The “Pull” Of Trump
Before I get into this post let me say that I know anything can happen in a general election. That rule applies to every candidate.
Everybody got that? Good. Moving on…
I have a terrible fear of heights. It’s not a fear of being so far off the ground; it’s a fear of jumping. Let me explain. When I’m standing on the observation deck of the Empire State building, or on the look-out at places like the Grand Canyon, or on a balcony, I feel a pull within the center of my body – a pull that wants to propel me, without consent of my brain, over the edge. It’s frightening to feel such a disconnect between my brain and body. It’s like I’ve lost free will.
That’s what I’m noticing with people most concerned with Trump. It reminds me of my fear of heights. Their brain is telling them that there’s no way they can vote for Trump, but there’s this “pull” that worries them that, once in the voting booth, they will… jump.
When I hear our commenters and contributors worry about Trump winning I can’t wrap my head around it – (other than “anything can happen to any candidate in a general election.) I keep trying to figure out why they see Trump as a dire threat when every woman and minority person I know doesn’t feel the same. I don’t care how Trump pivots in the general. The things he’s said about women and minorities can’t be unsaid. They exist, and women and minorities aren’t forgetting them.
So why are certain people so worried? Is there, like my fear of heights, a… pull?
Not me. I know there is no way I’ll vote for Trump. There is no desire whatsoever.. and I am quite familiar with that desire to “jump”. I worry that many people who spend a lot of time communicating with like-minded individuals… in this case, we’ll say liberals who are very active and aware of politics…. dont fully grasp the mindset of the nation in general… certainly not the attention span. My worry is that people will forget.. and not be reminded.
I understand and share your feelings about heights. It is odd, but because I know what you are talking about, I know my Trump sense isn’t really the same thing.
My Trump “fear” arises from four main facts.
1) The electorate is highly polarized and even the worst candidate starts out with 45% of the vote locked in.
2) The GOP has spent a lot of time an energy on disenfranchising huge swaths of voters.
3) The US media is a clusterfuck wrapped in fraud cabal. And..
4) Clinton is a weak candidate.
HIgh-Place Phenomena
When the results were correlated, the team arrived at the following, admittedly somewhat speculative, scenario: Imagine a person with high anxiety sensitivity. She leans over a ledge of the Grand Canyon. In super fast reaction to her physical sensation of anxiety, her survival instinct forces her away from the edge. Yet when she looks at the ledge, she sees it’s sturdy. There was never any danger. Her brain tries to process an answer to the question “Why did I back up if it was safe?” A logical answer is that she must have been tempted to jump.
In other words, Hames explained, people misinterpret the instinctual safety signal, and conclude they must have felt an urge to leap. Hence the study’s title: “An Urge to Jump Affirms to Urge to Live.”
I don’t feel an urge to jump, but my lizard brain just knows it is more dangerous to be within a body-length of the edge than to be twenty feet away.
To examine jason’s “Trump fear”
1) The electorate is highly polarized and even the worst candidate starts out with 45% of the vote locked in. Granted that this is true in the sense of the popular vote, it is not–as has been demonstrated repeatedly–true once the popular vote has been mediated via the Electoral College. Winning the Presidency is very much a “game of states” and in that game one would have to say that Clinton begins with a substantial but not quite insurmountable advantage as the Democratic nominee. So this one rates, to me anyway, as “only partly true.”
2) The GOP has spent a lot of time an energy on disenfranchising huge swaths of voters. True, but again only partly relevant. The places where the GOP has been most successful in this appear not surprisingly to be places in which the GOP already had a pretty good shot of winning (i.e. Arizona), and not in states more completely controlled by the Dems. The exceptions could be states like Virginia, North Carolina, and even Georgia, where the electorates may well be significantly more inclined to vote Democratic in the General than they are in state elections. But for this to become an issue, Trump has to be close enough to being in contention for a 1-2% shift to change the race.
3) The US media is a clusterfuck wrapped in fraud cabal. And.. This one is more true; my perception is that they are already gearing up to give us a narrative of two flawed, widely unliked candidates. Trump’s appearance yesterday on (I think) GMA played to that. Instead of hitting him with things he has previously said, they gave him the full serious sit-down treatment with audience participation and a chance to look presidential, and a chance to say (I paraphrase) “If I hadn’t been willing to hit my opponents hard, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. Now it’s time for me to begin to sound Presidential.” This is a warped twist on the “run to your base” theory of primaries, but not implausible for the people who have not been so far paying close attention. The media needs a horse race and not a blow-out this fall, and while I think most of the MSM actually does favor Clinton, it favors its own bottom line even more. This one’s pretty much true.
4) Clinton is a weak candidate. By all objective and most subjective measures this is true. She’s the stereotypical machine/legacy politician who is banking more on “its my turn” (both as a loyal apparatchik and as a woman) than on any genuine widespread enthusiasm for her as a leader. We keep forgetting that her negatives only look low in comparison to Trump’s. If she’d been running against Mitt Romney, she’d be widely perceived as being in serious trouble right now, despite all his “binders of women.” She can’t play the outsider in a year when there is serious populist outsidery energy on both sides. In many ways she reminds one of GHW Bush following Reagan–if Mike Dukakis hadn’t turned out to be such a bad candidate Papa Bush would never even have gotten his single term. This one’s real, no matter how Dem partisans try to spin it away.
As for pandora’s reliance on women and minorities not to forget Trump’s many statements on the record about both, I don’t think that’s going to play out as forcefully as she thinks. I cannot give a really strong intellectual reason, but I’m just not feeling it yet as I read and listen. Maybe it will coalesce when Trump becomes the official nominee. But I’m not confident of that in a General Electoral sense.
I see this election as ending either as a nail-biter 2000-like Trump victory or an apparent Clinton landslide. Not much middle ground. (And, ironically, I think Trump would be a far stronger candidate for the GOP than Cruz.)
The startle reflex experienced while falling off to sleep and suddenly awakening and grasping may have been a survival instinct that kept our simian selves from falling out of trees during nap time. Your fear of that “pull” impulse, that many experience near dangerous precipices, may be a related self destructive counter trait. That it might effect voting booth behavior to the detriment of a rational choice being made is a brilliant, forgive the expression, “leap” on your part.
2 true at about 100%, and 2 true at about 50% so overall…mostly true. There you have it from an objective source.
BTW – You forgot about Wisconsin (a blue/swing state nationally?) having done some serious Clinton voter disfranchisement.
The biggest risk for Clinton, as I see it, is that she falls into the trap that Gore fell in to, which is that he was dismissive of Bush as an idiot (totally possible) and running away from the record of his would-be predecessor (not likely this time).
The was one of the traps Gore fell into. The other (the one I worry about) was playing small ball and only really trying to win in Florida and Ohio through piecemeal pandering.
I think that once Hillary is clear of the primary, the Obama team starts getting heavily involved. They don’t play small ball.
I do not think that most people believe the crap that Trump says. No one really believes he is going to build a wall or prevent any Muslims from entering the US. Nor do they like exactly what he says. What they are responding to is the simple fact that he has the cojones to thumb his nose at the establishment and be politically incorrect, like they wish they could or would.
They figure that Trump cannot be any worse than any of the other candidates and at least they like Trump because he is entertaining. They’ve been told for the last umpteen years that America is no longer great and that we can barely wipe our own a**. Now here comes someone who is larger than life, offering to make America great again.
The pull of Trump is visceral. No intellectual argument can be made against Trump because his popularity is devoid of any intellectual content. His rhetoric is an appeal to emotion. Would his supporters respond to moral philosophy or logic, reason and common sense?
I can appeal to intellect using reason, logic, and data. But, I don’t have a clue how to appeal to emotion because it seems foreign to me to make decisions based on emotion, but that’s exactly what his supporters will do.
Sanders will also be involved. Between his campaign saying he will stay a Democrat no matter what, Jane saying they will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, and Biden expressing his preference for the direction of the Party, I think Clinton’s General strategy is beginning to take shape.
You do know that free will is bullshit?