One of the goals of The Daily Music Break is to present political content to those who are bored by or downright hostile to politics. The hope is that folks will realize that the next two years are so important that the distaste must be put on hold.
Electoral-Vote.com is one of the older political sites. The two guys who run it – known only as Zenger and the Votemaster – do a great job of analyzing events and clarifying what likely is going on in real time. Last week, EV – which, by the way, doesn’t waste a lot of money on fancy-pants website design – pointing out that Trump voters often are inconsistent and illogical.
From the piece:
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark has run hundreds of focus groups since 2020, this year focusing on Biden-to-Trump voters. She says most of them see all of Trump’s flaws, so pointing them out is useless. The voters already know them. The problem is that they believe Donald Trump is fundamentally for them whereas the Democrats are for minorities, gay people, and trans people, and not for ordinary white working people. What they want above all else, is for prices to go down.
The Bulwark, by the way, is a site run by non-Trump Republicans.
There is a basic difference in how Trump voters and non-Trump voters perceive the president. Democrats are aghast at everything about Donald Trump. After all, the man is a convicted felon who was found civilly liable of sexual assault, likely did something cringey or criminal with Jeffery Epstein, is gutting our institutions as quickly as a commercial fisherman in a hold full of tuna, is navigating our economy with breathtaking irresponsibility and making billions for himself in the process. They believe any of those things and others should be disqualifying–and would be for a Democrat.
Creative Commons via Wannapik Studios
Democrats, as a party, don’t understand how this man can retain any support. It makes no sense to them. And it doesn’t–unless you go a bit deeper. Things happen for a reason. Democrats have to think deeply and clearly about why Trump has dominated our politics for almost a decade. And an honest appraisal is that at least some of it is the Dems fault.
First, credit where it is due. In any fair reckoning, the Democrats are the party of the people. The Ds have greatly improved healthcare, saved the economy at the end of the pandemic, took global warming seriously, invested heavily in rural broadband, fed more kids and grownups and were behind various other positive initiatives. The party would have gone further on these and other issues if the Republicans hadn’t done all they could to stop them.
What the Democrats didn’t do was communicate what they had accomplished effectively. It’s a tough assignment, since many of the issues are complex and difficult to explain. The challenge is exacerbated by the willingness of the other side to distort and lie. But it’s possible.
Republicans did a much better job of the politics in the decades before MAGA took over. The party had a goal and developed strategies and tactics to make it happen. The bottom line was the Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Mark Levin and the rest effectively pitted the multicultural coasts against the mostly White middle of the country. AM talk radio and, later, Fox News incessantly pushed messaging that was based on dishonesty and appeals to grievance and hatred.
A side effect was that the fomenting hatred and doing so without being truthful paved the way for MAGA. Whether at least some of the architects of the strategy are sorry for the genie they let out of the bottle is irrelevant. Donald Trump clearly has very real and unique political skills. But to a great extent he was the beneficiary of the brilliant long game played by the Republicans.
All of that is very esoteric. It’s actually pretty simple when put into plain language: The Democrats have to tell their story better.
Continue reading after the music break…
Dr. John–Mac Rebennack–was an American treasure. This is a fun early song done with Ronnie Barron, who apparently was a good friend. Dr. John initially was a guitarist, but had a finger shot off while defending a friend in a scuffle. For some reason, that didn’t affect his ability to play the piano.
An interesting trivia item about Rebennack is that he was pictured on the Ivory soap box as a baby. It’s rather ironic that the brand that calls itself “99 and 44/100% pure” featured Dr. John, considering his subsequent endeavors.
Some Democrats seem to be getting the message. California Governor Gavin Newsom is mocking Trump on social media. Zohran Mamdani, who has come from nowhere to likely be the next mayor of New York City, is running a campaign that excels at social media. There are other examples of Democratic politicians starting to talk the talk.
Mamdani said that the party should communicate on a deeper and more direct level. This is what he told Time.com (though I saw the quote at Political Wire, another good site):
I think the larger struggle for us as Democrats is to ensure that we are practicing a politics that is direct, a politics of no translation, a politics that when you read the policy commitment, you understand it, as how it applies to your life.
The most important part is campaigning on how issues directly impact the lives of voters and their families. It’s obvious but not necessarily easy to do without sounding condescending.
For folks who have had it with politics (but are reading this anyway), the reality is that the issues on the table for the next few years are so important, so fundamental to who we are as a nation, that it is vital to see beyond the superficial (such as nonsense such as “owning the libs”) and think deeply about who is more likely to help our country deal with the serious problems we face – starting with those created by Trump.
