[shimman]

Spoken like someone who has done zero canvassing or organizing of any kind. You ask two voters on both sides of the spectrum and they'll make the same argument you are.

Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy.

The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said

> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...]

Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...".

But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".

[lanstin]

I guess we can see how subtle a skill good messaging is - one can so easily come across as a moralistic busy body if one doesn't listen and connect before trying to persuade.

The suggestion wasn't overt, it was kind of implicity - telling people that they don't know their own self interest, even when they manifestly don't, is not very ahh "politic" :)

[jjk166]

It takes a special kind of mind to emphasize the importance of listening while simultaneously disregarding what someone actually says.

[bombcar]

And most of those boil down to “voting for X decreases the things I care about increases the things I don’t care about; therefore those who care about those things are voting insane.”

It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Voting "insane" is very different from voting "selfish".

Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc).

But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all.

It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).

[prewett]

In a republic, where you vote for people to represent you, not to implement your wishes, voting for a candidate you believe will make "good" decisions (even if you disagree with some of them), is actually how the system was supposed to behave. "Good" might mean "the things I want / agree with", but it might also mean "benefits the public interest, even if I don't want / disagree with it".

[PaulDavisThe1st]

What do you consider "representing me" to mean?

And sure, people may vote for a candidate (implicitly, for a policy) that benefits society as a whole even if it negatively impacts them. It does stretch credibility, however, to try to make the case this is what is happening when people earning median incomes or below vote for candidates who cut taxes on the wealthiest in a society, as well as reducing the share of GDP going to labor, and claiming "well, those folks just think this candidate is doing a good job on <cultural issue>". I'm not suggesting it is impossible that this happens sometimes, but across the entirety of working class Republican voters (for example) ... I find it hard to believe.