compared to the ones Trump used.

I'd love for you to be right. I'd love for a non-white, non-male person to be able to speak bluntly without being called obnoxious, dangerous and bigoted against whites. But I don't see much evidence for it.

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 Post Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 3:44 pm 
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Kea's right, only white men can get angry and yell and lash out without every observer thinking they've lost control of themselves and are dangerous and shouldn't have power.

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 Post Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 6:38 pm 
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I guess* an ideal hero for an archetypical lower class white male is someone, who simply does not care on who's toes he steps, because he is only concerned with what is right, and not with what is polite.

To play that as a leftwinger, you need to occasionally step on the toes of someone on the left, and get a loud yelp and then goes "Yeah so". And part of your message needs to be something, that resonates as true with the archetypical lower class whites.

The latter is relatively easy for a left democrats, it can be "the corporations screw us all over" in one way or an other. The former i guess is harder for a democrat to do, even if most crushed toes are on the right and there i think a "minority bonus" within the democrats could help.

An i think being careful was a strategic error of Clinton. She should have runs as "Harpie, but our Harpie".

* and yes, it's mostly a guess

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