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Notes -
Reporting from Politico describes the polling conducted for the Democrats, by the Democrats (source poll now released here). It's interesting stuff. When asked (all voters) about the Democratic response to Trump so far:
Pretty damning. If you lump in the "not sure" with those that actually explicitly say the Dems have no strategy at all, that's a good 2/3rds of voters, and even less than a third of those who think the Dems do have a strategy think it's a good one! And that's before the State of the Union, which seems to only have reinforced this impression. They tested a handful of opinionated claims about what direction the Democrats should go, presented in pairs and asked about which were, relatively speaking, more persuasive if they were to go that direction. Specific matchup data or party affiliation breakdowns wasn't published but overall, some notes about what did particularly well or poorly:
I found the contrast pretty interesting. Voters seem to think that a moderate, mainstream Democratic party would be most effective, but at the same time didn't think that talking down to people was necessarily an issue. Of course, all these reasons were relative to others, not framed in absolute terms, but still. The fact that "Democrats have no message" was found to be MORE persuasive than many of these other reasons, yet a statement calling them to double down on explicitly leftist policies seems to suggest that the Democrats are in a bit of a hole beyond just identity. A lot of people here seem to think that woke language is the millstone, but many voters don't seem to agree. If there's a big takeaway here, it's that voters are probably increasingly favoring short-term, domestic results in their motivations to vote. They don't think the messengers are that flawed, only the message itself, which is super interesting. As such, if I were the Democrats, I'd lean hard back into restoring CFPB-like programs and putting in to place better health care reform as midterm messages. After all, I think a lot of voters still look favorably on the Obamacare reforms. A final note is that this Democratic-aligned polling outfit didn't even bother to include an immigration-specific message! Perhaps because on their version of a Trump approval poll, Border Security and Immigration both received top marks at +10 and +8 favorable. Inflation and healthcare got -10 and -10, emphasizing my point about good points of focus.
I just want technocrats who will build a thousand nuclear reactors, regulate industrial contaminants and unhealthy food, craft policy for cheaper industrial inputs, rationalize local (city, county, state) regulations and bureaucracy (e.g. a unified online tax or building permit system) and encourage our people and culture to prosper, like Lew Kuan Yew. I've seen nothing like this in the West. Should I build it?
The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?
You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.
"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.
I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.
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