I keep thinking back to this quote by President Lyndon B. Johnson as I read all these news reports about what went wrong in this election, how we missed the glaring red signs, and we ignored carefully planned dog whistles that rang the amygdala like a bell in voters.
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
“Make America Great Again.”
”They’re eating the dogs and the cats!”
“Your child goes to school and comes back a different gender.”
”They’re trying to take black jobs away.”
“Childless cat ladies that want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
To us, the “Make America Great Again” slogan is dumb, and we already think our country is great. We know “Make America Great Again” is a dog whistle to those who yearn for the halcyon days of the past, when they had it all, and sat on top of the mountain like a king. But to them, it’s a call to use their power to unwind what they see as the scourges of liberalism.
When Trump said, “They’re eating the dogs and the cats,” he dug into that ongoing narrative around illegal immigration, and exploited people’s sense of unfairness and the sense that illegal immigrants were being treated better than they were. He also rang the amygdala so loudly since their brains were already primed for it due to all the fear-mongering about immigrants on Fox News.
The whole “Your child goes to school and comes back a different gender” line ties into the fears of parents that they’ll lose control over their children, that some sort of “scary” system is going to take their children away. This isn’t new — it’s reminiscent of pizza gate, and the fear over Wayfair using furniture names to signal human trafficking. It touches on the cultural war issues over gender, identity, and sexuality. Most voters have never met a transgender person, and recent polling indicates that they think transgender Americans account for 21% of the population, when it’s actually about 1% of the population. So they fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t relate to.
Trump’s team knew that to win critical swing states, he had to erode specific constituencies to get enough votes to win. He had to ramp up his infrequent voters, bring in new ones and increase male voter turnout. That’s why he attacked Kamala Harris’s racial identity in doubting her blackness and why he kept saying that illegal immigrants were “trying to take black jobs away.” This line was absurd, but got a lot of traction on social media with a lot of spoofs, and voters joking about this line. People who hear absurdities repeated enough tend to believe it. They don’t have time to sit down and actually read the news — they scan the news, they check their favorite influencer, or podcast keyboard warrior, and take what they say as actual fact.
“Childless cat ladies” was a huge dog whistle to disaffected men — and made them feel understood, like Trump and J.D. Vance got them. This line “childless cat ladies” has been used in many variations as attacks on single women for enjoying their single hood, or on strong, independent women. They turned out to vote for Trump, and eroded the Roe v. Wade vote that has won midterms and special elections since 2020.
These dog whistles — when we hear them, we can’t pooh-pooh them or overlook them as hyperbole. These are carefully crafted pieces of messaging that are designed to divide, exploit fears, and undermine trust in facts. Republican strategists like Susan Wiles and Chris LaCivita have had decades of experience in ringing the amygdala enough to convince voters of absurdities.
And what about us? What can we do to combat this? When we do, we sound like the child on the playground saying, “The bully took my money,” and the bully denies this, and points to another bully as the culprit with others backing him up.
My thinking is that we’ve got to get tough, clear, and start talking to American voters like they have a sixth grade reading level -— because they do. They understand simple lines. We can’t assume they think like us, or have the luxury to read the news. They work long jobs, have issues feeding their families, and they really don’t begrudge the wealthy being wealthy — they want to be wealthy like the wealthy, and if they see someone being tough, they like it because they want to be tough too — and they think that candidate is on their side, fighting for them.
No more talking like the newspapers they don’t read. We have to talk and engage with digestible lines like the TikTok's, the Reels, and the quick social media share of “Jesus loves the puppies!” that they read/consume. We fight like we’re strong, we understand their struggles, and we punch up.