There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
Why can't it be true that many people voted stupidly? As a third party to Brexit, it was apparent that many people voted stupidly.
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In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
> There is a lot of "Don't believe that Republican voters are stupid" in the comments, but why is that true?
I’m taking a shot in the dark here but I’m guessing they voted R themselves, we can all portray ourselves to be objective in comments when we really aren’t. This happens a lot on social media, especially the faux-smart part.
I find it hard to believe that the majority of ~70,000,000 people are that stupid and/or mislead, the only other option is that the majority actually want what is now coming and I do not feel obliged to refrain from passing judgement on that. My feelings on brexit, which far more directly affects myself, are similar.
People who were naive enough to be misled do undoubtably exist (I know a couple of otherwise intelligent people who massively regret the brexit thing) but I don't think they are the majority.
Shortly before the Brexit referendum, Scotland had an independence referendum, where the Westminster government was in favour of the status quo - and they had a great deal of success by deliberately not figuring out what independence would mean.
What currency would an independent Scotland use? What will happen to their military? What about healthcare, and education? EU membership? What share of the UK's national debt would they take on? Who will get citizenship? What will the border look like? Nobody knows! So a yes vote was a scary leap into the unknown with many unsolved problems, while a no vote was safe and predictable.
After the strategy succeeded in the Scottish independence vote, Cameron decided to repeat that success with Brexit - not figuring out what Brexit means was a deliberate strategy intended to boost the remain campaign.
I think there's something to be said about the value of a calculated protest vote.
For young men, who doesn't feel that the Democrats are offering them a world view where they are valued at all, why should they vote Democrat? Maybe at some level they realize that Trumps policies are worse for them in some ways than Harris'. But when Harris loses despite Trump being such an awful candidate it sends a very powerful message to the Democrats: you can't just keep ignoring a huge portion of the population and make them feel like they're not valued in society.
People put self-worth above almost anything else except self-preservation.
I keep seeing this take on Democrat's treatise of men but I'm not sure it really follows. Even among Democrats white people and men are the most valued classes of American society, for better or worse their interests will never not be protected above all others. The Democratic case has been "given that, what can we do to help the rest of you." Stuff like LGBT support, reproductive rights, BLM, and even path to citizenship don't even wiggle the needle of white men's favor in society.
It doesn't change how it feels especially in online spaces where minorities vent publicly where before it has been private, and I can understand that, but that seems to be the only difference. GOP messaging successfully took "everyone is doing worse off right now" + "look at these Democrats throwing inconsequential scraps to minorities" and convinced people it was causal.
Mostly because "they're stupid" is a lazy argument that ignores why you think they're stupid. You can say "Well, they voted against their best economic interests," assuming they're all net recipients of government cash, but they say they don't want to be, and they want to dismantle executive departments they perceive as wasteful. You can say "They're violent," but Trump campaigned on being the peace-negotiator who didn't start any wars, and Harris had no real response to that. You can say "He hates women," but there are apparently enough women who are either pro-life or didn't see abortion as the main campaign issue. Harris's commercials said "We want change," but she's the incumbent! If change didn't happen by now, why would it four years from now?
From what I've seen from Trump supporters on NextDoor you are missing a lot of cases where it is hard to come up with a good explanation that doesn't involve some stupidity or at least willful ignorance.
For example I've seen people saying they were going to vote for him because he'll stop undocumented immigrants from eating pets in Springfield OH. No one has been able to find any evidence of that.
There are also the people who say they will vote for him because he promises to get rid of some specific government service or program, and it turns out from their other comments that this is a service or program that they depend on but don't realize it is the same program.
Going the other way, there are people on NextDoor who I've suspected were a bit stupid long before I saw them in any political discussion. E.g., people going on about contrails being the government spraying us with chemicals or the new electric meters rolled out in this area over the last few years will make us sick because of their remote read capabilities (but the ones they replaced were also remote read--apparently they never noticed that they never saw a meter reader in all the years they had it).
Whenever one of those people later posted something that did say how they would vote it almost invariably was for Trump, and it would be for reasons like the ones above.
This suggests that while there might be reasons for a non-stupid person to vote for Trump, he also captured a big fraction of the votes of stupid people. That I think is one of the biggest difference between Trump and other candidates from both parties. Trump might be the first to actively court the stupid vote.
NextDoor is an...interesting...place from which to select a sample of voters. There are plenty of stupid people to go around, and Trump certainly doesn't have a monopoly on them--I would argue that the Left's appeals to various identity voters are also explicitly courting stupid people, they're just insulated by being members of protected classes.
The example you gave is an interesting one, because it's a situation where a very real concern--the public resources of small communities being stretched beyond their limits because the federal government refuses to enforce immigration law--was deflected by the media to something ridiculous. ("Brown people are invading our towns and eating our cats!") People voted for Trump because they saw through that kind of tactic, and they're far from stupid for doing so.
How the heck was that deflection by the media? Trump said live on national television "In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there".
Vance did later admit that this was just a rumor, and then encouraged people the keep on spreading it.
BTW, the immigrants in Springfield are there legally, which is another thing Trump has repeatedly lied about.
The big thing though is that they people I'm talking about who base their support of Trump on things like the eating pets things live in areas where there are not many immigrants (legal or illegal). They personally are not seeing any problems immigrant related.
All their information on this comes from Trump. And most of their information on every other issue. And even if they finally are convinced that he lied on something they never question anything else and go try to verify it.
And that's why I would consider them to be not quite up to par in the thinking department.
My point precisely. We seem to forget Churchill's famous dictum that "no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
I am for democracy because everything else is worse, but that doesn't mean I need to delude myself that "the majority is always" right or some nonsense like that. Yet the latter seems to be an increasingly common talking point, I've noticed.
There are many democratic nations on earth, many variations on theme.
Churchill today might note that US democracy is the worst form of democratic Government being structurally doomed to spiral into a two party K-hole despite being setup by people largely vehemently opposed to party politics.
Perhaps worst is overstating "old", "tired", "dated", "failed to scale", "doesn't encourage representative government".
It's not a choice between one form of democracy and authoritarian Stalinism. There's a far broader chice between many forms of democracy - some of those that embrace plurity of choice and reject unlimited legal bribery by very small very rich vested interests might be worth a look.
While I agree with you that there are different ways of structuring democracies and that parts of US democracy seem... in need of an update, even "better" democracies can't fully prevent a slide into authoritarianism. It has happened countless times before.
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.
Because any choice in a two party system is stupid to some degree, for most people. Most people’s beliefs don’t all line up exactly with one political party or the other. So every election is a compromise: which of your values must you prioritize? A whole lot of Americans aren’t doing well economically, they haven’t been doing well for decades, and under Biden they saw everything get more expensive. So they don’t like either side, and if you can convince them to vote, it’s only going to be for change. Kamala didn’t portray any change from Biden, so she lost.
I think calling it mere stupidity is a little too reductive. There are genuine grievances among his supporters, such as rising inequality, loss of opportunities/jobs and an economic system which is not working out for them. But expecting a narcissistic misogynistic racist billionaire rapist to actually help them is…the definition of stupidity.
At the end of the day though he was the one that spent the time to understand what they care about.
> Literacy levels: 54% of adults read below a 6th-grade level, and 20% read below a 5th-grade level.
This is the reality in America. The education system failed these people.
Trump is merely taking advantage of that. He understands that logical arguments aren't necessary, merely emotional ones that appeal to how downtrodden and forgotten these folk feel. If he can make them believe that building a wall and/or deporting immigrants will get them their jobs back or that tariffs will bring manufacturing back to America that is more important to winning an election than truths or reality.
He won fair and square, the election -is- a popularity contest, not a competency contest.
Well, half of the population is more stupid than the other half (not saying republicans are, just saying that yeah, hackernews is definitely a subset not representative of the total population)
Why can't it be true that many people voted stupidly? As a third party to Brexit, it was apparent that many people voted stupidly.
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edit:
In my opinion, it's very simple. I became a one issue voter after one of the candidates tried to obstruct the process (violently), the last time. That's antithetical to America. It's ironic because it's the type of thing that happens in the "shithole countries" that we're so focused on keeping out (I say this as a person who thinks immigration reform with strong structure is long needed).
Rewarding Trump by giving him the keys is stupid if you can even muster the courage to say you believe in anything America stands for.