Pollsters can try to adjust their sample for gender, race, political party, education, and a dozen other demographic categories. But there’s one category for which it would seem inherently impossible to adjust—differences in willingness to talk to pollsters that cuts across the other demographics. Many Trump voters simply don’t want to respond to pollsters. And you don’t discover the political skew of the non-responders until the election itself.
We’ve already seen that there’s a huge partisan difference in willingness to use mail-in ballots; why should we be surprised that there’s a modest difference in willingness to talk to pollsters?
Perhaps this anti-pollster attitude is more common in places like Wisconsin, with lots of farmers and smaller industrial towns, as compared to Arizona, which fewer farmers and small industrial towns. At least that seems to have been the case in both 2016 and 2020.
On a separate issue, I’ve frequently argued that working class whites that are struggling to get by don’t like being told by Ivy League professors that they benefit from “white privilege”. I don’t even think Hispanics like the concept. (Note to commenters: This point is completely separate from the question of whether working class whites do in fact benefit from white privilege.)
All year long I’ve had a nagging feeling that the “woke” movement could hand the election to Trump. Perhaps it did not, but I suspect it came close to doing so. Perhaps a Trump victory was prevented by something as random as a big October surge in Covid deaths in Wisconsin.
Too soon to say!
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Nov 4 2020 at 6:36pm
“All year long I’ve had a nagging feeling that the “woke” movement could hand the election to Trump.”
I react very badly to this argument, and I wonder if the reason is something like this: I think it sounds to me like the “poverty causes crime” argument sounds to people on the other side of the political spectrum. In both cases the suggestion is that some unpleasant external circumstance (nagging by right-on lefties/lack of money) causes a failure in some group of people’s ability to regulate themselves (refusal to look objectively at politics/commit crimes); AND therefore we should handle this kind of failure in a different way to other similar failures (lefties should stop nagging rural whites/lenient sentencing for the poor).
I don’t know if those similarities ring true to you, but the structures of those two arguments look similar to me. Now, I’m more inclined to accept arguments like “poverty causes crime therefore crime in certain neighbourhoods/communities should be handled differently” than I am arguments like “rural whites vote Republican because of nagging lefties therefore nagging lefties should lay off” – and I *think* my position is justifiable.
The justification would be: the punishment of crime is an awesome intervention in lives by the state; minimizing it would be good. Nagging is part of intellectual debate; maximizing intellectual debate is generally good.
But perhaps they’re both bad arguments. I’m not sure!
Lliam Munro
Nov 4 2020 at 7:22pm
This seems a curious response to me.
Given Scott’s repeated expressions of disgust with Trump, it’s not as though he’s arguing that voting for Trump is a justified response to wokeist rhetoric.
He’s merely proposing that increased support for Trump may be a consequence of wokeist rhetoric. To respond to that observation with, in effect, ‘it shouldn’t be’, seems to miss the point.
If someone were to threaten to shoot me if I didn’t hand them my wallet, it would do me relatively little good to assert that being shot shouldn’t be the consequence of refusing.
If wokeist rhetoric is driving people to Trump, then telling them that their response is not justified doesn’t seem a strategy well optimised for electoral success.
Jeff G.
Nov 4 2020 at 8:21pm
I agree with Llian, and I also don’t see the equivalence between crime and nagging. Crime is an unambiguous bad that should be minimized or prevented but I would not call “nagging” a good thing that should be maximized. I see the argument as simply saying that by picking “woke-ism” as a key issue, the Dems turned off a group of people that did not agree that this was a key issue or disagreed with some of it’s conclusions. That sounds like a reasonable outcome from a healthy intellectual debate. But saying that one group of people did not agree with your parties point a view and therefore the appropriate response should be to keep hammering it into them until they agree does not sound like a healthy debate at all.
Phil H
Nov 5 2020 at 12:50am
Curious is fine. I wasn’t responding to Scott’s main point, about polling, at all. Just musing on a small sidebar in his argument.
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 10:31pm
I wasn’t trying to justify anything, just stating my view as to cause and effect.
BC
Nov 4 2020 at 11:07pm
Your analogy breaks down by comparing committing crimes to the “failure” of voting for Trump. I *disagree* with the people that support Trump. The reason that the Woke keep alienating most of mainstream America is because the Woke keep characterizing political disagreement as a moral failure. Disagreeing with the Woke is viewed like a crime that needs punishment or deterrence. That’s the essence of cancel culture.
The Woke alienate working class whites, so working class whites look for people that will “take their side”. That’s why they turn to Trump. So, if the Woke don’t want working class whites to turn to people like Trump, then the Woke should stop making working class whites feel like they need someone “on their side”.
In the 80s and 90s, white conservatives used to wonder why black urban voters often supported corrupt and divisive city mayors like Coleman Young in Detroit and Marion Barry in DC. The inability of the Woke to understand working class whites’ support for Trump is similar. When people sense antipathy, they reflexively look for allies for protection and are willing to overlook many character flaws in such allies.
Phil H
Nov 5 2020 at 12:56am
“The Woke alienate working class whites”
This is a thing that happens mainly in the imagination of Fox News and similar organizations. Think about how often you have been “alienated” by “The Woke”. Not heard an apocryphal story online, but how often it’s actually happened to you. I assume that these incidents do occur every now and then, but in terms of real frequency and real impact on people’s lives, it’s pretty minimal.
Garrett
Nov 5 2020 at 8:22am
Um, frequently? I feel like you don’t have a family that has diverse political views. Leftists often make condescending statements about those who disagree with them. Rightists do too.
Something I’ve seen a lot of these past four years on my social media: “[Insert political opinion here.] And if you disagree, unfriend me right now!”
KevinDC
Nov 5 2020 at 8:48am
That’s not a measure that will serve well to make your point, at least not to me, because it’s something that happens quite frequently in my personal experience. I’m not personally “working class” at this stage of my life (although as recently as a few years ago I was only making around $18,000 a year), but due to both my job and my current income bracket I’m frequently surrounded by “woke” people. And among the woke it is very common to hear frequent and totally unsolicited descriptions of the white working class as moronic, uneducated, bigoted, xenophobic rubes. The level and frequency of casually expressed disgust and genuine hatred is quite shocking – and it’s definitely something I’ve found very alienating.
But if you’re curious – there’s also been some scholarly work done on this topic. Entire books have been written by sociologists who embedded themselves with the white working class in an attempt to understand their support for Trump. (See for example White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America by Joan Williams, or Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Hochschild.) And they find the same thing – a very large degree of support for Trump comes from people who are sick of feeling constantly belittled and looked down upon by “the woke,” and this belittlement is very much something they personally experience in their day to day lives. What I found particularly interesting is that a large number of Trump’s “supporters” don’t actually like him at all – they find him repellent. But they used phrases like “we don’t like Trump at all, he’s our way to vote with our middle finger.”
Note, I’m leaving aside the question of whether or not their feelings of alienation are justified, or whether using Trump as their “murder weapon” was a judicious response – I’m simply talking about whether such feelings of alienation existed and had that effect. And to me, the evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
Dylan
Nov 5 2020 at 9:44am
Phil,
One example. 4 years ago I was at one of the large protests against Trump in NYC.
A youngish, white, homeless guy who was probably mentally ill came up and started yelling insults at the protesters. The black, gay man next to me shouted back something along the lines of “Shut up you cisgendered, straight white man, you don’t have the right to talk.”
Obviously, this is just one instance of something said in the heat of the moment from a guy that was being insulted. But, as a straight, white, cisgender dude that was marching next to him ostensibly in support of the same things, I’d lie if I said it wasn’t a little alienating. Certainly not alienating enough that I’d go out and vote for Trump, but not the kind of thing that made me feel welcome.
That example was memorable, but I come across lesser versions of the sentiment on an almost daily basis. As a reasonably well-educated, somewhat liberal, big city guy, I’m not really the target of their scorn, yet I still pickup on it quite a bit. I’d imagine if I was a more conservative, high school dropout from Kentucky it would be way more alienating.
Steve
Nov 5 2020 at 1:05pm
My wife is a social worker. All throughout graduate school and in her career she has been battered with what we all know as “woke” ideas and sentiment. It has pushed her farther towards the center than she ever thought she would go.
She works with a transgender therapist who bullies the entire office and nobody ever stands up to them, because they fear the obvious reprecussions of being labeled anti-trans, even if it’s over some issue completely unrelated to this person’s gender. Obviously I’m not saying that it’s great to be trans because you can get ahead at work, or that this person is consciously using their status to get what they want, but that’s the situation.
AMT
Nov 5 2020 at 2:39pm
You alienate people when you don’t simply nag them, but falsely accuse them of being a racist for simply living their life. You don’t even have to specifically target an individual, just generally state a viewpoint. Here’s an example:
Since “every” system in the country is racist, and simply interacting without trying to “do something different” (change the system?) makes you racist, simply going to the DMV and renewing your license is now “racist.”
There is no escape from this woke hatred of what they define “racism.” You can’t say “but I’m not racist!” no matter how true it is. That’s just your “white fragility.” The “we’re all racist” premise is used to superficially seem inclusive, but really is just used to imply that anyone who isn’t “trying hard to change things, like us woke people” is a horrible, racist person. It’s purely a threat to coerce you to do what the woke say…or you’re just tarred and feathered as a horrible racist, and therefore a horrible person.
You are not allowed to dispute white fragility or systemic racism, so there can be no debate or counterargument. Just think about what happens if you are publicly called a racist; you have no defense to the forthcoming cancellation. Now you have to worry about your career, your house, your social networks, everything. So when you know you’re not racist, it really seems like these people are just looking for a reason to hate you and hurt you, or wrongfully coerce you because of your “tribe.” It’s not at all surprising some people will turn to the most vocal opponent to fight for “their side.”
Phil H
Nov 5 2020 at 3:50pm
Thank you for those responses.
I asked for examples from real life, not social media, and I got exactly one actual example, from Dylan, and that was a stray comment hurled at a rally. KevinDC, you say it happens all the time. I genuinely think that both you and I would be educated by you going through the process of writing out a specific example.
David Henderson links to a great real example on another thread – a real example. As I said, I don’t doubt that real examples exist. But when you write them out, and then you compare them to other real examples of discrimination – against non-white people, or gay people, or disabled people, you start to get a sense of proportion.
AMT
Nov 5 2020 at 4:33pm
It is false to imply you can only be “alienated” via a personal action. If someone shares on twitter “marriage is only between a man and woman” how does that not alienate homosexuals from them? I don’t need to actually start an argument with neo-nazis to know that we are alienated from each other; simply knowing how vastly different our viewpoints are is sufficient, and you can learn others viewpoints on social media.
Garrett
Nov 5 2020 at 4:48pm
When I mentioned family in my response I was referring to both “real life” and social media occurrences. I’m not going to delve into them though, sorry.
And thinking social media interactions are beneath real life interactions is a dated mindset. Like it or not, social media interactions affect people and their opinions. To deny that is to bury your head in the sand.
KevinDC
Nov 5 2020 at 5:04pm
Not to split hairs, but no, you didn’t. What you said was:
So no, you didn’t ask to be supplied with specific examples, you just asked people to think about how often it’s happened to them. So simply saying “it actually happens to me a lot” is a reasonable answer to the question you actually asked.
But, if you’re curious about actual examples, here’s some that have occurred in the last two weeks or so. I’ve heard people say that they just wish Covid could be modified to kill all the “Trumptards.” I’ve heard it be said that the only reason anyone would ever vote Republican is because they’re racist or stupid. A few days ago I heard someone say make a joke about how in the Bible Adam and Eve’s children all had to breed with each other, and how stupid that obviously is, but it explains why people in the South all love the Bible because they’re all “inbred hicks anyway.” One person mentioned that they ruled someone out as a possible friend because it turned out they liked Jeff Foxworthy’s comedy and they can’t stand anyone who “likes that racist redneck garbage.” This was followed up by a comment that if we just took the right to vote away from anyone who enjoys country music we could save the whole country.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. But this is a pretty representative example of the kinds of comments I hear getting thrown around on a regular basis. Now, I’m not conservative, nor am I religious, but I do find just the sheer smugness and condescension of these people very alienating – and if I were religious or conservative, I can only imagine I’d find it even more so.
KevinDC
Nov 5 2020 at 10:51am
I see a lot of threads in that comment I could pull on, but I’ll focus on just this one here:
Here, I disagree completely. Nagging has none of the character of intellectual debate, nor is it reflective of any interest in being persuasive or convincing. The problem here isn’t that the left is trying to engage in legitimate and fair minded intellectual debate with rural Americans and the rural folk are annoyed at all this intellectual commentary being offered to them. (I can see how many leftists might prefer that explanation, but as someone who feels equally alienated by the left and right and watches their squabbles from the outside, that doesn’t come within a light year of accurately describing how the situation looks to a third party.)
The commentary coming from “the woke” towards rural Americans has about zero point nothing percent to do with attempting to persuade or engage in legitimate debate, and instead seems entirely designed to be as condescending and insulting as possible in a way that provides emotional satisfaction and feelings of superiority to the woke. And I don’t think this is an entirely idiosyncratic interpretation on my part – many “woke” writers have specifically written essays saying it’s pointless to try to discuss or debate things with the other side, because “those people” are impervious to facts and logic anyway, so the best thing to do is constantly shame and insult them, and call them out for their bigotry and ignorance.
How common is that type of mindset on the left? I have no way to know, since I lack the telepathic powers of Charles Xavier. But while it’s possible that they are a small volume in terms of quantity, in terms of loudness their volume is overwhelming. And given how rare it is for other leftists to be willing to acknowledge (or even seem to notice!) that issue, it makes me at least suspect the mindset is popular.
Phil H
Nov 5 2020 at 3:57pm
“Nagging has none of the character of intellectual debate”
I think that’s wrong. It represents too purist a view of what intellectual debate can or should be. I understand that philosophy-class platonic ideal of what intellectual debate should be: premises and conclusions, valid statistics, all that jazz. But in the real world, that isn’t how people persuade each other. I think we just have to give up on that pedagogically helpful but ultimately untrue vision of intellectual debate, and accept that it is wider: intellectual debate is any deployment of affective or propositional reasons to try to change the ideas or behaviour of others.
KevinDC
Nov 5 2020 at 4:45pm
I will cheerfully plead guilty to being a purist about the standards of intellectual debate.
My “real world” experience is very different from yours. I have been frequently persuaded to change my mind by those means, and have frequently persuaded others to change their minds in the same way. However, I can say I know of exactly zero cases of people who were persuaded to change their minds as a result of nagging. Usually I find nagging has the opposite effect – it makes people resent you and just dig their heels in further. And I ultimately agree with Scott Alexander’s assessment of the situation where he says “Given all of this, I reject the argument that Purely Logical Debate has been tried and found wanting. Like GK Chesterton, I think it has been found difficult and left untried.”
KevinDC
Nov 5 2020 at 6:34pm
A couple of further thoughts –
You propose an alternative definition of intellectual debate where “intellectual debate is any deployment of affective or propositional reasons to try to change the ideas or behaviour of others.” Here’s one reason I think that’s a bad definition – lots of people are skilled at persuading to change their ideas or behavior based on patently bad reasoning. Rush Limbaugh, for example, is clearly a very successful persuader. If you’re employing a definition of “intellectual debate” which leads to the conclusion “Rush Limbaugh is highly skilled at intellectual debate”, you need a better definition!
Also, you said in your initial post “maximizing intellectual debate is generally good.” How well does your definition work there? “Maximizing the deployment of affective or propositional reasons to try to change the ideas or behaviour of others is generally good.” Why would that be generally good? Because we’re trying to change their ideas or behavior in the right direction? How do we know it’s the right direction? Because we worked it out through intellectual debate? Well, no, because now our definition of intellectual debate doesn’t have anything built into it that makes it any good at reaching true or trustworthy conclusions. It seems we’ve left our understanding of reality much more up to chance.
Setting aside the definition of intellectual debate, let’s consider the ostensible goal. You believe that leftist nagging is designed to persuade people. But it’s clearly had the opposite effect – it doesn’t persuade or move people in the direction leftists want, it pushed them further away. (See the social science evidence I cited earlier if you’re curious, I can only post so much in a comment!) And yet, leftists continue a strategy that is clearly not working. If the goal is persuading people to change their minds and behavior, then continued use of this approach makes no sense. But if, as I contend, the true purpose is to indulge in feelings of smug superiority, then it makes perfect sense that they’d continue and even double down – which is what we observe.
Michael Sandifer
Nov 4 2020 at 7:31pm
Yes, Democrats need to can identity politics and just use the broad language of equal rights and equal opportunity. They also need to push better policies for business owners and better tax policies. The fringe needs to stop demagoging the wealthy, and stop feeding the socialist narratives. They need to focus on national unity, rather than dividing by identity.
It seems apparent that the last 3 election cycles were more about Trump than Democrats or Republicans. Republicans over-perform when Trump runs, and under-perform when he does not, as in the 2018 midterms. Democrats did less to win this election than Trump did to lose it.
I’m overjoyed Biden apparently won, but it’s like winning while scoring 9 points, and after the other team loses 3 fumbles and throws 3 interceptions. What happens against an opponent that doesn’t self-destruct?
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 9:34pm
Michael, You said:
“I’m overjoyed Biden apparently won”
I don’t think we know that yet. AZ was called for Biden, but Trump still has a decent chance to win that state.
Market Fiscalist
Nov 4 2020 at 9:46pm
Betting markets are hardening for Biden (even after last batch of results from AZ) – I think because it now looks like PA is likely to go to him.
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 10:33pm
Yeah, I just saw Nate Silver say that about Pennsylvania. In any case, it’s quite a close election!
Market Fiscalist
Nov 4 2020 at 10:48pm
It has. But its not impossible that Biden wins Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia, plus the popular vote by 3% or more (when all the mail-ins are counted ) – and it will look like a landslide.
Scott Sumner
Nov 4 2020 at 11:45pm
It’s not a landslide if the tipping point state is about a 1% margin.
Market Fiscalist
Nov 5 2020 at 1:23am
The best that Biden could do is probably 304 to 213 which (you are right) is not a landslide but far more decisive than it has felt like it would be be through the last 24 hours. If that is how it ends up then the postal ballots factor may have made it look closer than it really was. I assume (but am happy to be corrected if wrong) that ‘the tipping state’ would normally have a relatively small major
Market Fiscalist
Nov 5 2020 at 1:27am
ity
Market Fiscalist
Nov 5 2020 at 1:33am
I correct myself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping-point_state#Obama_victory_tipping_point_state
Garrett
Nov 5 2020 at 8:27am
It looks to me like Biden needs Arizona or Pennsylvania, see map here
Scott Sumner
Nov 5 2020 at 12:46pm
Isn’t GA still in play?
Garrett
Nov 5 2020 at 1:59pm
True, as of 1:57 Election Betting Odds has GA at 71.1% chance of going to Biden, along with 78.2% for AZ and 83.8% for PA. If Biden gets any of those he wins.
Market Fiscalist
Nov 4 2020 at 9:11pm
‘All year long I’ve had a nagging feeling that the “woke” movement could hand the election to Trump’
Yes, me too. I’ve always voted Libertarian until yesterday (when I voted Democrat) and don’t like Biden much but think he deserves a lot of credit for subtly neutralizing that issue. The Democrats need to address ‘wokishness’ in their party and coastal-society head on in the next 4 years or they will be destroyed by Trump (or more likely, a more hard-core populist candidate) next time around.
Michael Sandifer
Nov 5 2020 at 1:08am
Yes. Words like “intersectionalism” don’t exactly bring in the votes in places outside of Berkeley, CA or Cambridge, MA.
Mark Z
Nov 5 2020 at 2:28am
I’m surprised no clever Midwestern Democrats have adopted the slogan “unionism, not intersectionalism.” The math pun would serve as a dog whistle that would win over the educated voters. It’s brilliant.
Thomas Hutcheson
Nov 5 2020 at 7:07am
working class whites that are struggling to get by don’t like being told by Ivy League professors that they benefit from “white privilege”.
Probably true if it ever happened. Has it? I do not recall VP Biden ever saying that. I don’t know about Senate/House candidates.
That said, democrats need to do a better job running on issues that actually help people — freer trade, more highly skilled immigration, lower structural deficits achieved mainly by taxing high consumption individuals), expansion of health insurance, revenue neutral taxation of net CO2 emissions.
Scott Sumner
Nov 5 2020 at 12:49pm
No Biden doesn’t say that. But he gets tarred with guilt by association, in the minds of many voters.
Matthias
Nov 5 2020 at 9:19pm
People generally don’t vote for those things that actually help them.
derek
Nov 5 2020 at 9:07am
I think it’s far more likely that Hispanics are voting with their short-term pocketbooks and perceived Trump as presenting a lower risk of mandated lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. I agree that BLM was a losing position for Democrats, and the idea of intersectionality was especially a losing position, but I would hesitate to assign too much weight to things like this. Another issue that gets often brought up as a factor is opposition to Biden’s supposedly “socialist” (mostly the Trump campaign’s word) policies given immigrants’ presumed distaste for these policies in Cuba, Venezuela, etc.; however, I would tend to characterize Venezuela and Ecuador as being led by strongmen of the Trump/Xi/Putin/Erdogan variety before I would characterize them as socialist, so it could also just be that immigrants are from countries where there is less aversion to strongmen leaders than in much of the USA. Also, to the extent that there is a cosmopolitan/rural divide, Hispanic voters would likely tend to be on the rural, relatively Republican side.
Knut P. Heen
Nov 5 2020 at 9:36am
I hang up every time pollsters call. Politically correct people do not hang up every time. Hence polls will be biased towards politically correct views. There is a correlation between attitude to pollsters and attitude to politics.
Craig
Nov 5 2020 at 9:50am
Of course we’re also assuming that polling is done in good faith from the onset and isn’t a form of propaganda, but sure “differences in willingness to talk to pollsters that cuts across the other demographics. Many Trump voters simply don’t want to respond to pollsters.”
Indeed, I am subject to economic ostracization.
You know, one of the weird things about cell phones is that it has replaced my flashlight, alarm clock, stock broker, bank teller, money….but funnily enough over time the phones have become increasingly less useful, you know, as actual phones. In fact, to be honest, the vast majority of the calls I receive are just garbage and I presume to ignore them.
In fact, I love the smartphone except the phone and actually I want to get rid of the phone app altogether. The spam calls are a disutility. The texting is based on phone number but it doesn’t need to be and I’d just as soon use skype/portal to call people I actually want to talk to.
Michael Sandifer
Nov 5 2020 at 1:13pm
What people like David Axelrod and Mike Murphy, both of whom have run state-wide and nationwide races, including Presidential campaigns say about public polls, is that they’re typically of relatively low quality, because they are done on the cheap. Best one can do with those usually is just average them together and hope for the best.
They say the internal polls conducted by private campaigns are of higher quality, because more money, time, and attention are invested, especially with regard to sampling. Also, polls capture, at best, information that’s at least 3-4 days old. It’s looking through the rearview mirror. It’s not uncommon for polls to move rather considerably in the last few days before election day. We saw some big movements in the final week, in places like Iowa, for example. The change in the last Des Moines Register poll was so large, most assumed there was a large error. It appeared Republicans and Democrats literally switched positions, so I thought the pollster had literally mislabled the results.
Finally, reasons Democrats lost are likely significantly more complicated than quick takes can account for, though there seem to be lots of things Democrats regularly do or fail to do that cost them votes. It seems that sorting of voters by education continues, with less educated voters continuing to move to Republicans, for example.
Scott Sumner
Nov 5 2020 at 7:13pm
If the race closed somewhat in the final days, then Covid might have cost Trump the election in a way that’s different from how we usually view the factor. Covid led to roughly half the votes being cast in October, when Biden’s lead in the polls was often a couple points higher. And it looks like the tipping point state might be Wisconsin at 0.6%
Mark Bahner
Nov 6 2020 at 11:11am
I don’t know if you’ve seen any interviews of Bob Woodward about his “Rage” book, or read the book, but in an interview I saw, Woodward asked Trump a question that started with something like, “You and I are both beneficiaries of white privilege, your father being a successful businessman and mine being…”
According to Woodward (I think it’s on tape), Trump told Woodward that Woodward had really “drunk the Kool-Aid.” Trump didn’t think he benefited from white privilege at all. (!)
TMC
Nov 7 2020 at 6:33pm
If all white people were millionaires, then this would be a good argument. There are a lot of white poor people, more in total than black poor people, the idea that they have white privilege- or Trump’s success is from white privilege is ridiculous.
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