alt Hacker News> What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you?
I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems. Unfortunately neither party in my country is keen on that idea.
> People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
People thought that once they were told to think that. It's an easy sell to blame everything wrong on the scary dirty foreigners. When people are dissatisfied populism wins, regardless of whether the talking points are rooted in reality. The responsible thing to do is try to get people on board with populist ideas that help rather than hurt.
> I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems.
It's a seductive idea, but it's the attitude of an authoritarian technocrat. However, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, which requires being sensitive to the problems voters have, as voters see them. And that's probably a big part of Trump's actual appeal. My understanding is at his rallies and in his rhetoric, he gave the appearance of being responsive to many concerns that had been willfully ignored or denied for a long time (for instance: free trade dogma, which destroyed a lot of things and insisted people be satisfied with the easily-quantified cheap junk they were being given).
> People thought that once they were told to think that.
Don't pretend your thoughts are any more independent than those of the people you're othering.