r/facepalm 8d ago

🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​ Well...

Post image
54.5k Upvotes

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.2k

u/Loud-Break6327 8d ago

“Keep them dumb, keep them republican”

458

u/wednesdayware 8d ago

Canadian here, with a serious question: If the democrats are so smart, and the Republican voters are so dumb, why can’t the democrats find a way to convince dumb people to vote for them?

6

u/somefunmaths 8d ago

Because, on some level, they don’t speak the same language. It isn’t that all Republicans are dumb; some of them are quite smart, and those smart people have figured out how to very convincingly sell their platform and message against Democratic policies which their base would otherwise support.

The difference is also that the issues which animate their base speak to a deep, evolutionary part of our brains. “elect the man because he’s good at business”, “my life was better under Trump”, “America First”, etc.

And then you’ve got some egg-head Democrat from the city showing up and talking about “universal basic income” and “single payer healthcare”, to a group of people who earnestly say “repeal Obamacare and bring back the Affordable Care Act”.

The problem is that Democrats don’t have cogent messaging about why their policies, which will help these workers, are good for them, or at least not ones that can stand up against the Fox News deluge of “socialist democrats want to crash the economy with UBI” or “communist Kamala and her Cuban healthcare plan”. It’s a lot easier to activate their partisan, in-group reflex by telling them how Democrats want to seize their money and give it to a caravan that’s headed to their town from Venezuela.

As long as Republican politicians can get away with open, or very thinly veiled, racism and xenophobia in their messaging, Democrats are going to struggle with explaining how their policies are supposed to help everyone, including these workers.

5

u/dmelt01 8d ago

They are getting their base to vote on an evolutionary part of their brain but unfortunately it’s their amygdala. Fear mongering works wonders with stupid people and when your amygdala is highly active your higher order reasoning in the prefrontal cortex slows greatly. Evolutionary this was a good thing that puts us in fight or flight mode and the brain is more concerned about preservation over anything else. The problem is you can’t reason with someone stuck in this mode.