Posted on 01/13/2013 1:34:19 PM PST by upchuck
Low info voters are very easy to reach, problem is GOP caters to Wall Street and multi national corporations. LIV everyday see their neighbors lose jobs as plants close to free trade and WTO. LIV everyday see their neighbors take pay cuts as CEO’s and exec get pay increases and bonuses. LIV everyday see their factories close and move to China. LIV everyday see foreign workers come in and take over their high tech jobs and tech transfers to China leading to factory closures. LIV see this everyday and the GOP keeps telling them that Wall Street bankers and CEO’s are patriots/angels and everyone in gov is the devil. If you are on your 99th week of unemployment and the Dems offer extension and GOP offers cutoff, who would you vote for? Gov regs force businesses to move and close is the mantra. LIV agree, but the GOP solution of less regs is even crazier. Banking crisis which lead to the global meltdown caused by US liar loans and toxic mortgage backed securities sold worldwide was caused by SEC/UST inability to enforce existing regs and laws because big Wall Street bankers are treated more like celebrities then citizens of this country. Solve this bread and butter issue and many blue collar Dems will return to the GOP like they did for Reagan. Less taxes and leaving the criminal bankers scott free to repeat the crime in the future does not cut it.
I have another name for “low information” voters. Busy. Really in a world where tax freedom day is mid April, threatening to move into May who the hell has the time to pay attention to whiny politicians arguing with each other about which one gets to screw up our lives for the next couple of years. It’s a wonder anybody bothers to pay attention, it’s not like either party is presenting any solutions, heck they barely present any differences in how they’ll add problems. When one party sends up a guy that foisted a bad socialized medicine law on his state to go against the other party’s guy that foisted a basically identical bad socialized medicine law on the country why should anybody bother to be a high information voter?
Which thus presents the answer. If you want voters to be better informed run candidates worth learning about, present positions that might actually solve problems, and get tax freedom day before spring so maybe the people have a little time to pay attention.
bump
Naw, they just want their free stuff...
Property ownership stopped being an indicator of anything meaningful decades ago.
Rather, passing a simple test, similar to an abbreviated citizenship test, and evidence that the individual actually pays net income taxes (taxes paid exceed non-contributory government benefits,) or forget your "right" to vote. Earn it or stay home!
Plus nationwide voter ID and automatic severe penalties for voter fraud.
... but then it’s too late.
The only way to eliminate LIV’s is to change the two institutions have that have and have had so much sway over them ..the schools and the media. Until we reclaim them, we can hang it up.
Something my daughter used to tell me — when she was in college as the editor of the newspaper — was that while the Democrats were active on campus and were readily available to provide support or answer questions, the Republicans simply didn’t show up — didn’t even TRY with the student population. Perhaps our side just needs to start “showing up” more — on campuses, in schools, at school board meetings, etc.
What IS our presence in these areas? Democrats have simply been OPERATIVE in these areas, for a very, very long time. They have created partnerships with corporations (i.e, Scholastic books) for example ....and thus have been able to punch out literally drivel and other half baked ideas and made it available to the masses for consumption.
MOST parents are good and want the best for their kids ...but the “best” isn’t available.
As for the media, I think it’s about generating media alternatives ... re-educating people on the trule role of the press. ANd just turning off the TV, starving the beast, etc.
I think we need to start with analyzing which messages they are getting, and from WHERE/WHOM they are getting them, and either provide a balance and a CHOICE or an alternative. Maybe we just aren’t providing enough of an alternative.
And who created this leftist media? That's right Public Education
“you collapse Civil Society when you destroy Public Virtue”
BINGO!
“Low-info voters will be a GREAT deal more interested in politics once hard tyranny sinks in, loss of individual property rights becomes the order of the day.”
Im afraid your mistaken, the left will blame theses losses on the right and the low-info voters will buy it just as they bought every other lie the left sold them.
We either find a way to commucate with them or we die by the apathetic ignorance act of their hand.
“Low and no info voters have ZERO business voting.”
I agree, if your not going to seriously study the situation and canadits, your going to do more harm than good.
“Low-informed or ill-informed voters are the biggest threat to freedom and liberty-loving people. My two youngest brothers, my Dad and my one younger sister are in this category and though they’re family I don’t have much to do with them. They and those who vote as they do(Democrats) are destroying America.”
Your going to need to talk to them about this if they really are family.
That being said, people like this have always existed and always will exist. This is precisely why real Democracy’s as apposed to constitutionally finite Republics destroy themselves and oppress their people.
The large share of the population will either be easy fooled out of disinterest and/or preoccupation or they will be corrupted by the bribe of the politician. This happens every time, thou out history.
Our own public education system is not helping matters because the large bulk of the information theses low-info voters do have is generally derived from what little they learned in school.
But the underlining point is most everyone is going to fall for a scam when they never bothers to read the fine print. Unforutnatly it is the reality of life that only a minority of our population has the time or interest to read all the fine print that is now required in the maintenance of the currently massively complex government.
There are conservative people who are low or no info voters. They don’t read the papers, or have TVs. They go to work every day and are not bothered by “politics.” They do have friends and they will listen to those friends when they present a principled argument for a candidate. As long as we keep pretending the low and no info voters are the same as Obama’s zombies, we will miss out on an opportunity to bring more naturally conservative, principled voters to the polls.
well, it might take some time, but they’ll come around, as evidenced by history.
Poland: about 46 years.
Czechoslovakia: started to wake up to the music after 23 years, but went back to sleep for another 23
and so on...
Indeed the Marx movement has been going on for years.
My grandfather had a democrat brother whom he refused to talk to for like 30 odd years. I must admit to having inherited the same feeling in regard to my own brother when he started to show signs of becoming a liberal.
In fact I disagreed with his choice of wife on the related ground that I felt her New York liberal background would eventually bring into my brothers family the same ideology faults that has served compromised the families of New York, (including in my opinion) her own broken family.
I was however perswaded to keep my silence at the wedding in hopes that my pointing out the issue might help enable them to avoid the same ideological pitfalls, that has led to such havoc in her native land.
My bother has fortunately sense moved back into the conservative way of looking at things, and his wife seems not far behind him. I really don’t think either of them have ever cared that much, although sense having their first baby they seemed to become more politically aware & conservative.
As for your “liberal” siblings, having nearly found myself in your place it was my notion at the time to have fun with their nonsense by teasing them relentlessly. (Who says family politics can’t be fun?)
As my brother drifted back to conservatism this didn’t get very far, in this respect I’m actually a bit envious of your situation. I’ve never really had regular access to a national socialist before, at least not one that i didn’t eventually break :( ... (They are fragile things at heart and deep down they sense it too, hence their resistance to debate with knowledgeable Conservative.)
To put it frankly in their minds their attachment to their ideology has been trained to supersede their attachment to reason. Such is the ideological training of a socialist pawn(Marx’s usefully idiots).
Breaking thou their firewall logistically to require an indirect approach, to bypass their defenses and force them to confront their own internal contradictions.
In simple language they can’t realize your talking about politics in talking about the printable that underline that politics. Instead its got to be something monedane like a family game or a sporting event. Then you slowly ease in the logical correlation to political printable underlining a free political system.
A great family example could perhaps be found in the area of choosing family activities, which you would only later relate to choosing collective activity’s on a government level. AFTER they had in their head firmly established their own individual desire not to partispate in everything.
I hope you see where Im going here because once they have decided not to attend every family activity for whatever reason you would only need to quietly suggest that had this family been a government operating under their political system they would have no choice at all. lol Acting as if they don’t in obedience to their ideology(humorously) can help make the evils of the same ideology very much more real and impossible to ignore for them.
But do so quietly with subtly arrangements & choices. They cannot know what you are trying to do until after it is already done, and they can never know how you planned it out, less they attribute it to an arranged phenom.
Thank you for an erudite and well reasoned response. Funny thing is at one time I was raging leftie and my family used to tell me to cool it. Now it’s come full-circle and I’m telling them to cool it and get with the program, to see what it is they put back in office and that the country is collapsing around us. I’m heart broken, for what is happening to America and to my family. In all my years I’ve imagined things as they are now. God help us.
< typo; meant to say ‘’ never imagined things as they are now’’
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.