2024 National & State Elections (Not POTUS)

[mpaer]

No Yankees fan but I’m with this guy. Great moment from a couple of years ago.

Occasionally the filthy mouths of some New Yorkers makes me feel good all over

 

[Paine]

This may have already been covered, if so I apologize. But why in the blue hell are down ballot Dems associating themselves with Trump in campaign ads?

Because there is a segment of the Democratic Party that is addicted to tacking to the center, whether the center means going closer to Trump, Bush, Cheney, whoever.

 

[donbosco]

Occasionally the filthy mouths of some New Yorkers makes me feel good all over

 

[superrific]

This may have already been covered, if so I apologize. But why in the blue hell are down ballot Dems associating themselves with Trump in campaign ads?

Probably because it's possible to micro-target ads to voters for whom that message will matter.

Look, we need Tammy Baldwin to win her seat regardless of the outcome of the presidential race. If Kamala wins WI, then Baldwin will win. But if Kamala loses WI, Baldwin needs a backup plan. So she has an ad that might make Trump voters feel comfortable voting for her. This isn't going to change her overall messaging. It's just being cautious and sweating the details.

GOP reps in close races are basically doing the same the other way. They are more running away from Trump than running to Kamala, but it's the same dynamic.

 

[superrific]

Because there is a segment of the Democratic Party that is addicted to tacking to the center, whether the center means going closer to Trump, Bush, Cheney, whoever.

It's much, much more likely that the data scientists in the Democratic Party are telling candidates when and how to tack to the center. Tacking to the center is, of course, the way to win elections in America. The whole, "let's turn out our progressive base and win" nonsense has been exposed as a myth.

Here's the dynamic as I see it:

Progressive: We need a progressive message so we bring disaffected voters out to the polls. Give them something to get excited about.
Realist: Disaffected voters prefer Trump.
Progressive: That's because we're not giving them the right message.
Realist: They don't vote on messages or ideas. That's why they're voting for Trump.
Progressive*** : They are voting for Trump because he speaks to their economic anxieties and concerns.
Realist: No he doesn't. He's a firehose of BSC who runs an entire campaign based on fear mongering and obvious lies. The "armed gangs are invading the country" has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage.
Progressive: But he's tapping into something there. If we had something to offer them.
Realist: We did health insurance. That didn't help us with the people you think will carry us to new heights. Those people didn't care that the Republicans tried to take away their health insurance. They literally don't know who does what. That's why Trump can get away with lying about the great stuff he did that was actually done by Barack or Joe

etc.

The asterisks are for the part of this conversation where I engage a lot. You and I have in fact had this conversation before. I do not think Trump voters are receptive to a progressive message. We could give them a utopia and they'd reject it if someone convinced them there would be black and brown people there too. I understand that you have your identity as a progressive white rural Southerner and that shapes your thinking that people could be reached if only . . . but the research tells us that just isn't true. Our experience tells us that it just isn't true.

You can see this most clearly in the union members who are voting for Trump. That's about as close to a natural experiment as there is. Union support is an obvious difference between the parties and especially these candidates. The members of the big mfg unions value their unions and have the experience of unions giving them better wages and work conditions. Because they are in unions, they have a decent lifestyle. And yet a lot of them are voting Trump. The white ones primarily. And the male ones too. No amount of progressive policy are going to reach those people.

 

[Paine]

It's much, much more likely that the data scientists in the Democratic Party are telling candidates when and how to tack to the center. Tacking to the center is, of course, the way to win elections in America. The whole, "let's turn out our progressive base and win" nonsense has been exposed as a myth.

Here's the dynamic as I see it:

Progressive: We need a progressive message so we bring disaffected voters out to the polls. Give them something to get excited about.
Realist: Disaffected voters prefer Trump.
Progressive: That's because we're not giving them the right message.
Realist: They don't vote on messages or ideas. That's why they're voting for Trump.
Progressive*** : They are voting for Trump because he speaks to their economic anxieties and concerns.
Realist: No he doesn't. He's a firehose of BSC who runs an entire campaign based on fear mongering and obvious lies. The "armed gangs are invading the country" has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage.
Progressive: But he's tapping into something there. If we had something to offer them.
Realist: We did health insurance. That didn't help us with the people you think will carry us to new heights. Those people didn't care that the Republicans tried to take away their health insurance. They literally don't know who does what. That's why Trump can get away with lying about the great stuff he did that was actually done by Barack or Joe

etc.

The asterisks are for the part of this conversation where I engage a lot. You and I have in fact had this conversation before. I do not think Trump voters are receptive to a progressive message. We could give them a utopia and they'd reject it if someone convinced them there would be black and brown people there too. I understand that you have your identity as a progressive white rural Southerner and that shapes your thinking that people could be reached if only . . . but the research tells us that just isn't true. Our experience tells us that it just isn't true.

You can see this most clearly in the union members who are voting for Trump. That's about as close to a natural experiment as there is. Union support is an obvious difference between the parties and especially these candidates. The members of the big mfg unions value their unions and have the experience of unions giving them better wages and work conditions. Because they are in unions, they have a decent lifestyle. And yet a lot of them are voting Trump. The white ones primarily. And the male ones too. No amount of progressive policy are going to reach those people.

All that to say, we can agree to disagree. Like you said, we’ve had this argument before and you haven’t changed my mind nor I yours.

We haven’t had a Democratic candidate in the general election who has pursued the progressive policies I’m talking about ever. So I’m not sure how you can say it’s been “exposed as a myth.”

 

[superrific]

All that to say, we can agree to disagree. Like you said, we’ve had this argument before and you haven’t changed my mind nor I yours.

We haven’t had a Democratic candidate in the general election who has pursued the progressive policies I’m talking about ever. So I’m not sure how you can say it’s been “exposed as a myth.”

What has been exposed as a myth is the idea that the less engaged voters out there would emerge from the woodwork and vote for Dems if only given the right policies. The less engaged voters don't respond to messaging. This was Liz Warren's failing as a presidential candidate. It turns out that Americans actually don't want "a plan for that." HRC did the same: she ran on the issues. But you can't win that way because 1) the facts don't get to the people who would need to hear them and 2) these voters can't understand the subtleties anyway. If they had any idea about how policy works, they'd be running scared of Trump, because his policies will screw them. The problem isn't that Dems aren't offering enough meat. It's that policy gets drowned out by "they're eating the pets."

There was an article on Vox that touched on these points. It's paywalled. I don't know how I read it, but I did.

If Harris loses, expect Democrats to move right

Even though Harris is running as a moderate, progressives are likely to get blamed for her defeat.

www.vox.com

I think part of the issue here is that you're young and therefore naturally optimistic. And I used to be young and optimistic and after 30-35 years of doing this, I'm neither. And I also know that young people HATE to hear old dudes tell them that "your ideas sound great but I have experience and I know better and you'll see the same thing when you're my age." I hated hearing that. And there are good reasons to hate hearing that. But there are a few areas where experience really does matter. You have assumptions about how voters vote. I think those assumptions probably describe you and your relatively well-educated peers.

I'd like nycfan, if she gets any time, to talk a bit about her work with barely literate adults. I remember a post of hers a while back -- it was almost surely on the old board, and it might have been a year ago -- in which she said that watching people in a Trump crowd reminded her of those adults. They didn't know many words, and they weren't so good with comprehension, so they tend to grab onto the words they can understand. I'll let her expand on that point and I think there are some new threads that need starting. But if she's right that people gravitate to Trump because they can understand him, because they identify with "bigly" as that's the sort of language they use, then no amount of progressive ideas are going to help.

 

[Paine]

What has been exposed as a myth is the idea that the less engaged voters out there would emerge from the woodwork and vote for Dems if only given the right policies. The less engaged voters don't respond to messaging. This was Liz Warren's failing as a presidential candidate. It turns out that Americans actually don't want "a plan for that." HRC did the same: she ran on the issues. But you can't win that way because 1) the facts don't get to the people who would need to hear them and 2) these voters can't understand the subtleties anyway. If they had any idea about how policy works, they'd be running scared of Trump, because his policies will screw them. The problem isn't that Dems aren't offering enough meat. It's that policy gets drowned out by "they're eating the pets."

There was an article on Vox that touched on these points. It's paywalled. I don't know how I read it, but I did.

If Harris loses, expect Democrats to move right

Even though Harris is running as a moderate, progressives are likely to get blamed for her defeat.

www.vox.com

I think part of the issue here is that you're young and therefore naturally optimistic. And I used to be young and optimistic and after 30-35 years of doing this, I'm neither. And I also know that young people HATE to hear old dudes tell them that "your ideas sound great but I have experience and I know better and you'll see the same thing when you're my age." I hated hearing that. And there are good reasons to hate hearing that. But there are a few areas where experience really does matter. You have assumptions about how voters vote. I think those assumptions probably describe you and your relatively well-educated peers.

I'd like nycfan, if she gets any time, to talk a bit about her work with barely literate adults. I remember a post of hers a while back -- it was almost surely on the old board, and it might have been a year ago -- in which she said that watching people in a Trump crowd reminded her of those adults. They didn't know many words, and they weren't so good with comprehension, so they tend to grab onto the words they can understand. I'll let her expand on that point and I think there are some new threads that need starting. But if she's right that people gravitate to Trump because they can understand him, because they identify with "bigly" as that's the sort of language they use, then no amount of progressive ideas are going to help.

You fundamentally misunderstand my position if you think Elizabeth Warren is the type of candidate I’m pining for.

Just to elaborate on this, I’m not in favor of running professors who say they have a plan for everything. I think Liz Warren is a very smart person and fine Senator for Massachusetts. She is not my model for a populist Democratic presidential candidate. Nor is Hillary Clinton.

There’s a reason I supported Bernie Sanders and have been talking about Dan Osborn to anyone who will listen.

I’m not sure where you got the assumption that I run in circles with “well educated peers.” I regularly talk to more people that didn’t go to college than those that did. That’s where I get my “assumptions” about how people vote. From direct experiences knowing and talking with the people the Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging support from for the last 10 years.

 

[donbosco]

North Carolina early vote update​

The gap between 2020 and 2024 Black voters is narrowing and next week the pace will pick up.​

Thomas Mills
Oct 25, 2024

Today is the midpoint for in-person early voting in North Carolina. Republicans are the surprise this year in that they clearly have an early vote program that was not in place previously. African Americans lagged their 2020 in-person vote numbers but are now closing the gap. Unaffiliated voters are also showing up in much larger numbers than in the past. Finally, the suburbs are jumping.

North Carolina early vote update

The gap between 2020 and 2024 Black voters is narrowing and next week the pace will pick up.

www.politicsnc.com

 

[nycfan]

I'd like nycfan, if she gets any time, to talk a bit about her work with barely literate adults. I remember a post of hers a while back -- it was almost surely on the old board, and it might have been a year ago -- in which she said that watching people in a Trump crowd reminded her of those adults. They didn't know many words, and they weren't so good with comprehension, so they tend to grab onto the words they can understand. I'll let her expand on that point and I think there are some new threads that need starting. But if she's right that people gravitate to Trump because they can understand him, because they identify with "bigly" as that's the sort of language they use, then no amount of progressive ideas are going to help.

Don't recall exactly what I posted previously, so this may not even be what Super is referring to, but it is true that observing a good number of Trump supporters does remind me of work I did (a long time ago now) with functionally illiterate English-speaking adults. My observation was that they tended to decode/decipher words on a page, not read them. There were key words and phrases they had picked up one way or another by necessity in life that popped out of what I think they otherwise perceived as a sea of seemingly encrypted (from their perspective) data. Once they saw one of the limited words, it seemed to jump off the page and they would then leap to a guess about what the sentence or passage was about without actually being able to read it.

Another way to think about it is for anyone who has ever learned or tried to learn how to read music. For the novice, it is an act of translation (this black dot on this line means A, this one means G, etc.), painfully translating each line first as a note, then looking for "punctuation" (is it sharp or flat) and then further deciphering the timing information (is it a quarter note or a half note or an eighth note). They are not really reading music, which is its own language, at that point, just translating from music to English. Similarly, in my experience with functionally illiterate adults who are either trying to learn to read or just needing help filling out forms (which is really more my role in my volunteer efforts), part of the problem was that even after sounding out the word, they might still not be able to move from 3 syllables to a single word or really grasp what it means on its own, much less in connection with the words around it. They are translating/decoding (which I'm using in the sense of decoding an encrypted message, not in the educator's lingo for learning to read), not reading.

Consider this sentence from the NC website for obtaining unemployment benefits (I just pulled it at random as the kind of thing that the functionally illiterate REALLY struggle to navigate without help -- and even highly literate people often struggle to follow bureaucrateeze):

"North Carolina law requires you to serve an unpaid waiting week before you can be paid unemployment benefits. The first week you may be eligible for unemployment is your unpaid waiting week. Even though you are not paid for this week, you must still file your weekly certification. "​

In helping people with a sentence like the above, here is about how I found they were INITIALLY seeing it:

"North Carolina law kdjk ;rfjkd;fkjdl;aoi kjdk jfd unpaid kdjfdk week kdjfkdl fjd;oia djkl;fldkafj ;dl paid k JKDF:K :LDSFK DFkjdkjfla;. The first week djsk;fd jkdf kf;lajdl;fjdl;afkdj kfldkjfka;sdk;lfd week. kdjf dk;fjdk;alfdj lk;ajfdk;lafdk not paid djfdklfdj klafdj k, you must jdf;ld fakdf jdkl;af jdklf djkad."​

We were encouraged to help someone who needed help with this to read aloud the sentence a few times and then talk about what it meant. But the only thing they likely got without significant guidance and effort would be to assume that the unemployment check is paid weekly and they wanted to know how soon they would get it but couldn't sufficiently decode the sentence to even approach understanding what the point of this particular direction might be (which is actually more about having to provide the certification that you are not employed and are actively seeking employment even in the first week when you are not going to get an unemployment check).

Now, clearly, most of Trump's fans are not functionally illiterate, but many of them read on anywhere from a first grade to sixth grade level. As children, our listening comprehension skills are well ahead of our reading comprehension skills, but the listening comprehension impacts the ability to develop reading comprehension and in turn limited reading comprehension usually stunts the development of vocabulary and the the development of more complex listening comprehension.

So, in politics, people tend to get lost in complex policy positions and reject complex discussions that require nuance. I think that's why I started assuming in August that voters who claimed they needed to hear more about Kamala's policy positions really meant they were never going to vote for her, but had latched onto needing more details as an excuse. People with limited reading and listening comprehension get through their life without a working framework of context or an ability to process nuance, and so reject the notion that anything is as complex as some people are saying because they get by just fine without all that fancy talk.

Listen to Trump supporters interviewed at a rally and they clearly have no idea what is or anyone else's policy positions are on almost anything, but they do know that Trump is speaking to them on a basic level that is reassuring and resonates with their day to day lived experience -- they believe that he understands them because they understand him. He is using words they know in ways they are used to hearing other people use them and he is consistent, repeating them over and over for emphasis. I think it is why they take pleasure in repeating his statements back at people who they can see are infuriated by the statement. They don't know or really care whether it is internally inconsistent, incoherent or factually incorrect, they just know he says it, they like the sound of it, saying it to each other is like a secret handshake among themselves and it makes people who talk in big words and look down on them go bananas.

Whether by instinct or clever planning, I think that Trump is a MASTER at communicating with people with limited listening (and likely reading) comprehension. He uses key words and phrases over and over and over and those are key for people to latch onto. He insists that things ARE NOT so complicated and the people who insist otherwise are not to be trusted. LIBERTY! INVASION! MIGRANT CRIME! COMMUNIST! You don't need to know precisely what those words mean in the dictionary but you can tell from tone and repetition that they mean something good (LIBERTY!) or bad (INVASION!). They/them means the bad guys. We the People means the good guys.

 

[Paine]

Don't recall exactly what I posted previously, so this may not even be what Super is referring to, but it is true that observing a good number of Trump supporters does remind me of work I did (a long time ago now) with functionally illiterate English-speaking adults. My observation was that they tended to decode/decipher words on a page, not read them. There were key words and phrases they had picked up one way or another by necessity in life that popped out of what I think they otherwise perceived as a sea of seemingly encrypted (from their perspective) data. Once they saw one of the limited words, it seemed to jump off the page and they would then leap to a guess about what the sentence or passage was about without actually being able to read it.

Another way to think about it is for anyone who has ever learned or tried to learn how to read music. For the novice, it is an act of translation (this black dot on this line means A, this one means G, etc.), painfully translating each line first as a note, then looking for "punctuation" (is it sharp or flat) and then further deciphering the timing information (is it a quarter note or a half note or an eighth note). They are not really reading music, which is its own language, at that point, just translating from music to English. Similarly, in my experience with functionally illiterate adults who are either trying to learn to read or just needing help filling out forms (which is really more my role in my volunteer efforts), part of the problem was that even after sounding out the word, they might still not be able to move from 3 syllables to a single word or really grasp what it means on its own, much less in connection with the words around it. They are translating/decoding (which I'm using in the sense of decoding an encrypted message, not in the educator's lingo for learning to read), not reading.

Consider this sentence from the NC website for obtaining unemployment benefits (I just pulled it at random as the kind of thing that the functionally illiterate REALLY struggle to navigate without help -- and even highly literate people often struggle to follow bureaucrateeze):

"North Carolina law requires you to serve an unpaid waiting week before you can be paid unemployment benefits. The first week you may be eligible for unemployment is your unpaid waiting week. Even though you are not paid for this week, you must still file your weekly certification. "​

In helping people with a sentence like the above, here is about how I found they were INITIALLY seeing it:

"North Carolina law kdjk ;rfjkd;fkjdl;aoi kjdk jfd unpaid kdjfdk week kdjfkdl fjd;oia djkl;fldkafj ;dl paid k JKDF:K :LDSFK DFkjdkjfla;. The first week djsk;fd jkdf kf;lajdl;fjdl;afkdj kfldkjfka;sdk;lfd week. kdjf dk;fjdk;alfdj lk;ajfdk;lafdk not paid djfdklfdj klafdj k, you must jdf;ld fakdf jdkl;af jdklf djkad."​

We were encouraged to help someone who needed help with this to read aloud the sentence a few times and then talk about what it meant. But the only thing they likely got without significant guidance and effort would be to assume that the unemployment check is paid weekly and they wanted to know how soon they would get it but couldn't sufficiently decode the sentence to even approach understanding what the point of this particular direction might be (which is actually more about having to provide the certification that you are not employed and are actively seeking employment even in the first week when you are not going to get an unemployment check).

Now, clearly, most of Trump's fans are not functionally illiterate, but many of them read on anywhere from a first grade to sixth grade level. As children, our listening comprehension skills are well ahead of our reading comprehension skills, but the listening comprehension impacts the ability to develop reading comprehension and in turn limited reading comprehension usually stunts the development of vocabulary and the the development of more complex listening comprehension.

So, in politics, people tend to get lost in complex policy positions and reject complex discussions that require nuance. I think that's why I started assuming in August that voters who claimed they needed to hear more about Kamala's policy positions really meant they were never going to vote for her, but had latched onto needing more details as an excuse. People with limited reading and listening comprehension get through their life without a working framework of context or an ability to process nuance, and so reject the notion that anything is as complex as some people are saying because they get by just fine without all that fancy talk.

Listen to Trump supporters interviewed at a rally and they clearly have no idea what is or anyone else's policy positions are on almost anything, but they do know that Trump is speaking to them on a basic level that is reassuring and resonates with their day to day lived experience -- they believe that he understands them because they understand him. He is using words they know in ways they are used to hearing other people use them and he is consistent, repeating them over and over for emphasis. I think it is why they take pleasure in repeating his statements back at people who they can see are infuriated by the statement. They don't know or really care whether it is internally inconsistent, incoherent or factually incorrect, they just know he says it, they like the sound of it, saying it to each other is like a secret handshake among themselves and it makes people who talk in big words and look down on them go bananas.

Whether by instinct or clever planning, I think that Trump is a MASTER at communicating with people with limited listening (and likely reading) comprehension. He uses key words and phrases over and over and over and those are key for people to latch onto. He insists that things ARE NOT so complicated and the people who insist otherwise are not to be trusted. LIBERTY! INVASION! MIGRANT CRIME! COMMUNIST! You don't need to know precisely what those words mean in the dictionary but you can tell from tone and repetition that they mean something good (LIBERTY!) or bad (INVASION!). They/them means the bad guys. We the People means the good guys.

Thanks for this. I think this gets down to the nitty gritty in terms of the disconnect between what folks like me are proposing and what folks like super think we’re proposing.

Bernie and Trump share a few of the same characteristics in terms of what made them successful. Chief among these was an easy to understand message. Progressive populists are for simple messaging that is pro working class. This in direct contrast to the Clinton/Warren white paper style campaign. They’re proposing similar policies, but in drastically different styles. It’s the old wine track/beer track in a way.

Again, look at the campaign Dan Osborn is running in Nebraska. He’s running a campaign centered on his working class background and simple, “common sense” problem solving.

The issue a lot of Democrats have is that the Democratic label automatically discredits them in the eyes of many working class voters, rightfully or not. If a Democratic candidate was running against Fischer on the exact same platform as Osborn, I don’t think they get the same traction.

 

[superrific]

You fundamentally misunderstand my position if you think Elizabeth Warren is the type of candidate I’m pining for.

Just to elaborate on this, I’m not in favor of running professors who say they have a plan for everything. I think Liz Warren is a very smart person and fine Senator for Massachusetts. She is not my model for a populist Democratic presidential candidate. Nor is Hillary Clinton.

There’s a reason I supported Bernie Sanders and have been talking about Dan Osborn to anyone who will listen.

I’m not sure where you got the assumption that I run in circles with “well educated peers.” I regularly talk to more people that didn’t go to college than those that did. That’s where I get my “assumptions” about how people vote. From direct experiences knowing and talking with the people the Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging support from for the last 10 years.

I assume that you run in circles of well educated peers because you are well educated and people in this country have come to socialize primarily with others of similar education. But not exclusively, and of course not in all cases. That was the basis for my thinking.

Anyway, I know you're not pining for Elizabeth Warren. I brought her up because I think she symbolizes the problems that Dems have when talking about policy, which is what you want. You want the Democrats to be out there saying, "here's what we are going to do for you, forgotten Americans" and that would be fine if the "what we are going to do for you" actually resonated with people. But it seems that people don't actually want to hear real ideas. They want to hear seductive absurd bullshit. And it's almost congenitally impossible for progressives to peddle bullshit like that. It's not in the DNA. So we end up with plans. Trump doesn't have plans. It doesn't seem like plans help too much.

Anyway, a discussion for after the election.

 

[Paine]

I assume that you run in circles of well educated peers because you are well educated and people in this country have come to socialize primarily with others of similar education. But not exclusively, and of course not in all cases. That was the basis for my thinking.

Anyway, I know you're not pining for Elizabeth Warren. I brought her up because I think she symbolizes the problems that Dems have when talking about policy, which is what you want. You want the Democrats to be out there saying, "here's what we are going to do for you, forgotten Americans" and that would be fine if the "what we are going to do for you" actually resonated with people. But it seems that people don't actually want to hear real ideas. They want to hear seductive absurd bullshit. And it's almost congenitally impossible for progressives to peddle bullshit like that. It's not in the DNA. So we end up with plans. Trump doesn't have plans. It doesn't seem like plans help too much.

Anyway, a discussion for after the election.

It’s fine if you think that, but don’t use Elizabeth Warren as your example of busting the myth if you know she’s not even the kind of pol I’m talking about.

 

[superrific]

Don't recall exactly what I posted previously, so this may not even be what Super is referring to, but it is true that observing a good number of Trump supporters does remind me of work I did (a long time ago now) with functionally illiterate English-speaking adults. My observation was that they tended to decode/decipher words on a page, not read them. There were key words and phrases they had picked up one way or another by necessity in life that popped out of what I think they otherwise perceived as a sea of seemingly encrypted (from their perspective) data. Once they saw one of the limited words, it seemed to jump off the page and they would then leap to a guess about what the sentence or passage was about without actually being able to read it.

Another way to think about it is for anyone who has ever learned or tried to learn how to read music. For the novice, it is an act of translation (this black dot on this line means A, this one means G, etc.), painfully translating each line first as a note, then looking for "punctuation" (is it sharp or flat) and then further deciphering the timing information (is it a quarter note or a half note or an eighth note). They are not really reading music, which is its own language, at that point, just translating from music to English. Similarly, in my experience with functionally illiterate adults who are either trying to learn to read or just needing help filling out forms (which is really more my role in my volunteer efforts), part of the problem was that even after sounding out the word, they might still not be able to move from 3 syllables to a single word or really grasp what it means on its own, much less in connection with the words around it. They are translating/decoding (which I'm using in the sense of decoding an encrypted message, not in the educator's lingo for learning to read), not reading.

Consider this sentence from the NC website for obtaining unemployment benefits (I just pulled it at random as the kind of thing that the functionally illiterate REALLY struggle to navigate without help -- and even highly literate people often struggle to follow bureaucrateeze):

"North Carolina law requires you to serve an unpaid waiting week before you can be paid unemployment benefits. The first week you may be eligible for unemployment is your unpaid waiting week. Even though you are not paid for this week, you must still file your weekly certification. "​

In helping people with a sentence like the above, here is about how I found they were INITIALLY seeing it:

"North Carolina law kdjk ;rfjkd;fkjdl;aoi kjdk jfd unpaid kdjfdk week kdjfkdl fjd;oia djkl;fldkafj ;dl paid k JKDF:K :LDSFK DFkjdkjfla;. The first week djsk;fd jkdf kf;lajdl;fjdl;afkdj kfldkjfka;sdk;lfd week. kdjf dk;fjdk;alfdj lk;ajfdk;lafdk not paid djfdklfdj klafdj k, you must jdf;ld fakdf jdkl;af jdklf djkad."​

We were encouraged to help someone who needed help with this to read aloud the sentence a few times and then talk about what it meant. But the only thing they likely got without significant guidance and effort would be to assume that the unemployment check is paid weekly and they wanted to know how soon they would get it but couldn't sufficiently decode the sentence to even approach understanding what the point of this particular direction might be (which is actually more about having to provide the certification that you are not employed and are actively seeking employment even in the first week when you are not going to get an unemployment check).

Now, clearly, most of Trump's fans are not functionally illiterate, but many of them read on anywhere from a first grade to sixth grade level. As children, our listening comprehension skills are well ahead of our reading comprehension skills, but the listening comprehension impacts the ability to develop reading comprehension and in turn limited reading comprehension usually stunts the development of vocabulary and the the development of more complex listening comprehension.

So, in politics, people tend to get lost in complex policy positions and reject complex discussions that require nuance. I think that's why I started assuming in August that voters who claimed they needed to hear more about Kamala's policy positions really meant they were never going to vote for her, but had latched onto needing more details as an excuse. People with limited reading and listening comprehension get through their life without a working framework of context or an ability to process nuance, and so reject the notion that anything is as complex as some people are saying because they get by just fine without all that fancy talk.

Listen to Trump supporters interviewed at a rally and they clearly have no idea what is or anyone else's policy positions are on almost anything, but they do know that Trump is speaking to them on a basic level that is reassuring and resonates with their day to day lived experience -- they believe that he understands them because they understand him. He is using words they know in ways they are used to hearing other people use them and he is consistent, repeating them over and over for emphasis. I think it is why they take pleasure in repeating his statements back at people who they can see are infuriated by the statement. They don't know or really care whether it is internally inconsistent, incoherent or factually incorrect, they just know he says it, they like the sound of it, saying it to each other is like a secret handshake among themselves and it makes people who talk in big words and look down on them go bananas.

Whether by instinct or clever planning, I think that Trump is a MASTER at communicating with people with limited listening (and likely reading) comprehension. He uses key words and phrases over and over and over and those are key for people to latch onto. He insists that things ARE NOT so complicated and the people who insist otherwise are not to be trusted. LIBERTY! INVASION! MIGRANT CRIME! COMMUNIST! You don't need to know precisely what those words mean in the dictionary but you can tell from tone and repetition that they mean something good (LIBERTY!) or bad (INVASION!). They/them means the bad guys. We the People means the good guys.

This was exactly what I was remembering and thanks for expounding. This is a perspective we just don't talk about much. It helps answer the question of why Trump "loves the poorly educated." And it helps explain why so many people swallow the bullshit. If you're right, they might not know they are swallowing bullshit.

And it would also help explain, maybe, why Hispanics -- some of whom, surely, have limited English facility -- have been shifting to Trump.

 

[superrific]

It’s fine if you think that, but don’t use Elizabeth Warren as your example of busting the myth if you know she’s not even the kind of pol I’m talking about.

I don't know the type of pol you're talking about. Elizabeth Warren was only an example of why Dems struggle to talk policy like progressives want, not the explanation of the busted myth. The busted myth is explored in that vox piece and I'm sure elsewhere as well.

Anyway, at the moment, we're friends. Maybe I'm the Soviet Union and you're America, or maybe it's vice versa, but we're fighting the Nazis (surprisingly and demoralizingly literally) at the moment and we don't need a Yalta conference.

 

[Paine]

I don't know the type of pol you're talking about. Elizabeth Warren was only an example of why Dems struggle to talk policy like progressives want, not the explanation of the busted myth. The busted myth is explored in that vox piece and I'm sure elsewhere as well.

Anyway, at the moment, we're friends. Maybe I'm the Soviet Union and you're America, or maybe it's vice versa, but we're fighting the Nazis (surprisingly and demoralizingly literally) at the moment and we don't need a Yalta conference.

See my response to nycfan’s post.

 

[JCTarheel82]

Don't recall exactly what I posted previously, so this may not even be what Super is referring to, but it is true that observing a good number of Trump supporters does remind me of work I did (a long time ago now) with functionally illiterate English-speaking adults. My observation was that they tended to decode/decipher words on a page, not read them. There were key words and phrases they had picked up one way or another by necessity in life that popped out of what I think they otherwise perceived as a sea of seemingly encrypted (from their perspective) data. Once they saw one of the limited words, it seemed to jump off the page and they would then leap to a guess about what the sentence or passage was about without actually being able to read it.

Another way to think about it is for anyone who has ever learned or tried to learn how to read music. For the novice, it is an act of translation (this black dot on this line means A, this one means G, etc.), painfully translating each line first as a note, then looking for "punctuation" (is it sharp or flat) and then further deciphering the timing information (is it a quarter note or a half note or an eighth note). They are not really reading music, which is its own language, at that point, just translating from music to English. Similarly, in my experience with functionally illiterate adults who are either trying to learn to read or just needing help filling out forms (which is really more my role in my volunteer efforts), part of the problem was that even after sounding out the word, they might still not be able to move from 3 syllables to a single word or really grasp what it means on its own, much less in connection with the words around it. They are translating/decoding (which I'm using in the sense of decoding an encrypted message, not in the educator's lingo for learning to read), not reading.

Consider this sentence from the NC website for obtaining unemployment benefits (I just pulled it at random as the kind of thing that the functionally illiterate REALLY struggle to navigate without help -- and even highly literate people often struggle to follow bureaucrateeze):

"North Carolina law requires you to serve an unpaid waiting week before you can be paid unemployment benefits. The first week you may be eligible for unemployment is your unpaid waiting week. Even though you are not paid for this week, you must still file your weekly certification. "​

In helping people with a sentence like the above, here is about how I found they were INITIALLY seeing it:

"North Carolina law kdjk ;rfjkd;fkjdl;aoi kjdk jfd unpaid kdjfdk week kdjfkdl fjd;oia djkl;fldkafj ;dl paid k JKDF:K :LDSFK DFkjdkjfla;. The first week djsk;fd jkdf kf;lajdl;fjdl;afkdj kfldkjfka;sdk;lfd week. kdjf dk;fjdk;alfdj lk;ajfdk;lafdk not paid djfdklfdj klafdj k, you must jdf;ld fakdf jdkl;af jdklf djkad."​

We were encouraged to help someone who needed help with this to read aloud the sentence a few times and then talk about what it meant. But the only thing they likely got without significant guidance and effort would be to assume that the unemployment check is paid weekly and they wanted to know how soon they would get it but couldn't sufficiently decode the sentence to even approach understanding what the point of this particular direction might be (which is actually more about having to provide the certification that you are not employed and are actively seeking employment even in the first week when you are not going to get an unemployment check).

Now, clearly, most of Trump's fans are not functionally illiterate, but many of them read on anywhere from a first grade to sixth grade level. As children, our listening comprehension skills are well ahead of our reading comprehension skills, but the listening comprehension impacts the ability to develop reading comprehension and in turn limited reading comprehension usually stunts the development of vocabulary and the the development of more complex listening comprehension.

So, in politics, people tend to get lost in complex policy positions and reject complex discussions that require nuance. I think that's why I started assuming in August that voters who claimed they needed to hear more about Kamala's policy positions really meant they were never going to vote for her, but had latched onto needing more details as an excuse. People with limited reading and listening comprehension get through their life without a working framework of context or an ability to process nuance, and so reject the notion that anything is as complex as some people are saying because they get by just fine without all that fancy talk.

Listen to Trump supporters interviewed at a rally and they clearly have no idea what is or anyone else's policy positions are on almost anything, but they do know that Trump is speaking to them on a basic level that is reassuring and resonates with their day to day lived experience -- they believe that he understands them because they understand him. He is using words they know in ways they are used to hearing other people use them and he is consistent, repeating them over and over for emphasis. I think it is why they take pleasure in repeating his statements back at people who they can see are infuriated by the statement. They don't know or really care whether it is internally inconsistent, incoherent or factually incorrect, they just know he says it, they like the sound of it, saying it to each other is like a secret handshake among themselves and it makes people who talk in big words and look down on them go bananas.

Whether by instinct or clever planning, I think that Trump is a MASTER at communicating with people with limited listening (and likely reading) comprehension. He uses key words and phrases over and over and over and those are key for people to latch onto. He insists that things ARE NOT so complicated and the people who insist otherwise are not to be trusted. LIBERTY! INVASION! MIGRANT CRIME! COMMUNIST! You don't need to know precisely what those words mean in the dictionary but you can tell from tone and repetition that they mean something good (LIBERTY!) or bad (INVASION!). They/them means the bad guys. We the People means the good guys.

This is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

 

[nycfan]

This is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

In some ways, it is a long-winded version of his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

A person with limited listening comprehension has probably assigned broad meanings to words sufficient to get the gist of how the word tend to be used. Then Trump establishes his key word dictionary through repetition and there are just two types of key words and phrases — bad ones and good ones. Being part of MAGA means sharing a common Rosetta Stone and key words that identify you as a member of your chosen tribe. And Trump is the word giver.

A great example is how overwhelmed with pride a lot of MAGA are about his McDonalds stunt. See! He didn’t have to get his hands grubby serving fries but he did it FOR us. He gets us!

 

[nycfan]

 

[Calheel]

Was looking at 538 today and noticed that most of the senate races are tightening up considerably in the polls. Most of the democrats in contestable races are now within the margin of error. It would be basically like pulling an inside straight at this point for the Dems to win the Senate, the House and the Presidency.