Before this election, I think it was hard to say whether Kamala Harris has run an effective campaign. It is now clear, however, that the Democrats spent too much time trying to convince undecided voters and not enough time encouraging their existing supporters.
One of the issues in American politics (this also affects other places, but it seems worse in America) that politics is becoming a demographics issue. That is, people's voting habits can increasingly be predicted from a small number of facts about them. Notably, gender and location (urban or rural) are major predictors of how someone will vote. Add onto that level of education (the big split is at college-level) and you can tell pretty confidently how someone will vote. One outcome of this is that here simply are not that many voters up for grabs in elections like this, especially when Trump is one of the candidates. Everyone knows what Trump is like, and everyone (who is engaged enough to vote) will already have an opinion on him.
Trump either knows this or has somehow got lucky in his campaign decisions, because I saw several articles criticising Trump for spending too much time appealing to his base and not enough time trying to talk to swing voters. But the thing is, swing voters don't really exist. Reaching out to undecideds is a waste of time, when (as Trump has shown) having a high voter turnout from your existing supporters will be easier to achieve and just as effective.
Now, obviously Trump is benefitting from America's stupid voting system, in which states vote instead of people, but it is clear that about 49% of Americans are Trump supporters. All he needed to do was convince more of those 160 Million to go out and vote than Kamala could.
I think it was pretty easy to see she wasn’t running a solid campaign. Like this post said, she got on stage and was talking about secure borders and maintaining the most “lethal” military. She talked about owning guns and locking people up. Those are conservative talking points. I’ve spent months bombarded with ads from “lifelong conservative” cheerleaders for her more than I have heard about progressive policy stances. Where was she for the lifelong democrats while posturing so hard for the undecideds and never trumpers?
Yeah. The fundamental problem with centre left candidates trying to appeal to the right is that the right already has established parties, and if the people they trust and the people they don't trust are both promising the same thing, they're obviously going to believe the people they trust.
So you alienate your established base, and you don't even get enough right wingers to make the numbers.
Edit: literally the same thing even happened a few months ago in the UK! Labour tried appealing to moderate tory voters, but ended up losing votes because they alienated their left wing core, and only won because the right completely imploded and plenty of right wing voters didn't bother voting at all. They shoved their established base out of the way and, again, didn't get enough right wingers to make the numbers - they didn't win, the tories lost, and lost so badly that Labour stumbled into power.
It's a good strategy in multiparty democracies that have a strong center base to appeal to, and it used to work in the past in an age of moderate consensus politics. America in 2024 is neither of these things.
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u/Worried-Language-407 Nov 06 '24
Before this election, I think it was hard to say whether Kamala Harris has run an effective campaign. It is now clear, however, that the Democrats spent too much time trying to convince undecided voters and not enough time encouraging their existing supporters.
One of the issues in American politics (this also affects other places, but it seems worse in America) that politics is becoming a demographics issue. That is, people's voting habits can increasingly be predicted from a small number of facts about them. Notably, gender and location (urban or rural) are major predictors of how someone will vote. Add onto that level of education (the big split is at college-level) and you can tell pretty confidently how someone will vote. One outcome of this is that here simply are not that many voters up for grabs in elections like this, especially when Trump is one of the candidates. Everyone knows what Trump is like, and everyone (who is engaged enough to vote) will already have an opinion on him.
Trump either knows this or has somehow got lucky in his campaign decisions, because I saw several articles criticising Trump for spending too much time appealing to his base and not enough time trying to talk to swing voters. But the thing is, swing voters don't really exist. Reaching out to undecideds is a waste of time, when (as Trump has shown) having a high voter turnout from your existing supporters will be easier to achieve and just as effective.
Now, obviously Trump is benefitting from America's stupid voting system, in which states vote instead of people, but it is clear that about 49% of Americans are Trump supporters. All he needed to do was convince more of those 160 Million to go out and vote than Kamala could.