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Comment by drawkward | Hacker News Reader

Flagging you from the left here.

Harris outperformed Biden among only two demo groups[1]:

-College educated whites

-People with income > $100,000

Please, consider the possibility, that the Dems are now the party of wealthy elites, and that the diverse coalition making is happening on the R side of the aisle.

[1] Edit for sourcing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/obama-ezra-klein-...

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A diverse coalition is also what enabled the N side of the aisle to take power in Germany in 1933, so that's not exactly an argument against the comparison made by the grandparent.

How many of the people crying Actual Fascism are buying guns to fight it?

I've had multiple friends ask to start training with me at my Muay Thai gym here in Brooklyn over the past week. At the very least self-defense is starting to cross people's minds.

Me. I am. Trump keeps making jokes about a third term, about not leaving, and about getting republicans to keep him in power. But there’s also that one that wasn’t a joke where he actually tried to stay in power by targeting the most symbolic moment of the electoral vote certification with a violent insurrection.

So yeah, it’s me. I’m calling him a fascist and I’ve been buying guns and gear because of it.

You and I are seemingly in the minority.

I'm going to talk with my wife tonight about buying a gun.

Please learn how to use it responsibly

To me, the most interesting part of going to our local gun range is seeing, in fact, that my political opponents are, at root, sensible humans who are generally motivated by the same Maslow's hierarchy of needs as I am.

I mean, iirc the Germans were buying guns to fight Actual Communism and other far-left boogiemen they perceived to have infiltrated their political system.

The road from there to Actual Fascism was enabled and supported by a diverse working class coalition who was fed up with the status quo and in a dire economic situation.

Right, because the definition of “wealthy elite” is making $100k/yr.

Stop looking upwards!

An income of $100,000 puts you in the top 20%. Guess what? 20% doesnt win elections.

Here's some data about wealth by quintile:

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-this-chart-explains-americ...

Yes, the definition of wealthy elite could be reasonably set at 100k/year, according to this data.

Ah yes, the party of wealthy elites wants to tax incomes more than 400k, tax capital gains, is pro regulation. Whereas the party of working class wants to eliminate income tax, institute worldwide tariffs, is anti-regulation to the point of wanting to bring asbestos back. Makes total sense.

I'm not talking about party policy; I'm talking about party composition.

My conclusion from all of this is that most low-information voters really do make their decisions based on personality and message, rather than ideology or policy.

Dems always shoot themselves in the foot by putting up candidates that middle america just can't seem to relate to.

Trump might be the epitome of what middle america hates: a privileged city landlord who lives in opulence. But it doesn't matter, because he speaks their language.

Kamala only sounds smart and educated to other smart and educated people. She sounds snooty and condescending to everyone else.

I also think calling them "low-information" is incredibly ethnocentric, to the point of offense. Perhaps they just weight their information differently, especially when they exist at different levels of Maslow's hierarchy? It is hard to be "enlightened" (which probably in and of itself means different things to different folks) when youre hustling for food and rent. Poverty is exhausting; poverty impacts higher cognition.

Meanwhile, the Dems are seen as the party of DEI, which are wayyyyy above base survival needs, accoring to that hierarchy.

"low information voters" is a term for people that vote on relatively low levels of information regarding candidates or policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter

The term has nothing to do with enlightenment or even identity politics.

whooooossshhhhhhhh

Edited, to respond more substantively with a quote from your source:

>Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against what liberals assume to be their own interests and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters.

I get your point: condescension against low-information voters doesn't help.

But I think that your argument that the term "low-information" has no use just because it's been used with condescension by some is incorrect.

Instead of wasting cognitive energy of finding a new term for the same exact group of people, I think we should focus on treating them with the respect their sizable number of votes deserve.

Of course -- I don't expect people grinding paycheck-to-paycheck to be spending time mulling over their political ideologies or the merits of proposed policy proposals. And in fact, that's exactly my point. I'm not disparaging their situation, I'm describing it.

We do agree, I am just pointing out what once may have been a technical term (idiot, moron) may have become more of a disparagement these days.

Woah, we just speedran "low information is racist" to "poor people are stupid", I've never seen anything like it.

No one said a thing about race. Look up a definition of "ethnocentric" please; ethnocentrism also refers to cultural normativity. Specifically, I was referring to the following idea which can be found on the Wikipedia article on the term "low information voter":

It seems to me you are the one applying racial priors to my comment.

As for the second jerky thing you said:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-poverty-af...

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1238041

https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(22)00428-7/abs...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5266697/

https://neurosciencenews.com/poverty-neurodevelopment-behavi...

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c13830/revisions/...

https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/179/2/535/7068210?lo...

Kamala only sounds smart and educated to other smart and educated people.

Serious question, Can you please provide a video of her sounding smart and educated?

I'm not trying to convince anyone that she is. My point is the opposite: that many people do not. If you don't, then great, that's what I'm talking about.

The data is not yet available to draw conclusions about turnout or vote share. Votes are actually still being counted in some jurisdictions.

The Dems are the party of wealthy elites as Trump’s campaign was funded by wealthy elites. $44billion from Elon ring a bell?

That's comparing Democrats with Democrats.

Which groups did Harris outperform Trump in?

Correct, my point and the point of the article I am citing is that there are outflows of vorers from the Democratic base (I hesitate to say party, because, clearly these people aren't Democrats as much as at-best-former-democrats) leaving the Democratic party to be more and more white, wealthy, and educated.

I believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Democratic party as we know it.

It's just kind of stupid analysis. And definitely not "the beginning of the end of the Democratic party as we know it".

Biden got 87% of the black male vote, Harris got around 78%. And yes, that is a 9% swing. But there were less voters overall as well. And I'd also hesitate to extrapolate a trend from a single data point. Because Hillary Clinton got 81% of black men. Closer to Harris than Biden.

But when the Republican party showed these "outflows of voters", no one talked about the death of the Republican party.

So, yeah, just stupid analysis.

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