I know people who worked in the Obama '08 campaign going door to door to find undecideds and talk to them. This was when Bush was at 35%, Katrina was fresh in everyone’s memory, Iraq had been a clusterfuck for years, and the economy was in free fall. Undecideds and non voters tend to have a few common traits. They’re usually not the brightest, so simply explaining something clearly doesn’t work, trying to use an appeal to their better nature fails, and they simply hate even thinking about politics since they hear the “both sides” bullshit in the media (when they don’t tune it out to watch Real Housewives) and can’t work out what’s happening. Explaining to these people the benefits of single payer, financial regulation, etc. is actually an incredibly hard problem, because they’re not only misinformed, and ignorant, but not very interested in being informed.
I know a lot of people think “oh, if only we had a real leftist running with decent policies the voters would be motivated,” but once you meet enough Americans you see how that can’t possibly be true. We do need a good left wing candidate to pull in younger people (at the expense of older people) since they’re a lot harder to get to the polls otherwise, but just having good policy isn’t going to translate to any blowout or we’d be talking about Pres. Mondale, Pres. Dukakis, and Pres. Kucinich. As stupid as it is, if we want to win, what we need is a candidate with charisma more than a candidate with good policy, because Americans are by and large fucking idiots. Obama knew how to get people in the gut so they trusted him and wanted him to be their president. Bill Clinton was a master of it. Sanders was also really good at it, though he wasn’t quite good enough to survive the primary since his early campaign fumbled hard and he never caught up. Horrifyingly, Trump has this charisma with poorly educated people.
We do desperately need good policy, because that’s what we actually need. But as stupid as it is, if we want to win we need a candidate with a lot of qualities beyond that because being a left wing candidate in a US election is actually a net negative. If you look at the typical online political discourse Americans offer, they don’t have the foggiest notion of what any policy means, ‘socialism’ is a scare word for some Dems as well as every Republican and Independent, and by and large people they look to leaders they trust and follow their ideas. Which is why we need someone like Elizabeth Warren who not only is on the right side of history, but I think who has enough charisma to get people onboard and motivated to act, and is someone that people will look to as a leader.
