I know that it is not very much in the style of the dailyKos to make all that much of an attempt to understand, let alone reach out to, the other side (consisting primarily of republicans). The approach around here is more to attack and then try to isolate. If the enemy will not or cannot be persuaded, they must simply be stripped of power. Their complete defeat is the only option.
And that's not always a terrible strategy when going into an election. However, that mindset can indeed warp our understanding of election results.
I'm not going to link to anyone at dailyKos or elsewhere because I'm trying to avoid calling people out by name. But I think it will be clear to anyone who reads this post that there's a strong trend, at Dkos and in other liberal circles, to look on in shock and bewilderment at the fact that 74 million people voted for trump in the November election.
But: what if our shock is due to the fact that we're in our own version of a bubble, and that we simply have not sought out a sufficient number of alternate explanations for the phenomenon of the trump voter?
On these very pages, and in numerous other liberal/lefty blogs, I have often seen right wing columnists and news outlets rightly mocked for their seemingly paranoid assertions that the Libs are socialists who are going to turn us into Venezuela (or something like that).
And yet: what if we're doing something similar to a large number of trump voters? The term "racist," in current usage, connotes the worst kind of evil. So, are we really saying anything about the country, or are we actually revealing something about our own myopia, when we blithely write off an approximate one quarter of America as irredeemably evil? Are we observing, or are we projecting?
I would humbly assert that whenever we find ourselves making generalizations about tens of millions of people, it's time to reflect on the wisdom of our own approach.
Because I have seen it repeated by some of the most prominent bloggers on this website that 70-something million trump voters took a look at the last four years of incompetence, mayhem, malevolence, cruelty, death (300,000 and counting due to Covid), destruction, family separations, and blatantly obvious corruption and decided that that's what they want MORE of!
But this is not just a mischaracterization of trump voters, it's a mischaracterization that accomplishes little other than to make us look bad for having voiced it.
And I would reply that, in my opinion, it seems obvious that quite a lot of trump voters looked at trump and saw little if any of those horrible qualities. Quite a lot of them get their "news" (or propaganda) from entirely different sources than us. Many if not most of them have spent the last four years in a different universe in which trump was an American hero out there restoring the standing of our country as he stood up for America.
But it's not all just propaganda that influenced trump voters. Keep in mind, he was the incumbent president. And, either by design or default, he did exercise the advantages of incumbency. He signed trillions of dollars of Covid-stimulus money into law - in an election year! Millions of his voters received very real $1200 checks with trump's name on them, followed by a letter from trump (or the treasury, I can't remember) claiming credit for the relief funds. We should have realized how powerful that kind of monetary action can be in influencing voters.
In fact, at least one respected pollster released the results from their fall survey in which a clear majority of all Americans indicated that they were better off than they were 4 years ago. Whether trump deserves any credit for that or not is besides the point. The point is that if people think they're better off, they are more likely to give the guy in the white house four more years - whoever he (or she) may be.
And those are very likely the kind of factors that influenced quite a lot of trump voters: the upward trend of their own personal well-being over the last four years, their growing savings and/or stock accounts if they have one, the tax cut that many of them did notice (I certainly noticed it - even if I didn't want it), and the genuinely impressive amount of federal aid that hit the country in the spring and summer (our GDP has decreased much less than a lot of other western nations in 2020).
The negative factors that we (justifiably) obsess over (the incompetence, mayhem, malevolence, cruelty, death, destruction, family separations, and blatantly obvious corruption that I already mentioned) may have barely existed for trump voters who either heard little about them or just assumed that such stories were largely if not entirely the creations or exaggerations of an excessively liberal media.
So, if someone wants to assert that we have (at least) 74 million tragically misinformed or uninformed voters in this country, I will agree more or less 100% percent. But to jump to the conclusion that they viewed trump through more or less a similar lens as us, still decided to vote for him, and are therefore evil, is just not a prudent, productive, or insightful post-election analysis.
I personally believe that, whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to appeal to some of the people who voted for trump. The Democrats will need their votes at some point in time, either for control of the Senate, a second term for Biden/Harris, or whatever else comes up. And dismissing them all as troglodytes just won’t help us achieve that goal. Yes, some of them are troglodytes. But not 74 million of them. Even I cannot be that cynical about this country or the human race. Some of them must simply be lost in an alternate reality. Let’s try to reach them. Let’s not get lost in an alternate reality of our own.