This is one case where I think it's very fair to make a Pres-Trump v. Mayor Ford comparison. /1
/2 Amid the 2014 Toronto elxn, when I was with @Soknacki2014, a few volunteers described trying to persuade Ford voters.
/3 I had to advise everyone to just stop & walk away the moment they found out Voter X was a Ford fan. The problem..
/4 - as with Trump voters, was a widespread, cult-like suspension of reality. They'd tell you he had built a subway in Scarborough -
/5 - and when you pointed out that construction hadn't even started yet, it didn't matter. Specific broken promises: didn't matter.
/6 Many told canvassers + media the crack story was a lie - but once Ford admitted it, they said it didn't matter (some *still* said it was a lie)
/7 The total loyalty simply based on the notion of shared anger - "he's sticking it to THEM" - was enough to literally turn off brains.
/8 And anyone who worked that election knows that plenty of brains were lost that way. The stereotype of Ford Nation, like camp Trump -
/9 - as uneducated or low income drones was completely wrong; we hit Ford Fans of many age, gender, income & education levels.
/10 So we bypassed them, completely. And the easy reality was seen in Virginia on Tuesday: the only way for Dems & anti-Trump GOP to win -
/11 - elections against this phenomenon is to swamp it with higher turnouts. But in the long term, we really need psych + polici to -
/12 - study these movements like the cults they became, and to test whether approaches used to break cults can do work *politically.*
/13 Because that's what we are dealing with on the voter end of this crisis, and it's time to approach it from both ends accordingly.