[An interesting discussion about our inability to choose the right candidates](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/1/15515820/donald-trump-democracy-brexit-2016-election-europe) to make our lives better:
> How do choices get framed? How do opinions get formed? A lot of it is people simply taking cues from political figures, from public figures, that they’ve identified themselves with one way or the other, whether they’re party leaders or the leaders of social groups or interest groups that they feel some attachment to…This idea that people have fixed or informed views about central issues doesn’t square with most of the data we have.
From the authors’ book “[Democracy for Realists](https://smile.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsive-Government/dp/0691169446?sa-no-redirect=1)”, [some data supporting the argument that “it’s the economy, stupid”](https://books.google.com/books?id=CHuLCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154&dq=short+term+income+growth+tenure+and+presidential+election+outcomes&source=bl&ots=kt-3MDCiQV&sig=o6ZjJbWrn77qHpcgWPHOphItTuM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQrKaT7aXUAhUM02MKHVUsDbIQ6AEIMjAB#v=onepage&q=short%20term%20income%20growth%20tenure%20and%20presidential%20election%20outcomes&f=false):
> “It is possible to account for recent presidential election outcomes with a fair degree of precision solely on the basis of how long the incumbent party had been in power and [how much real income growth voters experienced](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wage-growth) in the six months leading up to Election Day.”
The authors attribute 2016’s strange elections to the inability of political “elites” to connect with voters, hence the rise of “outsiders”:
> The biggest limitation at the moment is that we don’t know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it possible to ensure that they’re working on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.
But they propose that instead of breaking down “identity politics”, we need to acknowledge its importance and make it work better:
> These group attachments are not some bad thing we do instead of being rational, well-informed creatures. They constitute who we are…We construct an interpretation of our lives, and we’re loyal to that and we find other people with similar views. That’s what human beings are like, and recognizing that seems to us a big step forward from the way we tend to think about politics now…
To do that, we need to better connect people’s identities and actions to the policymaking (e.g. what happens in Congress every day) rather than the elections (e.g. who you elect to Congress once every few years):
> A lot of the actual ways in which people of ordinary education or ordinary means or just not much power, the ways in which they are disadvantaged are often occurring at the level of policymaking rather than at the level of elections themselves. The financial sector, for instance, is having a lot of policy success in Washington, in ways that ordinary people, if they really understood what was happening, would not approve. But they don’t follow it closely enough, they don’t understand, and the policy process is tilted toward moneyed interests that ordinary people have no chance.
So embrace your identities, but don’t stop with the voting booth–find ways to connect daily to the actual decisions that impact your life.
