I don't know that they should ignore it, I'm just saying they don't have to really hammer it. Once the ball is rolling it kind of takes care of itself, and I assume it will reduce turnout and enthusiasm for GOP candidates. What the Dems need to work on IMO is also giving people a reason to turn out to vote for them.
Electoral strategies are often framed as a trade-off between, on the one hand, attracting swing voters by being moderate, and on the other hand, turning out your base by being a loony extremist.
There’s a bit of a conflict in the literature about what's more important. It looks like trying to attract swing voters is kind of pointless because there just aren’t very many of them. To be a swing voter, a person has to at least kind of pay attention to the actual issues while keeping an open mind. The problem is:
Who does that? So in theory, maybe focusing on getting your base out to vote by being a loony extremist is the best strategy. (And it has the benefit of helping you in the primary as well.)
As an empirical matter, however, it looks like moderate candidates actually do better in general elections than extremists, by and large. So maybe there’s something to be said for being a moderate after all...
There’s a new paper that makes sense of this apparent conflict.
It turns out that people really are too uninformed and stubborn to be swing voters, so turnout is the key after all. But it also turns out that being a looney extremist doesn’t motivate your own base to turn out so much as it motivates your opponent’s base to turn out.
So being a moderate is good, but it’s not because it helps attract swing voters. It’s because it helps prevent riling up the other side to come out in droves to vote against you.
Here’s the paper.
Applying this to the discussion above ... I do think it will make sense for Democrats to avoid making the next elections all about Trump. We* should focus more on boring, substantive issues instead. The problem with making it about Trump — attacking him over elitist argle-bargle like “honor” or “integrity” or “spelling” — is that it will inspire the #MAGA crowd to get out the vote.
We should emphasize mundane things like affordable health insurance, the environment, NATO, NAFTA, student loan reform, prison overcrowding, transportation, infrastructure....
We should not make Trump supporters feel like they are being attacked. We should make them feel like they are bored out of their freaking minds.
That will be the winning strategy: boredom. It’s not sexy, but that’s kind of the point.
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*I am going to refer to Democrats as “we” until Trump is out of office.