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No. No, they won't. These are people intellectually incapable of admitting they are wrong. It's hard even for most people, but in his base, it's a pathology, and I very much doubt the existence of the hypothetical swing voters.
Trump didn't win because of swing voters; he won because a bunch of idiots stayed home.
I'm going to keep throwing this out there. Every swing state has a Russian tail just like Putin's referendum. There are tons of ballots that were down ballot dem except president as well as excess bullet ballots (ballots that voted for Trump only and no other races) compared to previous years. One of Elon's Doge boys wrote software for reading ballots that had a write function. I don't think that is a coincidence.
https://electiontruthalliance.org/
This is a Russian, billionaire coup
I agree with you; it was up to Kamala's team to pursue this, though - the only party that could contest it - and she didn't.
I really don’t understand this “it’s hard for people to admit they’re wrong” thing.
Like, I’m wrong a lot. It’s not that big a deal. Just adjust to new information, form a new model, and move on.
You're an exception, not the rule. Even people capable of admitting they're wrong find it more difficult the more contentious and adversarial the argument.
I believe you; I'm just saying you're more well-adjusted than the average bear.
I think the difference is that you're an intellectually capable person. I remember reading that a person of very low IQ is simply unable to imagine anything different than their perceived reality. If you asked a very low IQ person how they would feel right now if they hadn't eaten breakfast, they wouldn't be able to provide an answer beyond "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast."
I think about this a lot when I see people parrot talking points from Fox News without being able to intellectually explain any nuances or create any new information from what they've heard.
There's a reason why white men without college degrees are the largest Trump-voting demographic. The more educated a person becomes, the less likely they are to support Trump.
You don't need to make guesses based on your own experiences, a quick googling of "swing voters" will pull up a bunch of data-driven approaches at analyzing them.
Are these the same data-driven polling that have consistently screwed up election prediction for the past decade?
Nate Silver did a better job in this last one, but he said going in that they'd finally recognized that polling was broken, it they'd stopped relying on it so heavily and were considering other factors in their predictions.
Have you ever met a honestly "undecided" voter, who votes?
63.7% turn out in the 2024 general. Nearly 40% of Americans didn't bother to vote. That was 66%, in 2020. There were an estimated 244M eligible voters in 2024; that means about 5½ million people who did vote in 2020 didn't bother to get off their fat asses this time and vote. Trump won the popular vote by 2½ million votes. So there's that.
Not that the popular vote means much; most Republican presidents who've won in the past quarter century did so while losing the popular vote, proving what a great system we have.
Anyway, I don't believe in swing voters. Specifically, I don't believe there are any significant numbers of people who actually vote who swing between the parties. The provable evidence of down-ballot voting speaks for itself. I have no doubt there undecideds; what I doubt is that many of them go to the polls.
There is one pretty clear data point that demonstrates their existence, that being people that voted for both Biden and Trump. And yes, I have met some swing voters, they're folks that are usually not very into politics, but do vote. I find it silly to not believe in something that we have data on, at any rate. Nor do I think it's very productive to focus in on any singular factor when multiple factors go into an equation.
I'm not sure that we're living in rational times, though. There's a concerted effort to divided the public, ~~focusing~~ fomenting discontent within the lower and middle class. I am increasingly skeptical of the idea that there's a large group of people who listen both to Fox News and NPR and seriously haven't formed a world view favoring one or the other.
And, again, time and again polling has proven unreliable. Lies, damned lies, and statistics? On the other hand, we have verifiable voting counts that show clearly that turnout was significantly - statistically significantly - low this election.
But now I've forgotten what we were originally disagreeing about.
Edit: changed a word to mean what I meant
Swing voters. And yeah, people that consume news probably aren't going to be swing. It's more often going to be people that don't watch news, read articles, etc.
How can you live a life not being exposed to the news?
I learned, through the second Bush administration, that my mental health is far better when I avoid all political news when there's a warmongering fascist in office. My wife insists on doing the "have you heard what Trump did today?" thing, and I scan past anything with the Orange Asset's face on it, but it's literally impossible to exist with any online presence and not be constantly bombarded by the shit that's going on. Some of it for certain is because I'm not as quick to skip resistance content, so I still do read about whatever recent traitorous action is going on, but still. How? How can you exist in America and not be constantly exposed to politics?
I once met a young guy who, after doing a term in the Peace Corps, came back, got himself some backpacking equipment, and just lived in the national parks. We picked him up hitchhiking to his next place. Really peaceful, nice kid; he apparently lived on rice and dried beans, and some spices, because it was energy dense and cheap. Anyway, him I could see going long stretches without hearing about Project 2025, but anyone who lives in society? Just... how?
Everyone on the internet gets a different experience, it's all custom tailored by algorithms to whatever they engage with. I do think it's gotten a lot harder in recent years, at least partially due to algorithms prioritizing the most divisive content, but some people put a lot of effort into consciously avoiding it. We even see it here on Lemmy, with people asking how to avoid political content, not subbing to any communities that go into politics (which lets be real, is quite a lot of them, including all news communities) and blocking users for bringing up politics. These are the type that probably subscribe to the tech forums, but hate every conversation about Elon. They probably don't have strong opinions on him either way, because they hate hearing about him and don't trust most of what they do hear.
Then there's real life versions too, people that just go to work, engage in whatever their hobbies are, and probably don't make friends with anyone too interested in current events due to not really liking it.
Some people just like their heads in the sand. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
I wish it were that easy. If I blocked everything that popped political news, and everyone who brought up politics, I may as well just not go online.
I can't even avoid engaging in it myself. But it's much harder these days to tune it out. I find I have to avoid all news, lest one item be about more treachery, and I don't want that.
Yeah I can't do it either. I took a break after the election, but here I am again. lol I do find it hard to empathize with people that just don't care about anything.
The problem is that I care too much. It's not good for my mental health. I'm angry all the time - you know, I notice it in my Lemmy interactions. I'm much more aggressive and antagonistic if I've been using attention to the news; I'm just not as nice a person. And honestly, I'm equally an ass to people who deserve it, as people who don't. It's awful, and I hate who it makes me.
It's not all news; just the current, recent crop. I can deal with the usual autocrat billionaires, most of the time; there's just a limit to how much I can handle before I displace onto folks who don't deserve my ire.
Yeah I know what you mean. It's tough, because being aware is one of the first steps for fighting back, but you can't fight back as effectively if it all demoralizes you too much. It's like there's a really fine line somewhere between involved and too much, and where that line is fluctuates over time.
For myself, while I am consuming news again, my overall consumption is still down from where it was pre-election. I remember I did this during Trump's first term as well, where it just started getting to me too much. I feel like I have a good amount of endurance for this stuff too. I wish there was a better answer, but it really is kinda a catch-22. Rock and a hard place.
Partisanship is a hell of a drug.
Not really so much to do with partisanship as with personality worship.