I will say, I accidentally sent an earlier version of a reply I typed out to Snoop. My edited reply differs a good bit, but the idea is still the same.
At any rate, I’ll try to respond to your post.
I appreciate that you at least partially agree there’s value in engaging conservative or right-leaning voters, even if it’s not always about flipping them. But I think your post ultimately reveals the limits of the framework you’re working within, especially the way it flattens conservative voters into caricatures and substitutes a moral diagnosis for a political strategy.
You say it’s not “convenient” to reduce MAGA to hate and xenophobia because it’s based on what you see and what the studies say. But you’re not treating these studies as data points to think with, you’re using them as moral proof texts. You’re assuming that correlation is destiny, that because racial resentment correlates with Trump support, it must be the core driver for every voter in that camp, and that it therefore forecloses serious political engagement.
What makes that even more contradictory is that you then turn around and say we should be appearing on Fox News to “plant seeds.” Why would we plant seeds among a population that, by your own account, is incapable of recognizing human decency or responding to anything but grievance? Either these voters are emotionally reachable or they’re not. You can’t write them off as morally depraved and politically unreachable in paragraph two and then tell us it’s “low cost” and “worth a shot” to try to reach them in paragraph one.
What’s going on here isn’t really a political strategy so much as it’s branding. You want Democrats to appear open-minded and decent to people who, in your telling, are beyond reason. That’s not a political plan. That’s reputational damage control for professional-class liberals who are uncomfortable being seen as aloof. You’re not trying to win anyone over, you’re trying to feel better about not winning them over.
And that ties into the larger problem: liberalism still doesn’t know how to process the emotional power of populism. You treat MAGA as a mass psychosis rather than as a political formation that has emotional, cultural, and economic resonance, much of which has grown in the vacuum created by decades of bipartisan neglect. You mention jobs as an “empty promise” and then act like grievance politics came out of nowhere. But maybe the promise of jobs isn’t empty to people who watched their towns collapse while both parties gave them NAFTA and Walmart.
You say, “What positive thing does MAGA offer?” The answer is belonging. Narrative. Identity. A sense of being seen. It’s not just “hate” any more than the appeal of Obama was just “hope.” The left will never understand how to defeat that until it understands how it works. And that begins with refusing to treat half the country like they’re too poisoned to ever matter politically.
People’s political identity isn’t genetically hardwired. If we cede that emotional ground to the right, they will keep winning it.
