- Education is now the best predictor for how someone will vote;
- Why Trump’s supporters don’t believe his threats (they’re focused only on their particular concerns);
- How Trump wants to lie in real-time without being fact-checked;
- Paul Krugman suggests that Trump’s lies are a mishmash result of being unmoored in time.
Is this a surprise?
CNN, 14 Oct 2024: Why education level has become the best predictor for how someone will vote
There are many ways in which Americans are ‘divided’ — women v men, rural v urban, whites v voters of color — in ways that are reflected in their political preferences, but for whatever reason education now seems better than the others for predicting peoples’ votes.
“The biggest single, best predictor of how someone’s going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics,” Sosnik told David Chalian on the “CNN Political Briefing” podcast.
That would be “longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was former President Bill Clinton’s political director and is known for incisive deep-dive memos.”
As the US transitions to a 21st century economy, there’s a rift between the people who attain education – “that’s become the basic Democratic Party,” he said, comparing them with people who feel left behind, “that group of voters is now the modern Republican Party base.”
And
Put another way, college graduates hold about three-quarters of the wealth in the US, but account for only about 40% of the population.
And so on.
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Trump’s own supporters aren’t bothered by all the outrageous things he says — like threatening to jail Democrats — because they don’t take him seriously. Is that odd?
NY Times, Shawn McCreesh, 14 Oct 2024: The Trump Voters Who Don’t Believe Trump, subtitled “When the former president endorses violence and proposes using the government to attack his enemies, many of his supporters assume it’s just an act.”
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
Most people don’t learn from (don’t know) history and they don’t care about big the picture; they just want to hear that someone supports them personally. It’s yet another example of tribal, short-term thinking.
They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Mr. Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.
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Again, Trump wants to be able to lie in real-time without being challenged.
Washington Post, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, 14 Oct 2024: Trump wages campaign against real-time fact checks, subtitled “The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods.”
Why don’t his fans care? Because they’re focused on their own immediate concerns, as in the above article, and nothing else matters to them. I think is the key point of this blog post, something I had not quite realized before.
“Within the political establishment on the right, it is now considered quite legitimate — and quite legitimate to say publicly and openly — that you disapprove of fact-checking,” said Lucas, author of “Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism.” He added: “Precisely because of Trump’s unusual relationship with the truth — even for a politician — it’s hardly surprising that he would object to it so volubly and so forcefully.”
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One more with a similar point.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 14 Oct 2024: Trump Has Become Unmoored in Time
[A]side from some blackouts during a 2020 heat wave, California hasn’t had major electricity shortages in decades.
But don’t tell Donald Trump. On Thursday, in the course of a rambling, at times incoherent speech to the Detroit Economic Club, he declared, “We don’t have electricity. In California, you have brownouts or blackouts every week. And blackouts, I mean, the place is stone cold broke, no electricity.” This isn’t true, it wasn’t true when he made similar assertions last year, and 39 million Californians can tell you that it isn’t true. But in Trump’s mind, apparently, that long-ago electricity crisis never ended.
Yes, I remember those “planned power outages” a few years ago (which did affect us), and a few more happened a couple weeks ago during our unusual October heat wave (which did not), but Trump’s statements quoted here are simply not true. Do his fans really believe him?
There’s an obvious parallel with Trump’s language on crime. In big cities, he has asserted, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be.”
Krugman sees this as a possible sign of Trump’s decline.
The point is that there’s a pattern here. As many observers have noted, Trump routinely peddles a grim picture of America that has little to do with reality. What I haven’t seen noted as much is that his imaginary dystopia seems to be, in large part, a pastiche assembled from past episodes of dysfunction. These episodes apparently became lodged in his brain, and perhaps because he’s someone who is not known for being interested in the details and who lives in a bubble of wealth and privilege, they never left.
