So much of state politics is currently Republicans dog whistling made up issues to their base rather than any kind of evidence based policy.
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
I guess it’s easy not to care about this stuff if you didn’t literally flee your homeland to get away from it.
Yes, you can get results from push-polling with heavily loaded wording and unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims like "overrun with drugs and criminal gangs" and correlating police funding to public safety.
Yes, that's different from evidence-based policy.
Yes, the Texas state governement has enacted a program of disenfranchisement.
I’m not “trolling.” In the last few years folks have become too comfortable calling policies “racist” or “dog whistling” without being confident that minorities actually perceive them that way. I think this is itself racist and manipulative—a way of fluffing apparent support for progressive policies by vaguely invoking minorities—and needs to be called out as such.
Cross-border criminal activity is a real concern that affects real people. There’s a reason majority Hispanic communities along the border have flipped Republican in the last couple of years. Right now Abbott is leading Beto among Hispanics in reputable polls: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2022/01/29/abbott-r.... Waving your hands and calling these concerns racist “dog whistles” is not only lazy but disrespectful to a distinct community with its own interests and often nuanced positions.
You have a point with immigration! But you overplay your hand with the defund stuff. Democratic candidates who run on "defund" lose their primary elections everywhere except a tiny number of ultra-blue uncompetitive districts.
It’s not just the Twitter elite doing that—it’s a lot of folks who don’t necessarily want to defund the police, but just wanted an opportunity to call republicans racist. But the end result is that we went about a year invoking minorities to attack policies that the minorities themselves supported, which is gross. The underlying practice needs to stop.
That the primary system elevates fringe candidates is, yes, a problem. But those candidates lose.
Like I said, we have an exceptionally mobilized defund movement in Oak Park, with demonstrations, proposed ordinances, and candidate slates. They got slaughtered. We're a single-party municipality; being outed as in any way sympathetic to Republicans is fatal here. It came to nothing: liberals don't want to defund the police.
Faced with that, Democrats in 2020 did not treat the idea as "fringe." The put up the BLM signs on their yards and didn't say a word against the activists promoting defund. Aside from Joe Biden, prominent Democrats equivocated when confronted directly: Elizabeth Warren responded to a question about "defund" by saying "it's not the term I would use." That's not how you describe what you think is a "fringe" idea.