i think the bottom text has it wrong.
this is probably a stronger argument to get people to vote for her:
what she'll do
what her opponent won't be able to do if she wins.
If we stopped constantly arguing logic and reason to people that clearly have none, and focused on discussions of how we improve the country through governance and policy, we could actually convert some of them. But If i were to imagine life as a Trumper all I would see is hatred towards me everywhere, why the fuck would I listen to people insulting me?
Not that this would happen because at the end of the day, both sides of the aisles have their fair share of people whose political ideology is just to regurgitate what their own social circles reinforce while simultaneously be unable to withstand some minor pushback on topics and then confirming to the other that they dont know what theyre talking about. And the media will constantly put a megaphone up to this ignorant minority so the other side can confirm to themselves how dumb that side is.
Shit half the time I try to make the point that most people voting for trump are doing so because of their social circles influence on them, and that we should try and treat them with decency if we ever want to change their minds, and I get downvoted into the floor and hear a bunch of "centrist bad" nonsense. Political parties are just sports teams to many at the end of the day, they were raised to follow one and think the other one sucks, and most involved don't realize how brainwashed they are that they now see the other half of the country as a hostile foreign entity.
Meanwhile capitalists rob us all blind and continue to spread this narrative that we should fight each other, so we dont unite against them.
She does not exhibit leadership qualities. It's going to be preaching to the converted, because only the converted could be so blind to her failings.
My favourite is telling a trumper I don’t fucking care what they think.
Letting the air out of their sails is more entertaining when it’s become obvious they are living for the drama of controversy and feeling their opinion matters so much to someone else than the message itself.
What if I told you: No Shit
Part of the fucking problem is that Dems seem to have kinda given up on ever getting anything nice. The only thing that matters is "BEAT TRUMP". Healthcare, civil/labor rights, debt relief, the anti-war movement, environmental protections, business regulation, green infrastructure development... none of that is even being offered up.
The only thing you hear is "Whatever position you have, know that Trump will be worse than Harris, so you have to vote Harris". How do you go up to someone's door and ask for their vote on those grounds? What do you say to someone who looks at Trump and Harris, shrugs, and says "They look the same to me"?
It isn't the MAGA voter that you have to worry about. It's the voter that's been getting burned election after election by disappointment and can't be bothered this time around.
What do you say to someone who looks at Trump and Harris, shrugs, and says “They look the same to me”?
What do you say? You say "are you suffering a stroke, would you like me to call you an ambulance?"
Americans aren't being given a real choice here, too bad, but that's how it is. Anyone who is eligible to vote but doesn't realise Trump is a genuine threat to democracy the world over maybe shouldn't be allowed to vote.
If you were caught in someplace where you didn't have access to water, and the only choices were a bottle of piss with blood in it (Trump, in this metaphor) and a warm, stale coke light (Harris, in this metaphor), which one would you choose? Neither of them are particularly enjoyable or healthy in the long run, but if you were in a place which had no access to fresh water (spelling out my metaphor here, but democracy), you would die without consuming liquids. Still, you probably wouldn't choose the pissy blood, because that'd actually be dangerous to drink no matter how dehydrated you were. A warm, stale coke light would still be a functional drink, no matter how much you'd never choose it if you had an option.
See where I'm going?
Chomsky did have a good point once about how there's a difference of the type of lack of democracy that you can see between America and Russia. (I'm Finnish, btw, fuck Putler.) He made the point that Americans tend to like to think they have a choice, whereas Russians are pretty openly certain they don't. As a heavy exaggeration, that is. I don't recall which book it was, but I think it was honestly one of his books from the 70's about linguistics, which made it weird, since it started with a chapter about CIA shenanigans and propaganda.
What if I told you... return2ozma is part of the problem. They continuously post negative articles about Harris and very little negatives about Trump...
very little negatives about Trump…
The problem with lemmy.world is the lack of Trump-negative articles. There simply isn't enough of them.
Um, out of interest I went through their posts of the last week or so. Three were critical of trump, one was critical of biden
Perhaps a bit of cognitive bias going on there?
People had an utter panic attack about this a few months ago. It's just that they post so much stuff that their name becomes recognizable so people freaked out because they noticed some of it, a small percentile really, was critical of Joe Biden. They panicked and tried to ban the user from basically everything they could. Most of them never thought to look and see what you did which is this user basically posts ad nauseam everything they can find. Some of it critical of Biden some of it critical of trump most having nothing to do with politics at all.
I had thought that people calmed down and cooler heads had prevailed. I guess there's some weak-willed people still out there though.
Fun Fact: Despite near unanimous claims by voters to the contrary, the data bears out that negative campaigning is far more productive than espousing the positives of your own candidate.
ok, can I see the data?
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-negative-campaigning-works-and-how-fight-it
Ledgerwood and her colleagues have also found that a negative frame is much more persistent, or “stickier,” than a positive one. If you come at an issue negatively, but are later reminded of the policy's positive aspects, you will still think it's a bust. And if you start out thinking favorably about the policy, but are reminded of its downsides, your positive perception will be swept away and a negative one will take its place.
The beauty of negative attacks — from a campaign standpoint — is that they influence everyone. Even a candidate’s supporters will be affected by negative attacks, Ledgerwood and her collaborators have found. Once a negative idea has been planted, it’s very hard to shake.
Looking at correlations between the volume of negative ads and the vote shares achieved by U.S. Senate candidates in 2010 and 2012, the researchers found that “while positive political advertising does not affect two-party vote share, negative political advertising has a significant positive effect on two-party vote shares.”
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/when-campaign-ads-go-low-it-often-works/
“Negative campaigning has been around as long as campaigning,” Lovett says. “It stays around because it works.”
https://www.cnn.com/2012/01/02/opinion/lariscy-negative-ads/index.html
So if we don’t like negative ads and even perhaps suspect they contribute to political malaise, why are they increasingly dominating candidates’ strategies?
The answer is simple: They work. And they work very well. Gingrich’s drop in polls in Iowa last month was no accident – it was choreographed by negative advertising. . . .
. . . Our brains process information both consciously and non-consciously. When we pay attention to a message we are engaged in active message processing. When we are distracted or not paying attention we may nonetheless passively receive information. There is some evidence that negative messages may be more likely than positive ones to passively register. They “stick” for several reasons.
First, one of the most important contributors to their success may be the negativity bias. Negative information is more memorable than positive – just think how clearly you remember an insult.
Second, negative ads are more complex than positive ones. A positive message that talks about the sponsoring candidate’s voting record, for example, is simple and straightforward. Every negative ad has at least an implied comparison. If Mitt Romney is “not a true conservative,” then by implication the candidate sponsoring the ad is saying he or she is a true conservative. This complexity can cause us to process the information more slowly and with somewhat more attentiveness.
From what I'm reading if may have some positive effect on voter share and possibly a negative effect on voter turnout. And that positive messages have have a positive effect on turnout. Isn't that the claim meme?
And, historically, Democrats win with greater turnout. At least as far as I'm aware.
Disclaimer: I've only spent 20 minutes on this. A properly measured response would take longer.
How Much Do Campaign Ads Matter?
The researchers found that, in the 2000 election, allowing only positive ads would have increased overall voter turnout from 50.4 percent to 52.4 percent. Meanwhile, airing only negative ads would have decreased turnout to 48.8 percent. The gap between the all-positive and all-negative scenarios was about 10 million voters.
“That’s pretty big,” Gordon says. “It does suggest that negative ads might have a detrimental effect” on election participation.
The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment
This 2007 meta analysis is the most recent meta analysis I could find. It throws into question both claims, that negative ad have a positive effect on voter and negative effect on turnout. There's been a lot of studies since then, but this still gets cited.
The conventional wisdom about negative political campaigning holds that it works, i.e., it has the consequences its practitioners intend. Many observers also fear that negative campaigning has unintended but detrimental effects on the political system itself. An earlier meta-analytic assessment of the relevant literature found no reliable evidence for these claims, but since then the research literature has more than doubled in size and has greatly improved in quality. We reexamine this literature and find that the major conclusions from the earlier meta-analysis still hold. All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood.
Positive Spillovers from Negative Campaigning
Negative advertising is frequent in electoral campaigns, despite its ambiguous effectiveness: Negativity may reduce voters' evaluation of the targeted politician but may have a backlash effect for the attacker. We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large‐scale field experiment during an electoral campaign for mayor in Italy and a survey experiment in a fictitious mayoral campaign. In our field experiment, we find a strong, positive spillover effect on the third main candidate (neither the target nor the attacker). This effect is confirmed in our survey experiment, which creates a controlled environment with no ideological components or strategic voting. The negative ad has no impact on the targeted incumbent, has a sizable backlash effect on the attacker, and largely benefits the idle candidate. The attacker is perceived as less cooperative, less likely to lead a successful government, and more ideologically extreme.
How dare you try to bring strategic decisions into this
Stop trying to bully me into voting against fascism
Trump is a miserable moron with terrible ideas. The only reason he wins is because of his negative campaigning. If he didn't do any negative campaigning, he would have no following whatsoever.
While we are busy demanding to know in detail exactly how Harris plans to solve every issue of this country, Trump is out there flat-out making up statistics and boogeymen, inventing conspiracy theories about birth certificates and sexual climbing in politics, and using hate and racism dog-whistles to rally the worst of us.
I hope those of you that hold Harris to the highest standards will remember what you did when we are living in the Trump sewer you helped elect.
hold Harris to the highest standards
What's the unreasonably high standard they're applying?
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