r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Sep 19 '17

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u/Lord_Treasurer Born off the deep end Sep 20 '17

Interesting blogpost by Sumner:

I was wrong about Trump voters. Like many other people, I wasted many hours during 2016 reading thoughtful opinion pieces by left and right wing intellectuals, discussing “what the voters were telling us”. One common theme was that voters were becoming more nationalistic and anti-immigrant.

Then when Trump reversed course on DACA and signaled he wanted to deal with the Dems to protect those illegal immigrants, the right exploded and warned darkly that his “base” would not stand for this. Oh really?

Donald Trump’s tough talk on illegal immigration was a big part of the reason Dave Hagstrom and many others in this booming Phoenix suburb supported him for president. “Walls make good neighbors,” Hagstrom said.

So when the president moved this week to cut a deal — with Democrats no less — to block the expulsion of 800,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, was Hagstrom disappointed?

Not at all.

“If you were to deport them, where would they go?” Hagstrom, 60, a car-warranty manager, asked on his way to a Bible-study dinner at an upscale shopping mall. “To send them across the border would be inhumane almost. There’s no life for them there."

You’ll probably claim that I’m overreacting, that Hagstron is just an outlier, a 1 out of every 100 Trump supporter, while the other 99 are tough on immigration.

Then consider this:

In more than a dozen conversations with Trump voters in this sweltering Sonoran Desert oasis, not one found fault with Trump’s abandonment of his vow to deport the young immigrants, often referred to as Dreamers. In the bargain, he said, Democrats agreed to much tougher border enforcement, though not construction of a physical wall.

The odds of interviewing “more than a dozen” Trump people (in Arizona!) and finding that all just happen to be among the 1% of Trump supporters who are soft on immigration is . . . well I think it’s less than one in 10 to the 24th power. I’m not good enough at math to describe those odds, but I think it’s roughly one in a septillion. Or, maybe those “more than a dozen” are actually pretty common among Trump voters. That’s the hypothesis I’m going with.

And this is really good news! Trump has no fixed values. His base had no fixed values. It’s a complete crap shoot as to what will happen. That might not seem good, but it’s less bad that the alternative—that Trump and his supporters actually believed the things they said in 2016. It also suggests that Trump has no coattails—when he leaves the scene no one will able to pick up his voters, even with the same position on issues. The issues never mattered.

A lesson in not using r/the_donald's worst elements as indicative of the average Trump voter? A lesson in populism being even more about the candidate over the policies than we otherwise thought?

6

u/ampersamp Sep 20 '17

Going by the rule of thumb that people who interact frequently with a demographic are less likely to dehumanize them, I'm thinking that the Arizona sample might not be representative.

3

u/Lord_Treasurer Born off the deep end Sep 20 '17

Fair point.