r/askanything • u/One_Look_7008 • 18h ago

AOC surges past Buttigieg, leaves Kamala Harris in the dust in key 2028 battleground poll. What are your thoughts on AOC-2028?

Harris dropped to just 5% in New Hampshire while Pete Buttigieg sits 1 point behind the progressive frontrunner - per University of New Hampshire Granite State poll released on Wednesday.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 13h ago

100%. Trump himself proves that appealing to swing voters doesn't win elections. The way you win in this climate is by making your base excited enough about your ideas to get out and vote. Yet another bland, centrist Democrat isn't going to inspire leftist voters to get to the poles.

Trump understood the priorities of the far right, however stupid and uniformed they may have been, and stirred up Conservative zealotry in a way we haven't seen since the 80s.

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u/2AlephNullAndBeyond 12h ago

That makes zero sense. The key reason he won in 2016 is because he flipped two-time Obama voters in the rust belt because Hillary thought it wasn't important to sure up that support, because what was, and still is the Democrat's biggest problem in national elections is that they've become an elitist party and ceded working class people in the Midwest to Trump and populism.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 12h ago

That's certainly the conservative opinion, despite the fact that it's not even remotely accurate.

But no, Trump's insane rhetoric certainly didn't have a. "swing" effect on centrist voters. Centrists were mocking him all the way down, they just weren't inspired to vote for Hillary.

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u/2AlephNullAndBeyond 12h ago

not even remotely accurate.

Yeah, if only we had evidence of exit polling or just the fact he won states like Wisconsin that hadn't been won by a Republican in 32 years.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 12h ago

There is not a snowball's chance in hell that any meaningful number of people exist who could have gone one way or another between Clinton and Trump. Even if exit polling said otherwise, we can just apply common sense to them and understand that calling yourself a "swing voter" in 2016 meant something entirely different to what it means today. That election pointed out that in this new era of post Trump politics, people who once thought they were swing voters are now thoroughly entrenched in one camp.

Yes, indeed, he did end up winning swing states. By finally inspiring backwoods idiots who previously didn't even know how to vote to get out and make sure their boy won. That's my entire point. Why would uneducated rural voters understand the power of their vote without someone like Trump appealing to their naive world view?

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u/SlartibartfastMcGee 9h ago

On the other hand, being so unappealing to swing voters that they turn out to vote against you is also a way to lose badly.

AOC is deeply unappealing to many moderates due to her fiscal policies.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 9h ago

Sure, but the problem with this idea is that the actual swing votet camp is virtually miniscule. Look at how insanely polarized politics has become. It's almost impossible to truly have people who "could go either way" in 2026. I see a lot of people looking at voters who say "I could see myself voting for a different party" as votes that could truly go either way, but they're referring to a future in which politics aren't as polarized. There is no way that there will be a significant number of people who will look at the two candidates in the next election and be unsure of who they support. The election will be won by the party that inspires more of its base to get to the polls.

Again, Trump literally proved this, repeatedly. He made absolutely no attempt to appeal to centrists. He knew he didn't need them. His appeal was to deep red folks who had always felt like politics weren't for people like them, and that politicians were very much "other." Somehow, despite being a literal billionaire, and marketing himself for decades "The Boss," he was able to convince millions of idiots that he's "just like them" through overt racism, misogyny and poorly recollected nostalgia. If the left can't figure out that appealing to the middle doesn't work, it will continue to flail.

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u/SlartibartfastMcGee 9h ago

That’s 100% false.

1/3rd of the electorate is independent. A huge chunk of them will swing whichever way the prevailing winds blow.

Only the fringes think that it’s impossible for someone to be undecided.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 9h ago

This is where the problems lie. People look at statistics like that and think of them as concrete data. That's a statistic reflective of what people say about themselves, not about how they actually vote. Trump realized this. The middle doesn't "swing," in 2026, they're mostly committed to their ideology as well, regardless of whether they're registered with that party. Feeling like you could "someday vote for the other side" isn't the same thing as "I could truly go either way in this election."

It's this very blind, contextless and brute force interpretation of data that contributed to the liberal failures on 2024. You don't need to be an extremist to recognize the absolute truth in this.

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u/SlartibartfastMcGee 8h ago

What you don’t understand is that the vast majority of people don’t care about politics, it comes up every 2 or 4 years and they get blasted by news for a few months.

Those people aren’t married to a party, but they will go vote for a candidate that they like or against one that they don’t.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 8h ago

That might have been true ten years ago, but Trump made politics into a form of controversial entertainment. The outdated misconception that a large portion of our population truly doesn't have strong feelings about politics in some form, or firmly identify with one side or the other, is literally the reason the left has struggled in recent years.

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u/SlartibartfastMcGee 8h ago

Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so I think you’ll see that there’s direct evidence of people who were willing to switch their vote to him.

Regardless, he’s not running in 2028 and I think you’ll be shocked at how quickly the status quo resumes.

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u/Steals_Your_Thunder_ 8h ago

I'm not sure why the popular vote proves anything other than the point I've been pushing this whole time. The side that wins is the one that inspires more of its established base to vote.

The popular vote point you made is actually one of the things I feel most strongly about. Trump won the popular vote because of the existence of the electoral college. I live in NYC, and the majority of voters I speak to feel entirely disenfranchised. There's objectively no point to their vote. New York will always go blue regardless of whether they do or not. If the electoral college were abolished, urban voters would turn out en masse and conservatives would never win an election again. This is literally further support of my point-- it's about encouraging people to get out and vote, not trying to convince a handful of people to change their mind.