LogFAQs > #982624969

Progressive policy is popular in a vacuum but many voters simply don't make the obvious leap to "then I should elect progressives/Democrats." and happily vote for Republicans without seeing the disconnect.

Case in point: there was a poll a few days ago (yesterday?) in Florida showing both the abortion rights amendment and marijuana legalization amendments are sitting at 60%, if barely, which is what they need to pass. But simultaneously Trump leads the state by like 10 points and Rick Scott leads in the Senate.

Why? I think that's also multi-faceted. I think a ton of it is "politics as sports/tribes" where even if you poll something like "Want legal weed? Or background checks on guns?" you'll get overwhelming support - in some cases comically so, like 80-90%... but this doesn't penetrate the fact that their "team" is "Republican" or that they/their family "grew up as Republicans" so they just keep voting for the people who oppose these policies.

Some of it is that a lot of people are susceptible to attacks on these policies that they're going to "the wrong people." This is the Reagan "welfare queens" type of attack that continues to this day. UBI may be popular depending on how you phrase it, but then the conservative attacks of "some lowlife who doesn't have a job is getting a monthly check from YOUR taxes" where they show some pictures of minorities with tattoos and shit and support craters. On the flipside, something like the New Deal was only possible because it explicitly and intentionally tried to cut out minorities from receiving the benefits so it was basically "progressive policy for whites only" and so was broadly popular with the public.

Obviously some of it is just low info/misinformed voters who don't follow politics and/or have basically zero civics knowledge like those stories of people thinking Biden is responsible for Roe being overturned simply because "it happened while he was president" despite the fact that it is entirely the fault of Trump who appointed the justices who proved the margin there (including a seat they essentially stole from Obama.) There's a lack of knowledge and curiosity of how shit gets down in government that a lot of people boil down to "who was POTUS at the moment this issue mattered to me?" in a government that was designed to work slowly and in a world where a lot of policy takes time to have its effects felt ("Trump's economy" basically being Obama's economy continuing on the exact pace it had been before it all fucking exploded with the mishandling of COVID and then Biden being saddled with the inflation and supply-chain issues caused by it that occurred under Trump - and to be fair - some of that was just "global pandemic" shit and not related to even Trump but that got pinned to Biden anyway despite him not being at fault.)

And a lot of it is that people simply don't believe that Republicans support the shit they literally say they support. Again, there's plenty of anecdotes from the 2012 Obama campaign where they tested messaging with swing voters on Romney's actual policy and people thought they had to be lied to/told a biased take because it couldn't be that unpopular/evil. Same with stuff that had actually happened like tax breaks forced in right after 9/11. The Obama campaign ultimately found that it would actually be more resonant with swing voters to simply attack Romney's character than to attack his policies because people would believe he was a callous businessman than believe he supported callous policies. It was fucking whack. That Project 2025 broke through in spite of this is kinda miraculous but even there you see people who are willing to believe it's overblown or accept Trump's obvious lies that he's not connected to it. Same with 1/6 being an insurrection attempt despite the fact we have actual evidence that Trump was trying to install DOJ officials who wanted to impose martial law and violently put down any riots that resulted if they simply rejected the election results - and then SCOTUS decided to cover for him by saying "oh that's inadmissable. immunity!" "When people tell you who they are, believe them" is simply something many voters refuse to do and will contort reality however they need to to accomplish that.