The Fart of the Deal

Political analysts and pundits genuinely baffle me sometimes with how distant from reality their observations can be.  Not even in a particular direction--the fact that there are pundits that both know how to read and insist that people like Ted Cruz or Donald "flotsam head" Trump wouldn't turn the White House into an open sewer doesn't surprise me, because in most cases there's a clear reason why that particular person would behave this way (money or hatred of brown people, usually).  But with another presidential election coming up, people are starting to talk about how _______ candidate can persuade voters outside of their expected constituency.  Donald "wood grain" Trump will never win any discerning moderate voters, they might say, or Bernie Sanders' economic policies will persuade some Trump supporters, or you can tell I'm a pundit because it's a well-known fact that pundits only speak in italics.  The vocal surgery that lets us do this is very expensive, so we're going to use it every chance we get.

I'll admit, I haven't personally seen that many presidential elections in my lifetime, and of the six I've been around for, I was only really politically aware during three of them.  But seeing as how voter behavior during 2012 is probably more relevant for the purposes of this ill-thought out tangent than voter behavior in 1992 is, I'm going to go ahead and feel decently sure of my question despite that. My question: why are people still acting like candidates should, or even can, change enough voters' minds to matter in an election?

I'm completely serious.  Maybe this is where anyone who's both reading this post and has knowledge of political science (a very rare combination--most people that know things about things make positive life choices that largely remove them from my potential readership) can jump in and eat me alive, but as far as I'm aware, people basically don't change their political views anymore.  At least, not on an individual level--obviously, the electorate that barely elected George W. Bush differs from the electorate that gave Barack Obama two massive victories, but I think Obama won less because he persuaded a significant number of Bush voters that they should vote against the exact opposite of everything they believed in and more because many of those Bush voters had died before making sure their grandchildren would have to go through a deliberately obtuse process to get an ID before they voted.  I don't want to just parrot the many, many, many, many people smarter than me that have pretty solid reason to believe that politics are largely emotional rather than logical.  But at the same time, it's bizarre that people seem to think otherwise, especially with regards to Republican voters.  I mean, we're talking about a group that will turn against a policy that they like if a politician they don't care for is attached to it.  At that point, you might as well try to persuade people that the sky is orange, or that the new DC movie is going to be good.  It's not happening.

The reason this trend is not just baffling, but worrisome, to me is specifically Bernie supporters (including Bernie) arguing that Bernie's policies would win over a decent amount of Donald "memetic fascist" Trump supporters.  This presumes that these supporters are motivated by facts and numbers, instead of by the hatred and fear spilling out of Donald "seriously, I'm maybe one step removed from fascism, if that" Trump's rubbery maw, and if Bernie actually becomes the nominee (which I would be SUPER JAZZED ABOUT) it could lead to his supporters throwing away a lot of time and money for insignificant returns.  As far as I can tell, you don't advance a cause by persuading your opponent's supporters; you do it by marginalizing them as much as humanly possible while you try to motivate your supporters to actually get off their asses and do something.  We see this disconnect from reality with people outraged with Black Lives Matter, too.  "Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't approve of this," they cry, as though the point of the March on Washington DC was to sway people on the fence instead of, you know, showing lawmakers that a lot of people really wanted less racist laws.

So, no, I don't think that there's going to be a lot of persuading voters this year.  Or, rather, a lot of successful persuasion--I don't doubt that people will try.  But I wish they wouldn't.  As I've said before, more than ever before your choices are "yeah this seems okay I guess" and "literally burn everything to the fucking ground."  You don't get to that point when your electorate is amenable to reason.