True Swing Voters Are Weird
Both of these are good points, I think:
It’s important to recall that the very act of being a persuadable voter is very odd, so it shouldn’t be too surprising if the things that are persuasive to persuadable voters are also odd. https://t.co/WzGbOaSLQx— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 24, 2019
The fact that it doesn’t make sense for marginal voters who would otherwise be open to voting for Democrats to be turned off by talk of impeachment doesn’t mean that it’s not, in fact the case. True swing voters — a small minority — in a highly polarized context have incoherent beliefs almost by definition. And AFICT the polling consistently shows Democratic policies as being a lot more popular than impeachment.
And of course this is also right:
I think my “Leftists were mad at Democrats for focusing on Russia and not healthcare in 2017 and now are mad at Democrat’s for focusing on healthcare and not Russia in 2019 because they dislike Democratic leadership” is a more parsimonious theory of what’s going on here— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) May 24, 2019
Of course, the fact that people who attacked the Dem leadership for blowing it for not focusing on issues are now attacking the Dem leadership for not focusing enough on Trump after doing very well in the midterms with an issue-based campaign doesn’t mean that the Dems shouldn’t impeach Trump — these people will attack the Dem leadership no matter what they do so it doesn’t matter. But it does mean that I’m not going to put any weight on the serene pundit’s fallacies about how we know impeachment will become a lot more popular when it happens when they come from people who spent 2017 and 18 talking about how the Dem leadership was blowing it by focusing too much on Trump and Russia.