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Casey's avatar

Appreciate the overview, but feels like we're missing the punchline. If I can infer:

The median American voter wants:

- moderation on cultural issues, especially salient trans issues such as parental consent and notification, trans athletics, and some degree of caution in the treatment of minors.

- a strong commitment to public order, namely a controlled southern border and a return to a more 90s style "tough on crime" approach

- an "all of the above" energy strategy that embraces and does not demonize the American fossil fuel industry

- a sense that they can "get ahead" economically, especially with housing and healthcare costs taking up painfully large proportions of household budgets

- a foreign policy that is clearly positioned as something in our interests (not on high minded appeals to "the global order" or JUST democracy/freedom), one that pushes our allies to be more obviously muscular, and otherwise avoids the excesses/debacles of the GWOT.

- a president that speaks in their vernacular and comes across as fundamentally authentic

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Ant Breach's avatar

Good piece. Two parallels that struck me from the UK:

1) Coal shows energy really matters over the long-term. The Tories still have not made the kind of gains in former coal mining seats that the Republicans have in Appalachia, because it was Thatcher who crushed the coal industry and broke the back of the National Union of Mineworkers almost fifty years ago and this is still remembered today.

There are these two sides of the equation for energy - almost all working class voters nationally rely on cheap energy consumption for their households and employment, so it matters everywhere. But there are also specific places and regions where cheap energy production is the only route to high wage and high status working class employment. These latter regions are very aware of this and swing on this politically. Both together mean energy has outsize scale, efficiency, and persistence in voter memories as a election policy issue.

2) Iraq was still politically central in 2010s UK too. Corbyn's election to Leader of Labour in 2015 and its turn to the Hard Left was only possible because he was seen to have integrity on Iraq and his opponents were discredited.

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