I read something a few years ago that said moderates/non-affiliated make up the majority of voters with only a smaller percentage on left and right tied to the parties (somewhere maybe in 15% to 20% range on each side, can't remember exactly).
So it seems like a good mix of moderate could possibly win, especially when the other candidate is so polarizing.
Most of the folks who say they’re unaffiliated or moderates or open to voting for either party in fact vote exactly like a self-reported partisan. They just don’t like the label.
Lots of crappy reporting doesn’t differentiate between self-reported swing/moderates and true swing.
GOTV matters more. Do your people show up at the polls?
That's the thing. When individual issues are polled without party labels, the Democratic Party's positions are largely popular. Just like these issues, if you were to put a Republican on the Democratic ticket, that candidate will lose support.
We've seen repeatedly that Democrats going to the middle are met with supposedly moderate Republicans saying, "But not like that."
The problem is that Democratic policies do not result in promised outcomes. For example, higher minimum wage sounds good on paper, but then you have a hard time finding a job or affording basic essentials. So people become allergic to people who seem to bring decay. I am not saying Republican policies are a picture of practicality.
For the problem of lifting as many as possible out of poverty there aren't really any good answers so I think it comes down what each person's preferred trade-offs are. No minimum wage is good because it lowers the barrier to potentially gainful employment as well as making it easier to meet the work requirement for certain government benefits. High minimum wage is good because if you can get a job you'll make enough to not need benefits and it puts a floor on how much value a job needs to actually produce to be worthwhile and orients the economy around more skilled work.
But both options kinda suck. No minimum wage when wages can be depressed below CoL creates a decay in its own way.
My preferred ideal is setting minimum wage not by rule but via a standing government work program available to anyone that pays above CoL for the area. Then private employers can compete on price or by offering easier less-stressful work.
Democrats are the party of “wouldn’t it be nice if?”
Republicans are the party of “yeah, but…”
We need both types of thinking, and it’s a shame there isn’t a party that actually merges the two instead of this crappy tug of war we have going on. Practical progressivism, or something.
Not really. If this were true, one might expect to see, say, deficit spending temper when Republicans control both houses and the presidency.
Republicans just like to put debt into different things, like tax cuts for the rich.
Plus a good deal of the “wouldn’t it be nice…” is real-world tested and proven and the “yeah, but…” is nonsense.
[edit] this notion is a hold-over from when it was sorta, kinda true, when both parties were still basically trying to make government work well and largely working toward similar goals and differed largely on approach—but that was more than 50 years ago. Reagan’s campaign is the demarcation line.
Individual Democratic policies might poll well but as a bundle there's deal killers in there for most Republicans. For instance: Universal health care sounds great... oh but thats bundled with changes to ATF policy to make me a felon for what's already in my closet? Pass.
It’s definitely not just that. You can ask people if they’d support a hypothetical social program and then describe a real one, warts and all (they’re usually not a tenth as bad as popularly supposed—you don’t need to shy away from the down sides to make them look good) and get very high rates of support. Name the actual program, and you get a “no” and a bunch of BS about it back. It’s a propaganda thing, it’s not the price tags. I mean, sometimes, sure, but you can go out all day long and get 20-30% swings in support for this stuff with straight descriptions (including costs) vs. the name under which a program has been vilified.
[edit] one of the funniest ones is foreign aid. It’s commonly supposed to be way higher than it actually is (you’ll get answers like 5%, 10% of the budget, wildly wrong stuff) so you can consistently get people to agree that a “cut” to double what it actually is would be a great thing for a fiscally responsible candidate to propose.
[edit edit] so point is the vast majority of voters have no clue what it is they’re opposing when they say they’re against lots of things they’re against. Describe it, and they’re on board. They don’t actually know what it is.
Maybe but we have also seen a swing in how politics works (gotten more extreme). During the last two decades I've gone from Republican to Democrat to independent (never-Trumper, Democrat by GOP moral forfeit). I wonder how my beliefs would have evolved if US politics didn't grow so extreme over time.
I'm in the same boat. I think everyone dramatically underestimates how many of us Trump refugees there are. Some of us are never trumpers and actually voted for Biden, some of us held our nose and voted for Trump. But the extreme right that fuels MAGA doesn't have as much support as people think, and the main reason why Trump stands a chance this year is because the left has made no overtures whatsoever to the center and center-right.
Going along with the… let’s say poorly supported by the facts notions that illegal immigrants are meaningful in terms of rising violent crime rates (which—to avoid accidentally contributing to the problem, no, they’re not rising) or fentanyl smuggling, and backing that not just with rhetoric but with policy in some cases is, I think, one thing the democratic campaigns believe they’re doing to reach out toward the center and center right. It’s definitely not aimed at democrats even a hair left of… idk, Reagan I guess, given the whole amnesty thing. So they are trying some stuff.
My father was a straight-ticket Republican voter his entire life and now he says he will never vote for any MAGA Republican. He hates the MAGA takeover of the party. Though it's anecdotal, I agree that there are far more Trump refugees than people think. I also don't know any Democrats who have done the inverse and moved to the MAGA camp.
Hopefully Trump's loss will be the final nail in the coffin for MAGA.
> and the main reason why Trump stands a chance this year is because the left has made no overtures whatsoever to the center and center-right.
People keep repeating this like it's some kind of obvious basic fact and I get more and more confused each time.
How much more "center" can you get than Joe Biden? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Kamala Harris? As far as I know, they're all in favor of arresting illegal immigrants, using military power to further foreign policies, moderate taxation, little to no drug legalization, mass incarceration for felons, barely any gun control, etc, etc.
What exactly is the "center-right" looking for that they're not getting?
Every time the media (and social media) brings up self-described right wing desires, they're pretty much entirely culture war issues, is that what you mean?
Yeah partisans arent good at winning friends and influencing people in their pathetic partisan power struggles
They’ve spent nearly a decade isolating themselves in an algorithm fueled mirror room, while disassociating from everyone that doesn't already agree with them 100%
instead of any color coded “wave” occurring despite their recurring delusions, there’s gridlock in the senate, no filibuster proof majority, they’ve lost affiliation and independents are the largest political affiliation in the country now with almost zero representation
I read something a few years ago that said moderates/non-affiliated make up the majority of voters with only a smaller percentage on left and right tied to the parties (somewhere maybe in 15% to 20% range on each side, can't remember exactly).
So it seems like a good mix of moderate could possibly win, especially when the other candidate is so polarizing.