the lowest-info of the low-info white voters

[solarbird]

Someone on Mastodon told a story a couple of days ago about a neighbour who isn’t “into politics,” and is leaning towards voting for Trump because “no one’s ever going to elect a woman for president.”

Think about that for a minute, because this kind of thinking is horrifically common amongst low-info white voters. And yes, she’s a white woman who clearly thinks she’s safe – functionally, she thinks she’s untouchable, and above it all.

Meanwhile, underneath it all, this kind of voter wants to to pick the winner and vote for that winner, like a gambler, because they don’t see it as making a statement or a political choice, they just want to be on the “winning team,” whoever that is, and regardless of how bad that team might be.

You see this kind of thinking in other places, too.

You see it in very stark, percentage-driven terms if you run Kickstarter campaigns. I’ve run a few, all successful. I’ve known and worked with people who have run others, both successful and not.

In my observation and personal experience:

Roughly 30% of people won’t back a Kickstarter campaign unless they’re already sure it’s going to succeed, despite the fact that there’s no monetary downside to them if it fails. They just won’t do it, even knowing and at least claiming to understand that it won’t cost them anything if it doesn’t make the target.

Appealing to “you make it more likely for it to succeed if you support” is minimally effective at best. I haven’t ever actually seen it work, I’m just thinking that surely it has to once in a while, right?

But that’s not all! It gets better, or worse, depending upon how you feel about it:

Around half of that group – 15% of people overall – won’t back a kickstarter campaign unless it has already succeeded, and that’s even if issuing their support would make it succeed.

Even if their pledge would be the one that actually puts it over the line, they won’t do it. They won’t pledge support until someone else puts it over the line first.

And to be clear: these are people who actually will support it once that happens.

I have spoken directly to people in this weird, latter camp that makes absolutely no sense to me. Telling them, “but your support would, itself, put it over the line into success” doesn’t budge them. Someone else has to do it.

But once that someone else puts it over the edge, they’ll go in.

I absolutely do not understand this, and yet, I am absolutely sure that this phenomenon extends into low-info voter voting decisions.

Now, I don’t know what percentage of “low info” voters are fully in this camp. I doubt it’s 15%, given how much more serious this is. But whatever the number, I can tell you that people in that camp want to vote for who they think is going to win. Otherwise, if they vote for the losing candidate, they are “wasting their vote.”

And yeah, that is a quote from someone I’ve talked to who voted exactly like this. Their vote is “wasted” unless they vote for the winner.

I’m pretty sure if the Trump-leaning white woman at the start of this little discussion thought Harris would win, she’d be leaning Harris right now. But she doesn’t, so she’s not.

I’m convinced Trump – and every authoritarian – knows this, and this is why Trump tries to paint a victory as inevitable, or at least inevitable “if the opposition doesn’t cheat.” Because if they can sell it, they get the support of all this class of voters, and that number matters. It’s not nearly as big a factor as racism, misogyny, and queerphobia, but it’s still enough to see.

So what do you do about it?

It’s very stupid, and it’s very simple. The way to convince them to vote for your candidate is to convince them your candidate is going to win.

For reals. That’s how. Or at least, that they’re probably going to win. Positions don’t matter to these people; being on the “winning team” does. So serve them that. Talk about the polls showing the biggest margins, regardless of quality; talk about the “momentum,” the “enthusiasm,” the – dare I say it – bandwagon effect.

(Because this is the bandwagon effect, or at least, the people most driven by it.)

The other approach you might try is encouraging them to think of opportunity loss. They don’t want to miss out. Tell them that not only is Harris going to win, but Harris is going to win and become the first Black woman (or South Asian woman or mixed-race woman) president of the United States, and they’re going to miss their one and only opportunity to be part of that by not voting for her.

Because really, they don’t just want to be on the winning team, they want to do something notable. Everybody does to one degree or another, somewhere; people like to feel that they matter. And they’ll tell themselves that their vote qualifies as notable – particularly if you encourage it.

So if you know anyone in this camp – and you might well know someone in this camp – there’s your approach. It’s pretty clear Harris knows this too; note the difference between my “If we fight, we’ll win” that I’ve been using for, what, almost a year now, and her far more newly minted “When we fight, we win.”

My version conditions it on doing the work. Hers doesn’t. Hers asserts certainty, in a way that is entirely – I think – about convincing this class of voters to vote for her.

“Do you hear that slogan? That is the sound of inevitability.” And being part of it? That’s the sound of notability, the cherry on top, adding enthusiasm to the “just vote for the winner” crowd, and giving their empty, not-so-above-it-all-as-they-think heads something to focus on.

Meanwhile, Trump’s the one making any victory conditional, even if it’s conditional on “Democrat cheating…”

…as more and more people leave his rallies early each day as he tells them he has enough votes and spews incoherent racism and nonsense out every shrinking pore in his nasty little body.

So.

Tell them Harris is going to win, and it’s going to be historic. Tell them you’re going to be part of it…

…and they could be, too. If they want.

Tell ’em, “History’s calling, team.”

And tell them to answer.

40 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.