(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Winning voters back from the coalition of the fearful [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-11-10 So, it happened. An apparent majority of those who voted in this election have chosen Trump and the GOP over Harris and fellow Democrats. While there is clearly a core number of voters who will vote for anyone with an R after their name, I believe the margin that tipped the election rightward was the several million voters whom I think of as the “coalition of the fearful.” The job of the Democratic Party in the coming days is to create and execute a plan to bring those swing voters back into the center in 2026, 2028, and local and state elections in the meantime. (Yes, I accept the framing of Democrats as the real centrist party in this country, while still something of a center-left coalition.) In any plan to get back to a majority,we need to pay close attention to two constituencies: those who voted for Trump for what we believe to be misguided reasons, and those who might have voted Democratic but chose to sit this one out. The second group is a topic for another diary; for now I want to focus on the first group, in which I would put: blue-collar workers, both union and nonunion; “socially conservative” Latinos; Black voters who feel under-represented in or under-served by our party; and an alarming number of young men, some voting for the first time. You may have others to add to the list; I'm not really sure how to sort out the various types of self-described Christians who voted for Trump, but I think there are reachable voters there as well. These people are not the enemy! That's Trump talk. They are our fellow citizens. And as disgusted as I am with the choices they made, we have to understand why they made those choices if we are going to win them back. Clearly misinformation (from home and abroad) and a willingness to ignore obvious facts (convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, failed deadbeat businessman, serial liar) had an enormous effect, but the key to the successful strategy of the right was to appeal to people's fears to win their votes. What are those motivating fears? I'll suggest a few: a general fear of losing what they have, and a specific fear of falling farther behind economically; fear of the “other,” especially if they feel those others are getting more than their fair share; and fear that things will never get better under our current system. As Democrats, we have to ask ourselves: What has the current administration and the Democratic Party done to feed those fears? What can government and civil society do to address those fears? The problem with the fear-based approach, when talking to voters, is that when you ask people about their fears they tend to get defensive or else deny them. And fact-based arguments don't exactly have a strong track record(witness the rising fear of crime while crime rates are steadily decreasing). Instead, what if we ask about, and listen to, people's needs? Whether in focus groups, door-to-door canvassing, community forums, or simply one conversation at a time, we might ask: What do you need – for yourself, your children and grandchildren, your community? What in our current society stands in the way of those needs being met? What can government and civil society do to help meet those needs? (In my first draft of this diary, I wrote the previous paragraph to ask about hopes versus fears, but my spouse reminded me that hope is a luxury for many people, an abstraction, while everyone has needs and a lot of people's needs are not being met.) Then, we have to explicitly and publicly identify with those needs and organize the message that Democrats are the only party that really cares about meeting them. And most important, we need the party to craft and rally behind solid, easily understandable policies to back up that promise and meet people's needs when we return to power. This is going to require some serious work within the party at the national level, and probably some new leadership. Some messaging priorities may need to change; we can't abandon our commitment to, for example, LGBTQ+ rights or climate change, but these do not appear to be the most effective issues with which to connect with disaffected voters. Furthermore, I don't believe we can wait four more years for the next national Democratic convention to work out these changes. It's time to start planning a national nuts-and-bolts, policy-platform, what-do-we-stand-for convention in 2025, and if necessary every year after that. 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