How are people noting the reaction of their friends/coworkers/family/etc to this past week?
I have been making a concerted effort to avoid following the actions of the current administration, but those actions are a downpour of horseshit into most of my non-political interests. It's an effusive rain of garbage that creeps into everything …
How are people noting the reaction of their friends/coworkers/family/etc to this past week?
I have been making a concerted effort to avoid following the actions of the current administration, but those actions are a downpour of horseshit into most of my non-political interests. It's an effusive rain of garbage that creeps into everything online. It's hard to avoid. I feel more exhausted from it after this one week than I was at the end of the prior four years of it.
Due to my attempt to avoid this I also avoid talking to people about it in my everyday life. As such I don't know how they're reacting to it. I'm also in more of a bubble than typical in that everyone I know is reliably left leaning, so there's limited information to gather there anyway.
But considering the endless deluge of exasperating headlines we're being bombarded with I am curious. How are the people in everyone's lives acting, the ones that don't care about or follow politics the way people here do? Are they ignoring it, are they remembering why he was so hated in his first term, do they think it's all nothingburgers that's being overhyped?
Normally I'd wait many months, but this past week in politics has been so exhausting to me I was wondering if it was having an early effect.
Doing the best we can. My wife and I talk every night about things we’ve seen in the news, especially trying to look past headlines to see what actually happened.
But it’s rough. It sucks we have to be subjected to this moment in history where the world is going to simply just have to touch the stove. It’s gonna suck.
I haven't had any conversations with Trump voters in the last week, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that almost 100% of the 49.9% is unmoved by anything they've seen. And, for that matter, that about 75% of the 49.9% has heard few or any details of what Trump has actually done in the last seven days. Hell, I'd wager 20% of the 49.9% think Biden is still President.
The comment was in reference to the controversial moves Trump has made in the past seven days and how plugged in his voters are to it. The kitchen table stuff you mention might be what ultimately tanks his popularity but it's not gonna hurt him in his first week.
OK my comment seems like I'm going nowhere related to your comment, but I swear it loops back at the end...
I like to mentally eyeball the country's electorate into three buckets. Four if we want to include non-voters.
The first bucket is reliable democratic voters.
The second bucket is reliable republican voters.
And the third bucket is people that are generally persuadable to vote for either party OR who has a fair enough tilt to either party but can be persuaded to not vote at all.
I don't think too long about how large each bucket truly is. It seems logical to expect that the D and R buckets are not equal in size. The overall composition is going to depend a lot on how strictly we define the people that can be persuaded to not vote instead of voting for their preferred party. Despite that, for simplicity I like to think of them as 40%-40%-20% or 33%-33%-33%, depending on the discussion. Both are almost certainly wrong, but for back of the envelope discussions I think these choices work well. For an election that has already happened I like the 40-40-20 grouping.
That in mind, I'd look at the 49.9% that voted for him slightly differently than you do. ~80% of that group is going to be die hard republicans, the vast majority of whom are now going to be MAGA. Those people (40% of the electorate) will never turn on him. He could come to their home, burn it down, promise to pay them for it but then sue them instead, and he would still have their support.
That group I expect to be wholly unmoved in any circumstances. Doesn't matter what he does, how bad the headlines are, if egg prices are $120/dozen. Doesn't matter. I don't think they'll change. But it's not the whole 49.9% that voted for him that are there.
I'm curious where the non-reliable voters are at. Reliable democrats and reliable republicans are going to react rather predictably to the next four years. What about the unreliable democrats and the true swing voters? What about the unreliable republicans?
A lot of our gains 2018-2022 were in some of that latter group becoming unreliable democrats instead of unreliable republicans. It looks like a decent part of our drop in 2024 was from them sitting out or crossing back over. Are they remembering why they shifted over to us before, are they blissfully not catching all the horrible headlines, do they think the headlines aren't that bad, etc.?
I won't challenge the breakdown of your buckets of voters. It's our information ecosystem that I suspect will keep Trump's coalition intact for the foreseeable future. The part of his voting coalition that spends their free time watching slip and fall videos on Tik Tok are definitely not plugged in to be critical of his first-week moves. The rest of his coalition is consuming media that will either dismiss or ignore entirely the controversial moves he's made.
Bottom line: I suspect there's a vanishingly small share of the 49.9% that is consuming any kind of critical reaction to Trump's opening week. The Trump voters who are reading The Atlantic or the New York Times, or watching network news, where critical reaction to Trump exists are almost all in the nonpersuadable bucket you describe. As for the rest, it's hard to see how exactly they are ever gonna hear a discouraging word about him in the media that they do consume. The cracks in the armor can only be expected to come if economic fundamentals (jobs, prices) noticeably falter. Autocratic behavior alone, no matter how severe, cannot be expected to dissuade them.
If they persist in doing things like send ICE to raid elementary schools that's going to filter through to folks who voted for him who have a problem with that type of enforcement.
Well, I hope you end up wrong but I can see ways that you could be right.
I don't think it changes your answer much, if at all, but I do want to clarify that I'm not so much hopeful of the last week changing people's minds purely on coverage being bad. Although that can factor. I'm thinking on the volume of stuff being covered.
I think society's biggest complaint with his admin is that there was a constant, seemingly daily, drop of "Big News" that was happening. Some stuff purely bad, like scandals. Some stuff announcements. Some stuff policy changes, that can be good or bad to an individual depending on their partisanship. The endlessness of it was exhausting. Seemingly even more exhausting for people that are only sorta into politics at most.
This past week has been that on overdrive. And seeping into so many other areas, not just traditional news media.
How are people noting the reaction of their friends/coworkers/family/etc to this past week?
I have been making a concerted effort to avoid following the actions of the current administration, but those actions are a downpour of horseshit into most of my non-political interests. It's an effusive rain of garbage that creeps into everything online. It's hard to avoid. I feel more exhausted from it after this one week than I was at the end of the prior four years of it.
Due to my attempt to avoid this I also avoid talking to people about it in my everyday life. As such I don't know how they're reacting to it. I'm also in more of a bubble than typical in that everyone I know is reliably left leaning, so there's limited information to gather there anyway.
But considering the endless deluge of exasperating headlines we're being bombarded with I am curious. How are the people in everyone's lives acting, the ones that don't care about or follow politics the way people here do? Are they ignoring it, are they remembering why he was so hated in his first term, do they think it's all nothingburgers that's being overhyped?
Normally I'd wait many months, but this past week in politics has been so exhausting to me I was wondering if it was having an early effect.
Doing the best we can. My wife and I talk every night about things we’ve seen in the news, especially trying to look past headlines to see what actually happened.
But it’s rough. It sucks we have to be subjected to this moment in history where the world is going to simply just have to touch the stove. It’s gonna suck.
I haven't had any conversations with Trump voters in the last week, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that almost 100% of the 49.9% is unmoved by anything they've seen. And, for that matter, that about 75% of the 49.9% has heard few or any details of what Trump has actually done in the last seven days. Hell, I'd wager 20% of the 49.9% think Biden is still President.
Price of eggs going up? Gas again over $3 per gallon? (at least where I live)
The comment was in reference to the controversial moves Trump has made in the past seven days and how plugged in his voters are to it. The kitchen table stuff you mention might be what ultimately tanks his popularity but it's not gonna hurt him in his first week.
With that, I agree.
But it’s the autocratic/erratic behavior that will cause the kitchen table issue
OK my comment seems like I'm going nowhere related to your comment, but I swear it loops back at the end...
I like to mentally eyeball the country's electorate into three buckets. Four if we want to include non-voters.
The first bucket is reliable democratic voters.
The second bucket is reliable republican voters.
And the third bucket is people that are generally persuadable to vote for either party OR who has a fair enough tilt to either party but can be persuaded to not vote at all.
I don't think too long about how large each bucket truly is. It seems logical to expect that the D and R buckets are not equal in size. The overall composition is going to depend a lot on how strictly we define the people that can be persuaded to not vote instead of voting for their preferred party. Despite that, for simplicity I like to think of them as 40%-40%-20% or 33%-33%-33%, depending on the discussion. Both are almost certainly wrong, but for back of the envelope discussions I think these choices work well. For an election that has already happened I like the 40-40-20 grouping.
That in mind, I'd look at the 49.9% that voted for him slightly differently than you do. ~80% of that group is going to be die hard republicans, the vast majority of whom are now going to be MAGA. Those people (40% of the electorate) will never turn on him. He could come to their home, burn it down, promise to pay them for it but then sue them instead, and he would still have their support.
That group I expect to be wholly unmoved in any circumstances. Doesn't matter what he does, how bad the headlines are, if egg prices are $120/dozen. Doesn't matter. I don't think they'll change. But it's not the whole 49.9% that voted for him that are there.
I'm curious where the non-reliable voters are at. Reliable democrats and reliable republicans are going to react rather predictably to the next four years. What about the unreliable democrats and the true swing voters? What about the unreliable republicans?
A lot of our gains 2018-2022 were in some of that latter group becoming unreliable democrats instead of unreliable republicans. It looks like a decent part of our drop in 2024 was from them sitting out or crossing back over. Are they remembering why they shifted over to us before, are they blissfully not catching all the horrible headlines, do they think the headlines aren't that bad, etc.?
I won't challenge the breakdown of your buckets of voters. It's our information ecosystem that I suspect will keep Trump's coalition intact for the foreseeable future. The part of his voting coalition that spends their free time watching slip and fall videos on Tik Tok are definitely not plugged in to be critical of his first-week moves. The rest of his coalition is consuming media that will either dismiss or ignore entirely the controversial moves he's made.
Bottom line: I suspect there's a vanishingly small share of the 49.9% that is consuming any kind of critical reaction to Trump's opening week. The Trump voters who are reading The Atlantic or the New York Times, or watching network news, where critical reaction to Trump exists are almost all in the nonpersuadable bucket you describe. As for the rest, it's hard to see how exactly they are ever gonna hear a discouraging word about him in the media that they do consume. The cracks in the armor can only be expected to come if economic fundamentals (jobs, prices) noticeably falter. Autocratic behavior alone, no matter how severe, cannot be expected to dissuade them.
If they persist in doing things like send ICE to raid elementary schools that's going to filter through to folks who voted for him who have a problem with that type of enforcement.
Well, I hope you end up wrong but I can see ways that you could be right.
I don't think it changes your answer much, if at all, but I do want to clarify that I'm not so much hopeful of the last week changing people's minds purely on coverage being bad. Although that can factor. I'm thinking on the volume of stuff being covered.
I think society's biggest complaint with his admin is that there was a constant, seemingly daily, drop of "Big News" that was happening. Some stuff purely bad, like scandals. Some stuff announcements. Some stuff policy changes, that can be good or bad to an individual depending on their partisanship. The endlessness of it was exhausting. Seemingly even more exhausting for people that are only sorta into politics at most.
This past week has been that on overdrive. And seeping into so many other areas, not just traditional news media.
Yes I've had friends text me about approval ratings and I'm like "don't even mention approvals until late February at the earliest"
The real scariness is not what is happening, but rather the strong possibility that a critical mass of "We the People" actively LIKE it.
Your percentage is too high, though your remarks may well be accurate.