TALKING PAST EACH OTHER — Entering the final week before the election, the vibes for Democrats aren’t great — and many in the party are at a loss over how to influence a seemingly calcified electorate. Polls across the swing states are tightening for Trump. Republican Senate candidates are gaining on their opponents. And over and over, Democrats lament that nothing they do seems to get through to Trump-curious voters. Nothing “moves the needle,” as Washington insiders like to say. Nowhere is this more frustrating to Democrats than on the economy. To Biden/Harris alums, it should be a selling point. Inflation is down, manufacturing jobs are up, and the U.S. economy is the envy of the world — at least to the chattering classes in Washington and abroad. Union members ostensibly should be the most appreciative. The Biden-Harris administration has put them the center of U.S. economic policy in a deliberate attempt to avoid the Blue Wall collapse that doomed even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. The White House has expanded Trump’s tariffs, passed historic industrial policies, and Biden even joined a UAW picket line. Major unions from the Teamsters to the Autoworkers won record contracts under his watch. Shouldn’t Democrats be rewarded for that at the ballot box? Perhaps not. Working-class support for Harris in the polls remains weak, particularly among “manual workers” — weaker than for Biden or Hillary Clinton. The Teamsters and firefighters unions declined to endorse her. And on the ground, union members who are pounding the pavement for Democrats lament that their Trump-supporting colleagues are “not persuadable,” as they told POLITICO Nightly this week. It’s a troublingly common predicament for Democrats. Even before Biden dropped out, factory workers in Wisconsin who benefited directly from his industrial policies — and got hefty raises this year themselves — said they still perceived the economy as bad, and were leaning toward Trump . And what of Trump’s threats to rescind that law? They didn’t believe he’d do it, despite his explicit statements of disdain toward the law. So what’s going on here? Are these voters falling prey to the culture wars, tribalized politics and voting against their economic interest? Are they simply oblivious of the policies that Democrats have tailored to win their support? Some observers see a deeper dynamic: voter reaction to perceived economic anxiety and precarity, the result of which makes people less credulous of official facts and more conspiracy-prone. “Supporters for right wing populists may not be objectively [economically] worse off on average, but they display what the psychologists call relative deprivation — which is that they feel relative to others … that they are being left behind in some way,” said sociologist William Davies, who studies the impact of emotion on politics. “This causes status anxiety.” The economic anxiety divide between the parties appears to be borne out in data. September polling showed that a majority of Trump swing-state voters say their own financial position worsened in the last year, while Harris voters were much more likely to say their situation stayed the same or improved. There were similar results when voters were asked if they considered their financial situation as “secure,” or if they expected it to get better or worse over the next year. Democrats, in a historical flip, are now becoming the party of the economically comfortable, while Republicans are much more nervous about their finances — perhaps a reflection of the inversion of the traditional coalitions. Trump and Vance have seized on this anxiety to spread misinformation on a number of fronts — about immigrants, electric vehicles, unemployment numbers, the mainstream media and more. Davies says those emotional appeals can motivate an already anxious population much more than a facts-first approach to political persuasion. The emotional appeals “establish a sense of solidarity among [Trump] supporters” that they — and their perceived truths — “have no legitimate means of … being represented through the media or through mainstream institutions,” said Davies. “Therefore, [political statements] have to circumvent reason altogether — and be expressed through outbursts of anguish, really, that things are not ok.” That state of elevated anxiety — or a “nervous state,” the title of Davies’ 2018 book on emotion in contemporary politics — makes it much easier for conspiracy theories and unfounded narratives to gain traction. That’s true whether it’s rumors about Haitian immigrants, Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings, or the Biden administration cooking the unemployment numbers — all topics that Trump voters in Michigan brought up last month in conversations on the campaign trail. Conversely, facts and figures — particularly presented by establishment media and politicians — are more questionable than ever. Social media, and its filtering of viewers toward content that affirms their biases and inflames their emotions, only pours fuel on the fire. The result is “everybody has this slightly knowing attitude, which is, well I’m suspicious of all of it.” Davies said, “which is precisely what the kind of agenda that [former Trump adviser Steve] Bannon would want to encourage.” In that high anxiety environment, Davies says, people are more susceptible to emotional appeals, and often grab on to narratives that “feel right” even when they aren’t completely borne out by the facts. The Republicans seem to realize this — hence, JD Vance’s comment in September saying that he could “create stories” about Haitian migrants because they speak to a larger truth. That’s a difference in type from previous forms of misinformation, Davies said — an assertion that “‘yes, we are lying, but we are justified in doing so for the following reasons,’ is an audacious move.” Whether the move works will largely depend on Democrats’ effectiveness in countering the misinformation. In the immediate term, Democrats largely argue they can do that by doubling down on their facts-first approach. In response to reporting on non-persuadable Trump voters, the UAW this week released new polling that they said shows union members who are contacted by fellow UAW members about the election overwhelmingly support Harris, 62-33 percent. And Michael Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, has made a similar argument about immigration — pointing out that support for mass deportation among Latinos collapses when voters are explained exactly what Trump’s plans could entail. That may be true, but it’s a bit late in the game for voter education, and the Harris campaign’s message hasn’t exactly been solely focused on the economy or immigration. After hitting Trump and Vance over manufacturing a few times in the past few weeks, Harris again reverted to warnings about Trump’s threats to democracy this week in Michigan — a subject that, while ominous, ranks much lower than the economy with swing state voters. And even if Democrats can break through GOP misinformation — economic and otherwise — in this cycle, researchers warn that the problem of competing realities isn’t going away. In fact, it’s only likely to get worse. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at gbade@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @GavinBade.
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