Basically, Dan, this poll basically validates the notion that the GOP strategy that began with Reagan in the 1970's has been entirely successful. Recognizing that their policy positions, which largely revolved around ensuring that the wealth and power of a small cadre of rich, white, Anglo-Saxon men was shielded from the democratic project of building a just society, were anathema to the vast majority of the population, Reagan's GOP set out to ensure that people didn't believe that government could work and that anyone associated with government was corrupt, incompetent, or both.
I live in a red state with a Republican supermajority. They failed to address our property tax issues and many ppl’s property taxes are now going up ~43%. Our 5 member Public Services Commission are all Republicans. They just voted to allow MDU in Eastern Montana raise their rates and allowed Northwestern Energy to raise our rates an interim 12.5% while they hold “hearings” to see if they’ll allow a 25-28% increase on our electricity. Gas is more expensive here as are groceries and housing is practically extortionate. They also refused fed $ to help feed children & poor and messed up Medicaid so ppl are losing/lost their insurance. (Our state also just allowed PragerU to become a textbook supplier.). All that to say that it seems to be from watching other red states that making things financially harder for their constituents is part of the Republican plan to try to take back control in 2024.
To me these study results are a generalization of what many politically active people like us feel. And what's worked for me is to follow the example of Jess Craven and Simon Rosenberg who (a) openly acknowledge the problems with our current system, (b) present a vision of a better future and (c) show a clear path how we get from (a) to (b). In my experience people don't want to be cynical, but they need an alternative vision that is both hopeful and grounded in reality.
There are two kinds of corruption driving these numbers, I believe.
The first kind is the ordinary, venal corruption of a Bob Menendez. Everyone immediately understands it because it’s the kind of thing that can and does occur in all walks of life. It’s also (usually) condemned by the parties and individual politicians. The only lasting damage is the light sentence he’ll likely get.
The other form of corruption is much more corrosive. It’s the everyday corruption of influence and access. It gives everyone the belief that the needs and desires of everyday voters don’t count. At all.
Campaign contributions (if I hear another politician say “Contributions don’t buy influence or my vote. They just buy access for discussion”. Let me tell you something, bud. No one believes you. Everyone thinks you’re lying. Left or Right, you’re lying. And your denial and our immediate assumption that you are lying—and that you think we’re stupid—affects our feelings toward all politicians.
Same for lobbyists. To voters, corporate lobbyists are a big part of why that “Corrupt” word looms so large on the chart. Lobbyists are why people’s utility bills jump 15%, and property taxes jump 25%—to fund the giveaways to other lobbyists’ clients. Lobbyists are why our food supply, water, and air are tainted. And voters figure that when some commission steps in to “save” the taxpayer by only giving a utility half the requested amount, that was always the plan.
People give up. They don’t vote. Or they vote with a sense of resignation. Or they vote these days to fend off what seems to be a party dedicated to returning the country to an even worse version of the antebellum Plantation South. Or because they favor a dictator who can stop all this uncomfortable progress, change, and inclusivity.
Elected Dems could fix this. Accept only small donations. Don’t limit the size of gifts from lobbyists — outlaw them entirely. You want lunch or dinner? Do what we do. Pay for it yourself. Want to be Speaker of the House? Loudly and plainly refuse all individual horse-trading. The comment I hear most often about the McCarthy-Scalise-Jordan clown act? That it’s a bunch of slimy politicians trading votes in typical backroom deals.
I can’t begin to include all the examples of this kind of pervasive corruption that makes ordinary people distrust politics and politicians. But I will include a big one: gerrymandering. Pure corruption of the political process.
Dems, want to jump a light-year ahead with voters? Unilaterally work out a real, ambitious and thorough reform on *this* type of corruption, announce it, and universally pledge to follow it. Do that and the party will no longer languish below lawyers and used car salespeople in ethical approval.
Do more? Engage with your voters monthly. On paper and email. Explain your votes. Explain how your thinking developed. Who you listened to. I have been a voter for over 50 years. The only messaging I have ever gotten was asking for money. With one exception: when I lived in Georgia, a senator named Max Cleland used to send a newsletter with just this information. Once his letter asked his constituents to call his office asking for thoughts on an upcoming election. Wouldn’t you find that sort of thing a compelling reason to keep a politician in office?
Think what a different politics we could have if the Democrats would do things that not only change public perception of their "both sides" corruption by monied interests but also use performative politics to communicate it through our propaganda-infested media: Like instead of undermining Fetterman, they could emulate his decency and all wear shorts for an hour.
My knee-jerk response when I read the part that stated that people believe the biggest problem with our government was “politicians" was to say, no, it's voters. How do you explain people who constantly vote in politicians who actively work against them? How do you explain voters who believe the BS they are fed (have you LISTENED to interviews at MAGA rallies?)? Too many voters don't do their research or refuse to watch more than one media outlet to gain multiple perspectives. So I do believe a lot of the blame falls on the shoulders of voters.
HOWEVER, as I thought some more, I realized that when you are only given crap to vote for, you end up with crap. The Supreme Court in the Citizens United ruling has created a political environment where the Good Guys don't have a chance. Poor old Abe Lincoln would have been royally screwed. And I know he's a Sorkin dream boy, but where is our Jeb Bartlett? We can't vote for candidates who don't exist. And why would any sane person want to be a part of our messed up system? Talk about a masochistic gig.
Which lead to my final thought. It's our system. It's the SCOTUS judges that sit on the bench for. life and make rulings that destroy our democracy by giving so much power to the wealthy while taking rights away and ignore the separation of church and state. It's our electoral college that makes no sense whatsoever. It's our Senate that gives huge power to people in Wyoming and sucks power from people in California. It's the broken GOP and gerrymandering that give us extremists who can't be voted out of office no matter what they do.
My comment is in response to the first bullet point under number three above. I too am concerned about using the words “saving our democracy”as they pertain to our work as activists. I certainly do not want to save our democracy as it is. I need to hear that our politicians are ready to TRANSFORM our democracy into an actual democracy, the democracy that our founding fathers envisioned, not the fascist-leaning one that we are experiencing today. I’m not sure what language to use to convince those on the fence that Democrats want what is good for ALL of us, no matter where we are on the continuum of our politics, but I do feel strongly that politicians and media must acknowledge where we constituents are and offer us hope for a rejuvenation of our democracy, not saving it in its current state. The nurturing of this sense of hope is absolutely necessary to metabolize despair and to empower us to bring about the change we wish to see. For a good dose of this hope, I refer media, politicians and all of us constituents to Simon Rosenberg‘s “With Democrats, Things Get Better”.
One anecdote: I recently visited an elderly relative in South Carolina who voted for Trump twice. She is now a never-Trumper. Why? "Because of his threat to democracy." She says all her friends feel the same way, and she has a lot of friends. I wouldn't completely discard saving democracy as a messaging strategy, but maybe the message needs to be more nuanced. Many may think politicians are corrupt, but maybe they object to corruption and want more fairness, justice, and accountability.
The reason that politicians don't respond to their "constituents" is that they are (almost) all corrupt because the Supreme Court made bribery by corporations legal in the Citizen's United decision. The politicians gerrymandered their way into districts they practically can't lose in and just take the corporate money and do the corporate bidding. I have no idea how to get money out of politics, but if it were to happen the politicians would once again have to be responsive to the voters and not the donors. There's also the problem with the Electoral College, but I don't have an idea for getting rid of that either.
Running on saving democracy is a huge mistake. People who can’t afford rent, health care, college for their kids, don’t care about democracy. The political answer is right in front of our eyes: the Bernie Sanders platform. Medicare for all, free public college and trade school, an increased minimum wage, etc. there’s a reason there were so many “Trump or Sanders” voters. We pretend they were anomalous, just a bunch of uninformed whackos. But they are smarter than the pundits; they know what matters. Ok, they were suckered by Trump. But they are waiting for honest politicians, and a Democratic Party, that can address their daily concerns. They don’t watch MSNBC. They don’t care about democracy. They are the electorate. We ignore them at our peril.
Thanks for your work! I like your direction and framing! 2024 will be an interesting year for MessageBox. ^_^
So folks are distrustful of dems and perpetuate a disproportionate sense of corruption for many reasons. Here are the ones I keep in mind when talking to folks:
1) GOP Reps and News sources for decades have been driving this narrative. Part of the GOP identity is owning the Libs because they're dangerous and reckless one week but also because they're evil and corrupt the next.
2) GOP projection is an effective and worrying tactic. Every GOP corruption story is conflated with "all politicians and especially the democrats are corrupt" on conservative podcasts, reporting, etc. It has effectively made everyone wonder just "how corrupt" the democrats are. Why hold any criticisms against the GOP alone that you could attribute to all politicians pretty decently? Until this feels like bad judgement to everyone, we will have similar problems.
3) Confusion is the point. The more Dems explain, the more we effectively cut ourselves off from people who are dually uninterested in politics. Those folks might respond better to a rallying call that comes from within their trusted social circles and matches their personal values.
Is it considered Stockholm Syndrome when people are getting ready to sign themselves up for 4 more years of exactly the person who has made politics exhausting? It’s like your car. You don’t notice it running and doing its job until you get a knock in the engine. Then you’re afraid something is wrong, you can’t hear anything else, and even when it’s fixed, you wonder if the knock will come back. trump is the knock in the engine.
"Approximately 80% of voters believe people who donate a lot of money have too much influence on Congress. More than 70% say the same about lobbyists and major corporations."
What if, what if the underlying problem isn't "democracy" per se but under-regulated capitalism? Fifty years ago, as an undergrad, I wrote a column for the college paper titled "Private Profit: Public Problem." A friend, a very smart guy with a political science/economics major, told me I was full of it. Note that this was 7 or 8 years before Reagan came along and persuaded me that I'd been on the right track all along.
A couple years after I wrote that column, I lived in the UK for 15 months. Big awakening: Britain, and most (all?) western European countries, had a labour/labor party and/or a socialist party that wasn't off on the sidelines somewhere. Not the U.S. What we did have was at least a century of demonizing labor and any talk of economic inequality as socialist, anarchist, communist, etc. This got worse after the Russian Revolution in 1917–18.
Despite the New Deal, it continues to this day. Notice how "moderate" Democrats -- Democrats, mind you! -- trash any Democrat who talks about economic and racial justice as "the Far Left." In my younger days, the Far Left was fringe Maoist or Marxist-Leninist groups that liked to cause havoc at antiwar demonstrations. Now it's elected Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who take economic justice seriously. Not coincidentally, most of these Democrats are of color. Also not coincidentally, MLK Jr. before he was assassinated was combining the struggles for economic and racial justice in a powerful way.
Back to that 80% of U.S. voters who "believe people who donate a lot of money have too much influence on Congress" and the "more than 70%" who "say the same about lobbyists and major corporations." This restores my faith in U.S. voters. Now if only more politicians and pundits could get it through their heads that in real life Big Money is in effect the 4th branch of government. The fact that it seems to have co-opted other three branches, especially the judiciary, means we've got our work cut out for us.
Don't you think a big reason for political exhaustion is the fact that Congress has been gridlocked for years? It can't even try to fix our problems. When it tries, it all gets watered down to nothing. Our biggest problems, drug addiction, gun violence, income inequality, lack of health insurance, climate change, Congress is helpless to do anything about. On top of gridlock is the overwhelming influence of big business and rich people. Not to mention one major party has become fascists who are actively taking away basic human rights. We feel powerless.
Living in California, in very blue cities, Dems that win elections seem very much seem in the pockets of realtors and developers, tech (Airbnb) etc. We’re (tenants) getting evicted from our homes.
Biden joining a picket line was the most hopeful thing I’ve seen a politician do after 20 years in SF. Seems like Dems leading in purple states are the BEST. They really have to distinguish themselves.
Basically, Dan, this poll basically validates the notion that the GOP strategy that began with Reagan in the 1970's has been entirely successful. Recognizing that their policy positions, which largely revolved around ensuring that the wealth and power of a small cadre of rich, white, Anglo-Saxon men was shielded from the democratic project of building a just society, were anathema to the vast majority of the population, Reagan's GOP set out to ensure that people didn't believe that government could work and that anyone associated with government was corrupt, incompetent, or both.
Sigh.
I live in a red state with a Republican supermajority. They failed to address our property tax issues and many ppl’s property taxes are now going up ~43%. Our 5 member Public Services Commission are all Republicans. They just voted to allow MDU in Eastern Montana raise their rates and allowed Northwestern Energy to raise our rates an interim 12.5% while they hold “hearings” to see if they’ll allow a 25-28% increase on our electricity. Gas is more expensive here as are groceries and housing is practically extortionate. They also refused fed $ to help feed children & poor and messed up Medicaid so ppl are losing/lost their insurance. (Our state also just allowed PragerU to become a textbook supplier.). All that to say that it seems to be from watching other red states that making things financially harder for their constituents is part of the Republican plan to try to take back control in 2024.
To me these study results are a generalization of what many politically active people like us feel. And what's worked for me is to follow the example of Jess Craven and Simon Rosenberg who (a) openly acknowledge the problems with our current system, (b) present a vision of a better future and (c) show a clear path how we get from (a) to (b). In my experience people don't want to be cynical, but they need an alternative vision that is both hopeful and grounded in reality.
There are two kinds of corruption driving these numbers, I believe.
The first kind is the ordinary, venal corruption of a Bob Menendez. Everyone immediately understands it because it’s the kind of thing that can and does occur in all walks of life. It’s also (usually) condemned by the parties and individual politicians. The only lasting damage is the light sentence he’ll likely get.
The other form of corruption is much more corrosive. It’s the everyday corruption of influence and access. It gives everyone the belief that the needs and desires of everyday voters don’t count. At all.
Campaign contributions (if I hear another politician say “Contributions don’t buy influence or my vote. They just buy access for discussion”. Let me tell you something, bud. No one believes you. Everyone thinks you’re lying. Left or Right, you’re lying. And your denial and our immediate assumption that you are lying—and that you think we’re stupid—affects our feelings toward all politicians.
Same for lobbyists. To voters, corporate lobbyists are a big part of why that “Corrupt” word looms so large on the chart. Lobbyists are why people’s utility bills jump 15%, and property taxes jump 25%—to fund the giveaways to other lobbyists’ clients. Lobbyists are why our food supply, water, and air are tainted. And voters figure that when some commission steps in to “save” the taxpayer by only giving a utility half the requested amount, that was always the plan.
People give up. They don’t vote. Or they vote with a sense of resignation. Or they vote these days to fend off what seems to be a party dedicated to returning the country to an even worse version of the antebellum Plantation South. Or because they favor a dictator who can stop all this uncomfortable progress, change, and inclusivity.
Elected Dems could fix this. Accept only small donations. Don’t limit the size of gifts from lobbyists — outlaw them entirely. You want lunch or dinner? Do what we do. Pay for it yourself. Want to be Speaker of the House? Loudly and plainly refuse all individual horse-trading. The comment I hear most often about the McCarthy-Scalise-Jordan clown act? That it’s a bunch of slimy politicians trading votes in typical backroom deals.
I can’t begin to include all the examples of this kind of pervasive corruption that makes ordinary people distrust politics and politicians. But I will include a big one: gerrymandering. Pure corruption of the political process.
Dems, want to jump a light-year ahead with voters? Unilaterally work out a real, ambitious and thorough reform on *this* type of corruption, announce it, and universally pledge to follow it. Do that and the party will no longer languish below lawyers and used car salespeople in ethical approval.
Do more? Engage with your voters monthly. On paper and email. Explain your votes. Explain how your thinking developed. Who you listened to. I have been a voter for over 50 years. The only messaging I have ever gotten was asking for money. With one exception: when I lived in Georgia, a senator named Max Cleland used to send a newsletter with just this information. Once his letter asked his constituents to call his office asking for thoughts on an upcoming election. Wouldn’t you find that sort of thing a compelling reason to keep a politician in office?
Think what a different politics we could have if the Democrats would do things that not only change public perception of their "both sides" corruption by monied interests but also use performative politics to communicate it through our propaganda-infested media: Like instead of undermining Fetterman, they could emulate his decency and all wear shorts for an hour.
My knee-jerk response when I read the part that stated that people believe the biggest problem with our government was “politicians" was to say, no, it's voters. How do you explain people who constantly vote in politicians who actively work against them? How do you explain voters who believe the BS they are fed (have you LISTENED to interviews at MAGA rallies?)? Too many voters don't do their research or refuse to watch more than one media outlet to gain multiple perspectives. So I do believe a lot of the blame falls on the shoulders of voters.
HOWEVER, as I thought some more, I realized that when you are only given crap to vote for, you end up with crap. The Supreme Court in the Citizens United ruling has created a political environment where the Good Guys don't have a chance. Poor old Abe Lincoln would have been royally screwed. And I know he's a Sorkin dream boy, but where is our Jeb Bartlett? We can't vote for candidates who don't exist. And why would any sane person want to be a part of our messed up system? Talk about a masochistic gig.
Which lead to my final thought. It's our system. It's the SCOTUS judges that sit on the bench for. life and make rulings that destroy our democracy by giving so much power to the wealthy while taking rights away and ignore the separation of church and state. It's our electoral college that makes no sense whatsoever. It's our Senate that gives huge power to people in Wyoming and sucks power from people in California. It's the broken GOP and gerrymandering that give us extremists who can't be voted out of office no matter what they do.
We need an overhaul.
My comment is in response to the first bullet point under number three above. I too am concerned about using the words “saving our democracy”as they pertain to our work as activists. I certainly do not want to save our democracy as it is. I need to hear that our politicians are ready to TRANSFORM our democracy into an actual democracy, the democracy that our founding fathers envisioned, not the fascist-leaning one that we are experiencing today. I’m not sure what language to use to convince those on the fence that Democrats want what is good for ALL of us, no matter where we are on the continuum of our politics, but I do feel strongly that politicians and media must acknowledge where we constituents are and offer us hope for a rejuvenation of our democracy, not saving it in its current state. The nurturing of this sense of hope is absolutely necessary to metabolize despair and to empower us to bring about the change we wish to see. For a good dose of this hope, I refer media, politicians and all of us constituents to Simon Rosenberg‘s “With Democrats, Things Get Better”.
One anecdote: I recently visited an elderly relative in South Carolina who voted for Trump twice. She is now a never-Trumper. Why? "Because of his threat to democracy." She says all her friends feel the same way, and she has a lot of friends. I wouldn't completely discard saving democracy as a messaging strategy, but maybe the message needs to be more nuanced. Many may think politicians are corrupt, but maybe they object to corruption and want more fairness, justice, and accountability.
Why don't you start the analysis with looking at the control the Political Industrial Complex exerts on our system?
The reason that politicians don't respond to their "constituents" is that they are (almost) all corrupt because the Supreme Court made bribery by corporations legal in the Citizen's United decision. The politicians gerrymandered their way into districts they practically can't lose in and just take the corporate money and do the corporate bidding. I have no idea how to get money out of politics, but if it were to happen the politicians would once again have to be responsive to the voters and not the donors. There's also the problem with the Electoral College, but I don't have an idea for getting rid of that either.
Running on saving democracy is a huge mistake. People who can’t afford rent, health care, college for their kids, don’t care about democracy. The political answer is right in front of our eyes: the Bernie Sanders platform. Medicare for all, free public college and trade school, an increased minimum wage, etc. there’s a reason there were so many “Trump or Sanders” voters. We pretend they were anomalous, just a bunch of uninformed whackos. But they are smarter than the pundits; they know what matters. Ok, they were suckered by Trump. But they are waiting for honest politicians, and a Democratic Party, that can address their daily concerns. They don’t watch MSNBC. They don’t care about democracy. They are the electorate. We ignore them at our peril.
Thanks for your work! I like your direction and framing! 2024 will be an interesting year for MessageBox. ^_^
So folks are distrustful of dems and perpetuate a disproportionate sense of corruption for many reasons. Here are the ones I keep in mind when talking to folks:
1) GOP Reps and News sources for decades have been driving this narrative. Part of the GOP identity is owning the Libs because they're dangerous and reckless one week but also because they're evil and corrupt the next.
2) GOP projection is an effective and worrying tactic. Every GOP corruption story is conflated with "all politicians and especially the democrats are corrupt" on conservative podcasts, reporting, etc. It has effectively made everyone wonder just "how corrupt" the democrats are. Why hold any criticisms against the GOP alone that you could attribute to all politicians pretty decently? Until this feels like bad judgement to everyone, we will have similar problems.
3) Confusion is the point. The more Dems explain, the more we effectively cut ourselves off from people who are dually uninterested in politics. Those folks might respond better to a rallying call that comes from within their trusted social circles and matches their personal values.
Is it considered Stockholm Syndrome when people are getting ready to sign themselves up for 4 more years of exactly the person who has made politics exhausting? It’s like your car. You don’t notice it running and doing its job until you get a knock in the engine. Then you’re afraid something is wrong, you can’t hear anything else, and even when it’s fixed, you wonder if the knock will come back. trump is the knock in the engine.
It's staring you, me, and all of us in the face:
"Approximately 80% of voters believe people who donate a lot of money have too much influence on Congress. More than 70% say the same about lobbyists and major corporations."
What if, what if the underlying problem isn't "democracy" per se but under-regulated capitalism? Fifty years ago, as an undergrad, I wrote a column for the college paper titled "Private Profit: Public Problem." A friend, a very smart guy with a political science/economics major, told me I was full of it. Note that this was 7 or 8 years before Reagan came along and persuaded me that I'd been on the right track all along.
A couple years after I wrote that column, I lived in the UK for 15 months. Big awakening: Britain, and most (all?) western European countries, had a labour/labor party and/or a socialist party that wasn't off on the sidelines somewhere. Not the U.S. What we did have was at least a century of demonizing labor and any talk of economic inequality as socialist, anarchist, communist, etc. This got worse after the Russian Revolution in 1917–18.
Despite the New Deal, it continues to this day. Notice how "moderate" Democrats -- Democrats, mind you! -- trash any Democrat who talks about economic and racial justice as "the Far Left." In my younger days, the Far Left was fringe Maoist or Marxist-Leninist groups that liked to cause havoc at antiwar demonstrations. Now it's elected Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who take economic justice seriously. Not coincidentally, most of these Democrats are of color. Also not coincidentally, MLK Jr. before he was assassinated was combining the struggles for economic and racial justice in a powerful way.
Back to that 80% of U.S. voters who "believe people who donate a lot of money have too much influence on Congress" and the "more than 70%" who "say the same about lobbyists and major corporations." This restores my faith in U.S. voters. Now if only more politicians and pundits could get it through their heads that in real life Big Money is in effect the 4th branch of government. The fact that it seems to have co-opted other three branches, especially the judiciary, means we've got our work cut out for us.
Don't you think a big reason for political exhaustion is the fact that Congress has been gridlocked for years? It can't even try to fix our problems. When it tries, it all gets watered down to nothing. Our biggest problems, drug addiction, gun violence, income inequality, lack of health insurance, climate change, Congress is helpless to do anything about. On top of gridlock is the overwhelming influence of big business and rich people. Not to mention one major party has become fascists who are actively taking away basic human rights. We feel powerless.
Living in California, in very blue cities, Dems that win elections seem very much seem in the pockets of realtors and developers, tech (Airbnb) etc. We’re (tenants) getting evicted from our homes.
Biden joining a picket line was the most hopeful thing I’ve seen a politician do after 20 years in SF. Seems like Dems leading in purple states are the BEST. They really have to distinguish themselves.