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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 2m

“There’s a magic class of voters who only showed up in 2024 and who care only about inflation even though inflation had been pretty low for almost two years and all of this is kind of a one-off thing that fails to match any previous trend” is just, like, not a very good explanation

Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 5m

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 7m

Like your argument here is literally “post hoc, ergo, propter hoc” and my point is that literally everything else you’d expect to see if inflation caused the election doesn’t seem to have happened

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 8m

2022 was actually the election closest to the shock, how did that one go

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 10m

At the end of the day liberals always seem very eager to collapse POLITICAL behavior - which is about social interactions, information, and belief - into POLICY explanations. Because then you can win at politics by being good at policy, which we believe we are. It doesn’t work like that, sadly.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 12m

This is all really a subvariant of deliverism. Deliverism says “fix policy problems and people will vote for you.” But it didn’t work because voters believed a bunch of lies about fake problems. So now people are arguing “Well, the reason voters believed those lies was because of policy problems.”

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 14m

See, with all due respect, this is the exact same thing I’m complaining about! “People are only misinformed because of the structural economic factors that allow them to be misinformed.” I dunno, what if they’re just wrong because they’re being lied to a lot?

Tim (Exia) Ross @exiaross.bsky.social · 17m

that's why the "illegals & healthcare" narrative is so sticky, bc even though it's not true, what is true is that people aren't getting enough benefits and are getting those benefits cut, so they want someone, anyone to blame bc the causes are abstract/unclear to them.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 19m

I think the reason it FEELS like it’s a complicated explanation is that we liberals have thoroughly cooked our brains on postgraduate seminars and it seems obvious to us that there must be some underlying political economy explanation for vote choice. But that itself is a complex, contestable claim!

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 22m

I’m not trying to go after this guy specifically because lots of smart people fall into this trap for some reason, but “they’re just wrong, because they were misinformed” is literally the simplest possible explanation for bewildering voter behavior.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 23m

When people claim to be voting based on some problem that doesn’t exist, be it food price inflation, crime increases, or immigrant caravans, “they’re lying and/or misinformed” IS the most parsimonious explanation.

“They’re expressing sublimated anger over something else” is much more convoluted.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 36m

You’re the one inventing a rationale no one said! People weren’t up in arms about interest rates, you just are imputing that they were because they were mad about food prices and interest rates seems kinda like a similar thing

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 57m

This is entirely correct. If Platner is all that - and I’ve been assured he is - he’ll just win the primary! It’s fine! Primaries are important!

Lakshya Jain @lakshya.splitticket.org · 1h

Graham Platner is a very high-ceiling candidate in Maine with a lot of potential. He's also extremely untested and while he looks promising for Democrats, it's pretty important to have a primary here to see if there are any red flags that bubble up.

Just let it go and log off.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

It’s question-begging in the formal sense: you’ve started with the premise that people are mad about inflation and then went looking for the specific kind of inflation they could reasonably be mad about. But what if they’re just mad without a reasonable explanation?

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

“Because people complained about food prices when food prices were stable but car prices were high, we can presume that they actually meant to complain about car prices” is not really sound logic. Another, better explanation is that people can be mad about problems that aren’t real.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

This kind of analysis tells us more about our intellectual class than it does about politics. It tells us that we’re desperate to reduce human social behavior to a regression analysis, where we can predict what will happen if we change X quantifiable input by Y amount. But it doesn’t work.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

“If you look at interest rates…”

“If you look at the first derivative of change in real disposable income…”

“If you look at food prices time-lagged eighteen months…”

Please stop. This is terrible social science. At bare minimum extend your explanation a few cycles and see if it works, it won’t.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

“I have found the economic trend that mechanistically predicts vote shift” - I’m sorry but this doesn’t work, it’s not how humans work, at best you’re curve-fitting and it’ll last one cycle, and more likely you’re curve-fitting badly and it doesn’t even really predict the cycle you say it predicts

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

Those aren’t the items people complained about the most

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

That makes no sense, what evidence do you have that people were mad about this? Who was complaining about interest rates

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

How they form those ideas and beliefs is incredibly complicated, often irrational, and driven more by social interactions than observable reality, logic or reason. But it is the ideas and beliefs that propel people, not their bank account or some underlying consumerist instinct

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

This is absolutely wrong, though. Human beings have beliefs and ideas. They are not rational welfare maximizers who decide what to believe based on what increases their ability to consume

Tyler Harris @tylerharris75.bsky.social · 1h

I think most voters are selfish little piggies with no inner life

a man in a yellow jacket is waving his hand

ALT: a man in a yellow jacket is waving his hand

media.tenor.com

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

We cannot fight the far right until we acknowledge that the spread of ideas and beliefs is what drives voter behavior and other political decisions, and that we have created an information environment that is extraordinarily favorable to the far right

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

The groups that shifted most towards Trump were not the groups hardest hit by inflation. Worldwide, the thing that seems most consistently linked to extremist, anti-institutional politics is not any set of economic conditions but SOCIAL MEDIA AND IMMERSION IN A DIGITAL INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

People were (and remain) mad about inflation while inflation was low. The “2024 anti-incumbency wave” that was supposedly caused by inflation is STILL GOING ON, with extremist and far-right parties stronger than ever. And these politics were less in evidence in 2022 when inflation was peaking.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 1h

“Inflation caused 2024” is a comfortable and appealing explanation for a lot of people - it reinforces their patronizing sense that most voters are selfish little piggies with no inner life, it promises that things will be back to normal next time - but there’s really not any evidence of it

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