Rick Perlstein: Who Are the 'Undecided'? On the infantilization of voters

[muriel_volestrangler]

It may not be about issues, but whether voters surrender to Trump’s invitation to return to the womb.

The future MSNBC host’s TNR piece was an account of the lessons he learned canvassing among undecided voters in Wisconsin for John Kerry. It incinerates a basic foundation of how political junkies think: “Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the ‘issues.’ That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs.”

Chris [Hayes] noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”
...
I’ve learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump’s gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump’s appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: “I am your protector. I want to be your protector … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger …”
...
I imagine that what at least some of them—certainly more than those supposedly entering the two candidates’ issue positions onto spreadsheets to study, ruling out the candidate not “specific” enough about their fiscal policies—are undecided because they are poised at a threshold. “Undecided” is a way station between the final surrender to the Trumpian fantasy, and all the imaginary comforts it offers, and sticking with the rest of us in the reality-based community, despite all the existential terrors the real world affords.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-02-who-are-the-undecided/

(via the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog)
(Note that Perlstein also says that promising to take vengeance on the people his supporters hate is also part of infantilizing them - this is not just a view of MAGA voters as helpless and in need of protection. But I ran out of paragraphs.)

[Peregrine Took]

1. Thanks so much for this excellent, informative aticle,

,,,"...Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, “such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I the asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number … the very concept of the ‘issue’ seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to.”

So much for "undecided voters" and their penchant for trying to understanding the "issues"

LOL.

[disappearingboy]

4. Most undecided voters don't even really care about "the issues."

They just want to be left alone and have someone else sort everything out. You know, the folks who "can't stand politics." In some ways I feel like they would be just fine with fascism, because it doesn't require them to think or get engaged. In fact, it requires them not to.

[disappearingboy]

2. Rick Perlstein is one of the voices of sanity I always turn to.

I've been paying attention to his work since I saw him give a talk about his then-new book "Nixonland" on C-SPAN back in the late 2000s.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. *That* Rick Perlstein ! I knew that name from somewhere, couldn't remember where.

I would have like to have read all four books when they came out, but have had so many complications in my life ...