Comment by bigstrat2003
Comment by bigstrat2003 12 hours ago
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
> Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism
Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.
> It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms
He got less than 50% of the vote, if the Dems are pushing so many people to Trump they are doing a crappy job of it.
Though I do agree that the Dems suck on messaging, it is not because they villainize Republican voters. It's because they don't focus their efforts on bread-and-button progressive priorities like labor and healthcare. They blew their wad on trans rights, which just isn't a great strategy to move a lot of voters to the polls.