Ever notice that some issues – vaccine skepticism, for example – don’t follow our normal political left-right axis of orientation? Eric Oliver did, and after studying the issue he came to the conclusion that America’s political divide is not ideological but psychological.
If you believe in UFOs or ESP or even general sense that there is a God who will respond to your prayers, you’re far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than not. Sort of across the board. And what we also found was that people who believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to believe in a host of other kinds of things.
Like, for example, natural medicines. Homeopathy. They tended to be more nationalistic in their orientations. They were a lot more populist in their orientations, just generally mistrustful of elites and sort of established groups. They often tended to be wary of foreigners and more xenophobic.
And so we saw this kind of interesting constellation that seemed to defy normal ideology and it didn’t necessarily align with race or even partisanship yet. It was this factor that really explained a lot of how people are understanding the world. And so we’re in the process of doing all this research, this is 2014, 2015. We’re fielding survey after survey to kind of generate all these data and who appears on the political horizon, but Donald Trump and he is emblematic of a lot of the things that we’re studying. And what we came to realize was that … American politics weren’t simply divided by ideology or partisanship or race, but there was another dimension.
And we ended up labeling this dimension kind of intuitionism. And most people are in the middle [of the scale] on this, but you can imagine the intuitionism dimension is anchored on two poles. On one side are people we call rationalist, and those are people who are products of the enlightenment. They believe in science, reason, logical deduction, empirical fact. And on the other end of this spectrum are people we call intuitionists and they believe in gut feelings … they’re very susceptible to feeling as a guide to understanding the world as opposed to say, for example, maybe thinking.
Lots of people have ideas on how Democrats should connect with disinterested working-class voters, but few have the feet-on-the-ground experience of Josh Weil, the former public school teacher who ran in the special election in April to replace Florida Rep. Mike Waltz. He knocked on thousands of doors, hoping to run on an education-centered platform, but he recalculated quickly based on his novel strategy listening to what voters told him. He’s running for Senate now, and he’s got lessons he thinks can be applied across America.
1. When people are struggling, it’s not medicare for all, it’s medicare for YOU.
The vast, VAST majority of voters aren’t reading the news like you and me. They don’t see a meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans, and they probably haven’t heard of most of them. They are constantly trying to make it through the day. Nearly 60% of Floridians are living dangerously close to the poverty line. They don’t have time to educate themselves on the hot button issue of the day, and are just trying to keep it together. Saying that you want their tax dollars to help other people just isn’t going to work. Empathy is a luxury when survival is daily. You have to tell them how you are going to help THEM. It’s not “improve education”, it’s pay your kids teachers more so your kids can get into better colleges. It’s not infrastructure and public transportation it’s less time in traffic FOR YOU.
That simple switch really makes all the difference, for both checked out Democrats and Independents/Republicans.They want to know: how are you going to make my life better. It’s not selfish, it’s survival. Trump did it, and he didn’t even know what the word groceries means. But there sure were billboards on the interstate that said “cheaper groceries”. Don’t talk policy, talk about their lives and how you are going to change it.
2. People think all politicians are evil, and we can’t try to out-purity the GOP.
My opponent was one of the most hated republican elected officials in Florida. In a 7-11 I got approached by members of local legislative staff who told me that they didn’t like him, and were voting for me. Anything bad you’ve seen come out of FL in the last 6 years, he’s probably been a part of it. We ran ads to tell them exactly what kind of person he was. They ran ads telling them about my past. They tuned out. Politics as usual. Voters assume that if there’s not something bad in a candidates past, it just hasn’t come out yet, and that all politicians are corrupt slimeballs. Which means we can’t sound like politicians, we need to sound like well, real people.
A medical statistic that you might have been subconsciously aware of without registering it as a fact: Fatal heart attacks have become increasingly rare. They’ve dropped 90 percent since 1970, but of course it’s not all good news.
In 1970, someone over the age of 65 hospitalized for a heart attack in the United States had about a 60% chance of leaving the hospital alive. Today, the survival rate is over 90%, with even better outcomes for younger patients.
Those numbers have contributed to a remarkable decrease in the likelihood of dying from any type of heart disease over the last 50 years, according to a new study of heart disease mortality led by Stanford Medicine researchers. In 1970, 41% of all deaths were attributed to ailments of the heart; in 2022, that statistic had dropped to 24% of all deaths.
Most strikingly, the proportion of deaths from acute myocardial infarctions — commonly known as heart attacks — fell nearly 90% during that period.
The decrease is a testament to the leaps and bounds made in our ability to manage and prevent heart attacks, from bystander CPR to artery-opening stents and cholesterol-lowering statins, as well as public health measures that have drastically cut tobacco smoking.
But the researchers also found that more Americans now die from other types of heart disease, including heart failure, hypertensive heart disease and arrhythmias. More deaths from chronic heart conditions are, in part, the trade-off from more patients living beyond events like heart attacks.
An asteroid discovered late last year briefly raised worries that it was on a collision course with Earth. More observations downplayed the possibility, but the Moon is a different story. The chances it will be hit aren’t great, but they’re not zero, either.
On the evening of December 22, 2032, a modest-sized asteroid called 2024 YR4 could potentially slam into the Moon, and the collision could produce a meteor shower unlike anything seen in living memory. The rocks lighting up our skies wouldn’t be space debris from a distant comet or asteroid, but fragments of the Moon itself — blasted free by a cosmic bullet traveling 13 kilometers per second. Vital space satellites and even astronauts onboard the International Space Station may be at risk.
The asteroid is about 60 meters across, roughly the size of a sports arena. It was first flagged by astronomers earlier this year when it briefly raised alarm for its 3% chance of striking Earth. That risk has since dropped to nearly zero. But the Moon, Earth’s closest celestial companion, is still in the crosshairs, with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope bumping the odds of a lunar strike to 4.3%.
Have a safe, well-hydrated Sunday.