Can Harris Convert Trump’s Core Audience?

Kamala Harris wants to be the president for all the people, but there is a group she is not talking to…literally.

Her words go over their heads.

This is vital to address, because it goes beyond an election-day win; she needs to engage these people for years to come.

“The biggest single, best predictor of how someone’s going to vote in American politics now is education level,”  stated Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik.

“That is now the new fault line in American politics.”  

Sosnik has a reputation for deep-dive political meaning.  He says that the candidate who can cross the “diploma divide” will win.

Both candidates are struggling to do just that.  Harris is saying that a four-year college degree should not be a requirement for economic success; she has pledged to have government look at a full array of employees when she is president.  Trump posed slinging French fries in a closed-for-the-occasion McDonalds.

As a more permanent lever, though, Trump speaks at the lowest grade level with the smallest vocabulary of any president in modern times, according to an analysis of 1,000+ transcripts.

The oddly low ranking for Obama – despite his for soaring rhetoric – comes from his intentionally folksy and accessible use of language.

People whose circumstances have put them in education levels that leave them behind, form the group of voters that is now the modern Republican Party base.

Two-thirds of the nation have not completed college.  Republicans increasingly dominate in party affiliation among White non-college voters, who continue to make up a majority (57%) of all GOP voters.  Working-class Whites have been drifting to the political right.  Trump gets the support of about two-thirds of White voters.  Most of them live in rural areas – hence the big Democratic vacuum in the mid-West.

People in cities are more often educated. They take jobs that require higher education - that are usually in cities. People move to the cities, in fact, because it’s where the jobs are that they want.

There, people who live in those urban environments are more exposed to different cultures, people, and experiences.

People who don’t live in cities are more isolated, more ignorant of other cultures and peoples, and have fewer view-expanding experiences.

They reject the idea of exploring new things and are unfriendly to innovation and uncertainty. It’s a fear of knowing what they don’t know.

The majority of the American people have a low reading level. Work environments tend to use 3rd grade language, because that’s the majority of peoples’ reading comprehension.

Coincidentally, that’s how Trump talks.

It’s not because Trump is dumbing his words down to appeal to the uneducated people. It’s because that’s his nature, and it’s why uneducated people resonated with him. They just “understand” him.

Trump has always had poor reviews from people who knew him growing up; he has not been the sharpest knife in the drawer.  One of his professors at Wharton College – the late Dr. William Kelly -  called Trump the dumbest student ever.  His fellow classmates said he rarely came to class and was always unprepared.

If you are going to inherit a billion dollars what’s the point of studying, I guess.

I’ll give Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune credit for this line: he says that “nothing compares to his most prominent, crippling and incurable defect: He’s dimmer than a 5-watt bulb.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reported to have called the president a “moron”.   Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” says Trump had “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”  A Security Department official, Miles Taylor, tells of how he had to dumb down security briefings to a first grade level.  His own colleague Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.”

It would be arguable whether he is bright enough to make connections between his conduct and its consequences. He sends out tweets that flagrantly contradict what he said earlier.  He wanted people to inject Clorox into their veins to cure Covid.

Trump reacts furiously to insinuations that he is dumb.  When challenged, he has said “I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

And I can tell you that Trump will never take up his own challenge. He may be uneducated, but he’s not suicidally stupid.

None of this implies that the people who vote for him are stupid either.  But the key still lies in something Mark Twain once said: "Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."  It's not about appearing smart, it's about effectively communicating with your audience. 

George Bush was evidently incredibly smart and used 50-cent words because it helped him relate more with uneducated voters despite being a Harvard graduate.

But they listen to Trump and they like what they hear.

While people with an education (i.e. high diction) listen to him, they tend to think he sounds like he uses “word salad” and doesn’t really say anything of substance.

What he actually does is repeat his talking points again and again until they become the only narrative.  He continually interrupts himself on digressions that keep listeners on their toes, stretching to follow the thread of his thought.

His accusation that immigrants in Springfield were eating cats and dogs, for example, was a highly successful ploy; it lit up the headlines for days and drew attention away from his debate performance against Harris.  I am sure Harris’ folks were aware of what he was doing but they couldn’t catch that image and put it back in its pen.  Trump won.  With ten cent words.

He uses phrases that are like red-hot pokers in the brain: so ridiculous that they are memorable.  They have an after-glow that stays with you, once the lie has been exposed.  Calling Harris “retarded” and a “sh*t” Vice President are not eloquent phrases but they get his job done.

I am sure that he does these things deliberately, based on years of experience with language as a weapon.  He may not even be aware of what he is doing.  But I would argue that he is fully aware; as he says: "I love the poorly educated".

But he speaks at a grade level his followers understand.  If he spoke about good ideas at that grade level, it would be a better world.

But it’s easier for him to avoid the hard job of learning, and just speak from what he (doesn’t) know.

His audience is primed with resentment against the more educated, and ready to grant him priority access to their brains.

There is a huge resentment in the work force. For every dollar of wealth in a ‘college household’, a household headed by a high school graduate has 22 cents.

College graduates hold about three-quarters of the wealth in the US, but account for only about 40% of the population.

Attempts by politicians to reach these less-educated citizens have often met with misunderstanding. Former Presidents Obama, Clinton and Biden have focused much of their economic rhetoric on industrial and construction employment, even though these sectors only make up 20% of all jobs (the rest are in the services sector).

Most politicians lack the language to explain the reality that most jobs are service jobs. Because of this, it is hardly surprising they also lack good ideas to address unequal wages and poor working conditions within the services sector.

They also do not have the background to understand that the Republican policies that they are urged to support, are killing their chances of getting ahead.  States that have resisted Medicaid, for example, are all dominated by Republican legislatures.  The people are told by their politicians that they are fighting hard to resist socialist.  None of them mentions that politicians use that very system themselves.

In places without Medicaid, hospitals close.  The ability to attract new people and investment dies.

With half the population reading at a grade seven level or below, appeals by Ms. Harris that are made in eloquent phrases at much higher levels are leaving them behind.  They literally do not understand what she means.  Then, as their condition worsens, the resentment factor notches up.

One of the worst things that social media technology has done has been to make a huge sector of the population think like it is “rural”.  Billionaires have bought up major news networks and they are absolutely pulling for Trump.  This is why rural people hear very little about his cognitive decline but it was breaking news every hour when it was Biden who was ‘old’.

Of course, being wealthy does not anoint one with wisdom.  The world’s richest man is giving gobs of money to the Republican cause, and not making any friends among the regulators who are now more determined that ever to bring him down when Harris get elected.  That’s a story for another time.

Rural people are so insulated from the world that everything is absolutely terrifying. They vote for people like Trump who they feel give them the simplest path to “security”.  They are afraid of Mexicans and Blacks and probably even Canadians (OK – bit of a stretch).

They resemble the assemblies that Carl Sagan once wrote about when he feared for the ‘dumbing down’ of America, at a time when:  “no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

Instead of adopting well documented methods of instruction that can dramatically raise the reading levels of low achieving students, schools are instead moving to teach to the lowest possible denominator.

If we are not striving to push ourselves ahead with higher vocabularies and knowledge, our overall intelligence will drop.  Our average IQ scores have decreased in three out of four cognitive measures.

We have an outdated and dumbed-down approach to learning and teaching. 

The only IQ measure to increase was 3D rotation (spatial reasoning), which makes sense if a youngster’s greatest challenge comes from video gaming.

Ultimately, this is the challenge facing America:  make the educational system the finest in the world, like it was in the 1920’s and ‘30’s with the world’s first imposition of Income Tax-funded schools.

Will Kamala Harris lose because she is not talking the language of a large section of voters?

I doubt it…I think she has the momentum to carry through.

But if she wants to preside over a truly unified nation, she has to do a “Mark Twain”: she has to learn to use 50-cent words.

It is, of course, a pity that America has not used its time and money to raise the literacy and knowledge levels of all of its citizens.  It’s not too late to start.

Perhaps if VP Harris -  soon to be President Harris  - makes this a priority, she can have her next campaign in four years using terms she is comfortable with…terms that Donald would not understand.

He would push back against literacy education, of course.  You can almost hear him rant: “Nobody’s done more for words than I have. Ask anyone! I use the best words, and I use them better than anybody else. Big, beautiful words. Tremendous words!”

How about words like “You’re fired!”, Donald?

Best words ever.