postmortem of the 2020 election

[woolfe9998]

This article in NY Mag is an excellent piece on what really happened with the 2020 elections and why. It is a long discussion with David Shor, who himself identifies with the progressive wing of the dem party and self-identifies as socialist. Yet he is analyzing extensive voter data, much of which has only been compiled in the last month or two.

He is mainly addressing why minority support for Trump increased, especially among Hispanics, and to a lesser extent, with blacks. He says that actually a large share of both groups identify in polls as "conservative" but nonetheless has traditionally voted dem because they perceive the GOP as hostile to minorities. But his takeaway is that the riots of last summer, and especially the "defund the police" slonageering, turned off a large number of right leaning Hispanics and some right leaning blacks. If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is a relevant portion:

And so this leads to a question of why. Why did nonwhite voters start sorting more by ideology? And that’s a hard thing to know. But my organization, and our partner organizations, have done extensive post-election surveys of 2020 voters. And we looked specifically at those voters who switched from supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald Trump in 2020 to see whether anything distinguishes this subgroup in terms of their policy opinions. What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

One interesting fact in all this is that Trump's "law and order" schtick, meant to appeal by fear to white suburbanites, did not resonate with that group. Instead, it resonated with more conservative non-white voters.

I said in the defund the police thread I started over the summer that this would hurt the dems in the elections, and indeed it did. We most likely would have done better in the House and Senate if not for that issue, and Biden would have won by a wider margin. Comments?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html

 

[dank69]

Yup, Dems need a LOT of work when it comes to sloganeering. It's sad that something so stupid matters so much more than actual policy, but that is the current reality.

 

[woolfe9998]

Yup, Dems need a LOT of work when it comes to sloganeering. It's sad that something so stupid matters so much more than actual policy, but that is the current reality.

Yes, it's a matter of messaging to some degree, but with the issue of policing I think the problem runs a little deeper. Policing is an issue of some substance, one that people across the spectrum care about and have firm opinions on. And I'm afraid the democrats are out of step on it, and frankly, it's mostly white democrats who are the problem. White dems have gone too far left on policing and on race/gender issues in general. Their abandonment of color blind liberalism is a problem for some voters, and apparently it isn't only white conversates who take issue with it.

 

[Moonbeam]

My two cents worth for this that if you tell Blacks and Hispanics long enough and hard enough they are dangerous worthless people they will believe it. I used to know a Black man who despised his own people for their criminal behavior and what they did to ruin the reputation of Black people. I am pretty sure if you had told him all those years ago that the police would no longer be policing, he would have called it insanity. Unfortunately it is already the truth when it comes to white collar crime. In that area of justice in America I have nothing but contempt. Did you know that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was complicated? Right. When you execute a person and cut them up and stuff them in a suitcase you really have a lot of angles to go over before you, you know, charge them and bring them to trial. Wouldn't it be great to be complicated.

I wish I knew how and who to tell to go fuck themselves over that.

 

[uclaLabrat]

I think defend the police is a perfect policy platform for the dems: appropriate policy and awful messaging.

 

[Franz316]

I think "Police Accountability" would have went over much better than "Defund the Police."

 

[Moonbeam]

I think "Police Accountability" would have went over much better than "Defund the Police."

Or fund community policing,,,,

 

[PowerEngineer]

I think "Police Accountability" would have went over much better than "Defund the Police."

Yes, I agree. A problem (at as I see it) is that movements like BLM sometimes jerk forward too quickly once they finally get some traction. In Portland (Oregon), they hastily abolished the police gun violence team because of accusations that they were targeting people of color. That has contributed to a spike in gun violence that also disproportionately affects people of color. Now they are trying to bring back a reformed gun violence team. Sometimes, it seems we go one step backward before (hopefully) two steps forward.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/cr...ears/283-b530bef4-5e02-4722-a418-8f50bf03e3fe

 

[VashHT]

Yeah the "abolish prisons" slogan is pretty dumb too, the prison system in the US is desperately in need of reform but just getting rid of it isn't going to fix the problem.

 

[vi edit]

Pretty much agree that slogans used were far more reductive than productive. Good intent, terrible names. GOP are much better at messaging.

 

[woolfe9998]

Pretty much agree that slogans used were far more reductive than productive. Good intent, terrible names. GOP are much better at messaging.

It should be mentioned that "defund the police" was not a slogan chosen by the party. It came from the grassroots. People in those protests were holding up "defund the police" signs. Then some local pols, at first Minneapolis city council, seized on it as a way to curry favor with local voters. And hence from there it came to national attention.

It should have just petered out at the ground level but those idiot local pols were thinking of themselves and not considering what it would do on a national level. That fool who came on CNN and said that expecting service in a 911 emergency was "white privilege" might well be the biggest moron I've seen on the dem side in a long time.

 

[interchange]

I would have gone with "help the police". Allocate funding to support staff, crisis workers, etc., build the relationship with the community, and allow officers to use their efforts doing actual police work. Pay them more with the money you save.

 

[HomerJS]

I think "Police Accountability" would have went over much better than "Defund the Police."

Dems tried to sloganeer to the level of 5th graders just like Republicans. That always backfires.

Right now GQP are pushing "Dems are closing schools and opening borders"

 

[trenchfoot]

Dems tried to sloganeer to the level of 5th graders just like Republicans. That always backfires.

Right now GQP are pushing "Dems are closing schools and opening borders"

Add to that the fact that Repubs who tune into that kind of messaging don't need any kind of verifiable proof to believe what they hear. If it came from FOX, it's good as gold as far as they're concerned.