Max Norton
Writing and Culture
Fall 2020
In the first presidential debate, Trump attacked his opposing viewpoints. The only issue? They weren’t Biden’s. With the current state of American politics, radicalized views are seen as the standard for their respective political parties. But as represented by the countless registered republicans likely casting their votes for Biden this November, and Biden’s repeated opposition to more radical policy, this is not the case.
Trump and Pence do this to present the Biden campaign in a bad light, trying to convince voters they are radical and unreasonable. Fish claims that “Political Gurus” are “Convinced that an audience’s attention span lasts only a few seconds.” What he means by this is that the truth is unimportant in this matter and that politicians say things to sway voters with the expectation that they won’t actually fact check them. The more you stick to your talking points, the more the argument becomes about those talking points and the way you present them then the actual empirical content of those talking points. It’s not about what’s better or worse, what’s right or wrong. It’s about who structures the better argument.
The reason they can do this is because in most cases people aren’t going to change their political stances. People have been content with their views for a lifetime, and those views are usually rooted in where they grew up or who they were raised by. If one is raised by conservatives in rural Alabama, they almost always won’t have the same political views as a person raised by progressives in Vermont. The only reason people change their minds is new information, not a new presentation of the information they already know.
“The more practiced you become in rehearsing the talking points on your side, the less likely it is that persuasion will occur, that you will change your mind. A change of mind requires that you hear something new and are provoked by it to say (if only to yourself), “I never thought of that.” But you, like your opponent, have already thought of everything, have heard it all.” (Fish)
What Fish presents as a “change of mind” doesn’t occur because of an internal revelation, it occurs because a person is exposed to something new. Thus, all a person needs to be convinced to vote for a political candidate is that they oppose their already existent views.
As a result of this, the American public has gravitated toward electing officials based off of their promises and not their actions. It almost seems like the American political system is a 4 party one rather than a 2 party one. On the left we have democrats and democratic socialists, and on the right, we have republicans and the platform Trump caters to. The outer two go into elections decided on their candidate. The inner two are fair game, and thus the target audience of the politicians. Whoever can convince them that they are less extreme wins the vote.
American presidential elections, such as this ongoing one, are decided by a handful of states at most. Thus, it’s not about gaining America’s vote, it’s about gaining Florida’s vote. Texas’ vote. Pennsylvania’s vote. Candidates appeal to certain key demographics, not the US as a whole. This past presidential election, the major factor in Biden swinging the election was taking back the “rust belt” states that won the election for Trump in 2016. The Biden campaign focused heavily on the demographic of the blue-collar middle-class worker that could relate to Biden, and this was key in securing his victory. Political polarization is major, but it is not unsolvable if you have the right argument.
