In my previous post, commenter tres_arboles asks:
It’s eyeglaze stuff to the so-called “low info” voter.
So the question is, how do you assert on behalf of the Yes campaign, “Look folks, these people are willing to (essentially) lie to get you to vote against this thing and it’s not nearly as expensive as they say it is!”?
First of all, I think you have to give voters credit. If you put things in terms relevant to their everyday experience, they’ll get it. I think there are two basic important points that anyone can understand.
- The annual cost per average adult. Very few people can actually effectively analyze if $10 billion (or $100 billion, for that matter) is good value for what we’re getting, nor what the impact of that sum on the economy is. They do know how to process a figure that says how much it will cost them, or at least an average family. So stick with numbers that mean something.
- When the opposition makes “average family” claims, take them to their logical conclusion, as I’ve done with the $60,000 figure. Leaving aside second order effects, sales taxes aren’t rocket science. For a 0.5% sales tax increase, to pay a certain amount in taxes you have to spend two hundred times that in the stores. If they’re going to use 2053 dollars in their tax estimates, we should use 2053 dollars to discuss the incomes of the people that will be paying those taxes.
Also, I think it’s important to remain focused on benefits as well as costs. While it’s important to debunk falsehoods, if we turn this debate into merely one of “how bad are taxes going to be?” we’re going to lose. People are going to get something for their money, and that’s why we’re all here fighting for it.
I don’t think an opposition group that runs afoul of the public disclosure commission and admits to mis-representing its endorsements really cares about telling the truth.
The Yes campaign is trying to debunk these lies. Does this entry give a good response to low info voters?
I hope in making a comment like that I am not giving the impression that I take my neighbors lightly or that I am one of those “elitists” to use the unfortunate campaign politics vernacular. I AM concerned that these types of representations by the “No” campaigns get reported uncritically by the local media (or that they get reported at all) and become part of the daily narrative around office water coolers and super market aisles. It’s a low-brow strategy (ignoring the facts and spouting things that sound “bad” to get a voter response) but one that has shown to be effective, witness the destruction of the monorail project or the recent “lipstick on a pig” flap in presidential politics.
David