My point about voters is that everyone you EVER interact w on political twitter, at political events falls into the tails of this distribution (2.5%). Most people who watch mainstream major networks news, read @nytimes or @WAPO,watch Sunday shows would fall within the 13.5% bands
Although there are certainly some primary voters who hail from the two 34% areas, the bulk of the two party's primary electorates come from the right & left flank of this graph, which means the far left & right are far more extreme than average & even the center and mods are more
conservative and liberal than the average electorate. For all the convo about the Dem primary, polling consistently shows only about 40% of all people who plan to cast ballots in it, people who as a group are already non-representative of the whole country, have watched a debate
Much of the people sitting in those two 34% bands are America's "disengaged" (as @pewresearch calls them). They aren't particularly ideological, but bc of that, they aren't all that inclined to participate (although this is NOT the only thing driving our low participation rates).
So when I give public lectures and interviews I try to remind my audiences that if they are hearing me talk, they are in the 1%. And when they look around confused I clarify, "no, no, not the income 1%, the information 1%. Th engagement 1%. And this is the crisis that underlies
every other crisis we have in American politics."
I want to add this follower Q to the thread in case other people need this frame of reference. Very good Q!
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🧵The Tipping Point Is Upon Us:
Will MAGA Simply Ignore the Courts?
Ok folks, we’re three weeks in and have already entered the “constitutional crisis” phase of things.
I want to draw your attention to something critically important in the coming week. The federal courts have started to respond to Elon Musk’s illegal attack on federal agencies and programs like USAID.
This is going to create a real litmus test for the survival of our democracy.
Much of what Trump and Elon are doing is so flagrantly illegal, it is hard to imagine much of it surviving judicial review, even at the Supreme Court level.
Yes, the Federalist Society controls the Court, but on occasion at least three of their justices, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts have ruled on the side of the Constitution against Trump. There is one major exception and that is the immunity case where they not only did their best to create an untouchable presidency, but also did it in a way to drag the case out of being tried before the election. So we know they have it in them.
I expect the lower courts to reject most of Trump’s power grab. All we can do is hope that those 3 justices recognize by creating the Imperial Presidency, they are rendering their own power obsolete.
The sitting Vice President went public with what us MAGA watchers already knew: there is a forceful movement within MAGA that argues federal court orders should simply be ignored.
This 🧵 is about the effects of partisanship on public opinion.
Please RT & share it! #TheMoreYouKnow
This book, The American Voter, first published in 1960, is the Bible of my subfield in political science: political behavior.
Political behavior is the study of the way people think, feel, and act with regard to politics and includes everyone from political office holders and candidates (elites) to your average man on the street voters.
As soon as phones became prolific enough to allow for scientific polling political scientists launched surveys to figure out what Americans knew about their government.
The results were shocking. It turned out that other than who the current president is and vague impressions of what the two parties stand for, average Joes and Janes knew next to nothing about their own government!
Trump, MAGA, and the Breaking of the American Mind:
A Majority of Republicans Say They are A-OK With Trump Suspending the Constitution
Have you ever had a random conversation with someone that just sort of stays with you over time?
I had one such conversation back in 2019 or so participating in an event.
The conversation was with a graduate student assistant from Rwanda who was working the event. That evening a few of us gathered under the Virginia summer sky to night gaze and hang out.
Always eager to talk with people from other cultures, and especially from places with a political history like Rwanda’s, I was eager to ask about Rwanda’s recovery from the genocide that ripped the country apart in a 100 day blood bath during the Rwandan civil war in 1994.
The victims of the Rwandan genocide were the Tutsi ethnic group, murdered in a wave of violence unleashed by the assassination of the Rwandan president by Hutu extremists, another Rwandan ethnic group. The genocide left somewhere between 500,000 and a million people, mostly Tutsis but also including moderate Hutus, dead.
An Interview with Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy.
If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.
As Dr. Taylor points out in our interview about his book The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy, for all the attention January 6th received, a key part of that story has been largely ignored.
I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role!
That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza's threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.
So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.
What follows is Emily’s article.
I, too, believe in the power of the corporeal.
But then again, I am also one of those elder millennials whose life has been a slipstream from watching 9/11 on my college dorm room TV set to having my high school friends sent to die in Iraq as the rest of us back home marched in the streets to no avail, to the financial crisis that would cost so many of us our future stability, to an impossible housing market, couples having crisis conversations about whether to bring kids into this world, and now enduring the start of Trump 2.0. It’s been a ride. And unlike my parents, it has not been a ride where the marches I have taken part in have singularly changed the course of history.
🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand
Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.
If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”
Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.
By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.
Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections.