Why do pundits, from Robert Reich, to the great cast of NPR's Politics, to the round table folks on the weekend shows keep getting politics, their bread and butter, wrong?
Maybe they don't go out and actually live the lives of real folks.
A recent week from the formerly august journal, The New Republic:
If Merrick Garland had been confirmed in 2016, we would still have the Roberts Court instead of the Trump-McConnell Court. As backlash to “Dobbs” mounts, McConnell may come to regret that fact.
What an amazing load of complete drivel. No wonder the left remains threatened by the presence of a bizarrely speaking septuagenarian millionaire serial polygamist.
They're clueless.
Here's how the logic noted above is supposed to work.
Suburban women (which in the minds of progressives defines somebody who is a cross between "soccer mom", Betty Crocker and the proverbial "Karen") suddenly becomes a Democratic voter due to the Dobbs decision because, no matter what else she thinks, the issue of abortion, the way progressives define it, is the most important issue in the world to her. And because of that, she's now boosting gay education in schools, the rights of the LBGQT, and subscribes to the Bernie Sanders newsletter.
And Kansas is evidence of this.
Not hardly.
In the real world, the suburban female voter is more likely to be a mid 30s professional who is watching her paycheck evaporate due to inflation, who can't hire competent help at work as there isn't any, anymore, whose existing help is "laying flat" and "quiet quitting", and who is wondering how she's going to help put food on the table.
She's a lot more likely to vote her pocketbook than
Most people aren't single issue voters. A few people, on the right and the left, are, but those who are single issue voters are much more likely to be on the right. And this is why:
Why are Republicans trying to prevent students from discussing sexuality, gender, and systemic racism in the classroom? Because the biggest threat facing the Republican Party is a multi-racial generation of Young people unafraid to speak truth to power — and make them irrelevant.
No, that's not it either.
It's because, starting in the 1970s, the left forced social change into society through the courts, not the ballot box, and average people got tired of being told that something's that they didn't accept, they had to accept, because nine old dudes in dresses told them they had to, Oracle at Delphi fashion.
So what that means is that when Soccer Mom goes to the ballot, she's not seeing it the way Robert Reich is at all.
And you can be 20 years old Ms. Soccer, whose is looking at a world that's pretty messed up due to the "tear everything down" mentality of the 1970s isn't. She's probably looking for the guard rails, only to find that they've taken off the parapet.
Well, what about Kansas?
Yeah, what about Kansas? That proves the point.
Kansas was a vote on repealing a constitutional amendment. It was a straight up or down vote. A person doesn't have to have that strong of convictions on anything to vote on something like that, which is why really badly conceived of constitutional amendments sail past Wyoming voters and become law, and then are completely forgotten. I'm not saying that vote was insignificant, but if it was combined with pocket book issues and the like, and for that matter other social issues, there's no telling where it would go.
Indeed, real voters have opinions on gun control, abortion, health care, the environment, Donald Trump, inflation and on and on. In the mind of the punditry Soccer Mom is charging off to the polls on abortion, but that actual voter stands a pretty good chance of having highly traditional values on marriage, a middle position on gun control, is worried on environmental issues, is really worried on inflation, and has no strong opinion on the Orange Haired Menace.
This doesn't describe the punditry. The punditry has strong opinions on everything, and they line up right and left.
Real people don't.
Which gets us to this.
Some people vote single issue tickets on social issues, but they're mostly on the right. And they do go to the polls.
Most people don't vote single issue anything, save for rare occasions, and often on very local issues.
Demographic groups align with their deeply held traditions after they establish themselves in the nation, and those traditions tend to be conservative, not liberal.
Those on the left who support their social issues sooner or later take them to the extreme and alienate everyone, and then they don't go to the polls.
Young people generally don't go to the polls, and they aren't going to in 2022 or 2024.
Abortion isn't going to make much of a difference in the 2022 or 2024 elections, and to the extent it does, it'll help the right, not the left.
To the extent any progressive politician is foolish enough to make gun control an issue, that'll hurt the left.
Nobody is going to the polls one way or another on LBGQT platforms, and that's going to play no role in upcoming elections.
Inflation is a big deal and that will impact voters, but in favor of Republicans.
You can't lie to voters for decades regarding their big worries and then have them support you anymore. They'll support somebody who listens to them, even if it's a dangerous bloviator.
You can't force your issues on people through courts for decades and then come out crying about the demise of democracy. People aren't going to believe that either.
Not matter what pundits believe, and rational people may wish for, Donald Trump just isn't going away, and it's not suddenly going to be the case that lots of Republicans abandon him.
And you can't really have any idea what real people are thinking if you don't have much of a connection with their lives.
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