Who is Ford Nation?

One interesting result from the poll is that Ford supporters who were Ontario Liberal voters in the 2014 election (21%) are in a statistical tie with NDP voters (20%) in the 2014 election, indicating both parties are suffering equal losses to Ford.

Interestingly, only 49% of 2014 PC voters identify themselves as part of or fans of Ford nation, suggesting there is a significant percentage of voters who potentially be pulled away from voting PC again.

I do not see how this validates NDP voters who vote Ford are either idiots or any more idiots than Liberal voters. They look at the world through a different prism than you do. Disrespecting them is never going to win them over to your side. 

All human beings filter the new information that they receive through their already existing belief systems, espeically political ones as the following article notes: 

people are more likely to be convinced Einstein wasn’t a great physicist than to change their minds on topics like immigration or the death penalty. 

It has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence (or the quality of information on Einstein or immigration policy). It’s due to the fact that we’re simply more open to changing our minds on nonpolitical topics. Scientists have been keen to figure out why — because if they can, it may open the door to the hardest challenge in politics right now: changing minds. ...

The brain processes politically charged information (or information about strongly held beliefs) differently (and perhaps with more emotion) than it processes more mundane facts. It can help explain why attempts to correct misinformation can backfire completely, leaving people more convinced of their convictions.

The results also jibe with some of Kaplan and Harris’s past work on religious beliefs. “When we compared evaluating religious statements to nonreligious statements, we [found] some of the same brain regions that are active in the current study,” Kaplan said. Which makes sense, because religious beliefs also factor into our identities.

What the new study definitely doesn’t show is that “political beliefs are hardwired,” Kaplan says. We can change our minds. Reflecting on his work and his own experience, Kaplan says a good way to make facts matter is to remind people that who they are and what they believe are two separate things.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/28/14088992/brain-study-c...

However, changing people's minds is not impossible, even on political issues as other studies show: 

1) If the argument you find convincing doesn’t resonate with someone else, find out what does

Whenever we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing — and wrongly think the other side will be swayed. 

On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like, "No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America." And they think other people will find this compelling, too. 

Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

What both sides fail to understand is that they're arguing a point that their opponents have not only already dismissed but may be inherently deaf to.

"The messages that are intuitive to people are, for the most part, not the effective ones," Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and psychology at Stanford University, told me in 2015. 

Willer has shown it's at least possible to nudge our political opponents to consider ideas they'd normally reject outright. In 2015, in a series of six studies, he and co-author Matthew Feinberg found that when conservative policies are framed around liberal values like equality or fairness, liberals become more accepting of them. The same was true of liberal policies recast in terms of conservative values like respect for authority. ...

How to sway the other side: Use their morals against them

Willer’s work is based on moral foundations theory. It's the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations are more stalwart: They favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.

Politicians intuitively use moral foundations to excite like-minded voters. Conservative politicians know phrases like "take our country back" get followers' hearts beating. 

What moral foundations theory tells us, however, is that these messages don't translate from one moral tribe to the other. "You’re essentially trying to convince somebody who speaks French of some position while speaking German to them," Willer says. "And that doesn’t resonate."

Willer cautioned that it's still extremely difficult to convert a political opponent completely to your side, even with these techniques. "We found statistically significant effects," he says. "They’re reliable. But in terms of magnitude, they are not large."

In his study, when he framed an argument against Trump in terms of loyalty (a conservative moral foundation), conservative participants reported they were less likely to support him.  “For instance, the loyalty message argued that Trump ‘has repeatedly behaved disloyally towards our country to serve his own interests’ and that ‘during the Vietnam War, he dodged the draft to follow his father into the development business,’” Feinberg and his co-author write in the study. ...

2) Listen. Your ideological opponents want to feel like they’ve been heard.

Willer and Feinberg’s work suggest there’s a way to change minds on policy. But what about on prejudice? How can you effectively argue a person out of a prejudicial opinion? Because as Vox’s German Lopez explains in great detail, simply calling people racist is a strategy sure to backfire. 

In 2016, the journal Science published a remarkable bit of insight: It's possible to reduce prejudice, and sway opinions on anti-transgender legislation, with one 10-minute conversation. What's more, the researchers found that the change of heart can last at least three months and is resistant to anti-transgender attack ads.

It worked because the canvassers in the study did a simple thing: They listened. 

Dave Fleischer, a longtime political organizer, calls it deep canvassing. The key to it is that Fleischer has the voter do most of the talking. Instead of pelting voters with facts, "we ask open-ended questions and then we listen," Fleischer told me last year. "And then we continue to ask open-ended questions based on what they just told us."

In talking about their own lives, the voters engage in what psychologists call "active processing." The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusion themselves, not when someone "bitch-slaps you with a statistic," says Fleischer. Overall, it's a task designed to point out our common humanity, which then opens the door to reducing prejudice and changing opinions.

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/23/13708996/argue-better-science