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6 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I love the idea that what motivated literally tens of millions of never-before-seen voters to the polls is that they read deep into Biden’s policy briefs and discovered some of his plans were arguably more progressive than Clinton’s
There is a fundamental and unshakeable truth about voter behavior that is constantly ignored:

CHANGES IN VOTER BEHAVIOR MUST BE A PRODUCT OF INFORMATION VOTERS ACTUALLY HAVE IN THEIR POSSESSION
What you see instead, literally every day, is people ascribing shifts to facts that voters - particularly marginal, low-engagement voters - almost certainly don’t know and have no reliable way to be informed about.
In some ways you can see the influence of free market absolutism here - the assumption that the market knows everything and its decisions are a reflection of that.

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
6 Nov
Biden needs to understand the GOP plan moving forward is crystal clear:
-commander his appointments
-pass no legislation at all
-cripple the economy with no stimulus
-shred voting rights with SCOTUS
-gerrymander
-blow out 2022 midterms
-lock in permanent minority rule
-win 2024
Everything that goes wrong from here on out will be blamed on Democrats. The Democrats only have a few tools here: the executive, a massive, majoritarian coalition, and a GOP split over Trump, with none of Trump's ability to produce turnout waves in presidential elections.
Biden needs to go on the all-out offense in every possible way. He can't rest on his laurels or call for national healing, because it's trivially easy for the GOP will use any reprieve to transform him into Jimmy Carter 2.0 and a far-right restoration in four years.
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
5 Nov
Democrats, to each other: "Trump is so awful, so crooked, so racist. How could anyone vote for him?"

Democrats, to regular voters: "I'm not here to talk about Trump. I'm here to talk about health care."
The overriding assumption appears to have been that Trump's badness was completely self-evident in all its particulars to everyone, and thus that anyone who ignored that badness was a moral monster completely immune to any appeal not rooted in racism or financial self-interest.
Seems like, if your opponent is a racist impeached twenty-times-accused sexual assaulter who self-deals with government resources and is too dumb to speak in complete sentences or understand basic government, you should... say so! Just say so out loud! Point it out, constantly!
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
2 Nov
reality is that, despite incredible geographic luck and an extremely unlikely spate of last-minute good fortune, trump barely, BARELY won in 2016 against an unpopular opponent. not a single thing has changed to his benefit and much has changed to his detriment
most people vote the same election after election (this is a big part of why trump won: a lot of his votes were just baked-in romney/mccain/bush voters) and it's unclear to me where trump would be getting many new votes, but pretty clear where biden would be
this basic logic - "trump has almost no ground to lose, and it's hard to see where he could have gained ground" - has held true for years. but now we're right up to the election and the polls are bearing it out too: trump has backslid almost everywhere
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
28 Oct
Here's what political media needs to understand about the catastrophe of 2016: it's not bad luck that led it to absorb and propagate right-wing talking points.

It was real incentives and social pressures - all of which CONTINUE TO EXIST TODAY. crooked.com/articles/2020-…
As long as political media remains a tightly-knit circle of elite insiders whose professional advancement depends chiefly on the approval of each other, there will be strong pressure to revert back to the failed practices of the past.
It doesn't help, either, that political media circles are connected to a large number of GOP partisans who remain part of the social scene, regardless of how unreliable they have proven. And it REALLY doesn't help that white men, and their fixations and biases, predominate.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
27 Oct
No, evaluating your party’s leaders as doing a poor job, and being willing to say so, does not actually indicate mental health conditions.

However, it connects to something else I’ve thought about a lot: how mentally draining it is to not trust leaders.
I’ve wondered if this is the root of the low-level panic a lot of Democrats feel, the constant attention suck that is Trump and politics, the doomscrolling: it feels like nobody is in charge and if we don’t pay close attention to every problem, every problem will get worse.
I’ve said this before but it’s simply exhausting - truly, physically exhausting - to know that not only will all manner of horrors occur between now and next week, every single week, but that even the people in government purportedly on our side will likely do nothing about them.
Read 8 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
27 Oct
It's true: the election is in seven days. What, exactly, has Pelosi done to slow Trump down?
Did she help ferret out his misdeeds? Did she outmaneuver him at the negotiating table, achieving Dem priorities? Did she hold his cronies accountable or uncover corruption at the agencies? Did she ever use any of the "arrows in her quiver" that she wasn't going to talk about?
Or was she, at best, a mildly irksome presence for Trump in the House, someone who insulted him time to time while holding her own caucus at bay and suppressing any movement within it to impose consequences or accountability on the administration?
Read 5 tweets

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