For many Americans Sam Altman and Madonna are unrelatable so the messaging falls on deaf ears (or is potentially even counter productive). Nobody believes Google or YC is hiring refugees, or that Sam Altman and others are sending their kids to public schools attended by refugees, or living in low to middle income neighborhoods housing refugees and having to manage the increased violence that ensues. All well and good to bang your hands on a table from the Ivory tower that is San Francisco when millions of people in middle America believe that you are not the one bearing the cost of this "open door" policy. To be effective, I think the message needs to come from people middle America can relate to not millionaire celebs and billionaire tech CEOs.
Furthermore, Sam Altman and crew did not utter a word when people who they _can_ relate to - thousands of legal immigrants from India and China working in technology companies - have been discriminated against by per-country green card quotas. Now the same crowd feel for refugees and other legal immigrants from certain countries being discriminated against. The hypocrisy is amusing.
I find this so ironic. The so-called "heartland" and their complaining about "liberal elites" on the coast are so incredibly wrong. Every election in modern history is decided, ultimately, by these people who let themselves believe that they're disadvantaged and being left out. It's the reverse that's true: they get more representation proportional to their population, they get to decide what the makeup of the majority of Congress looks like, and they're the swing states that decided presidential elections. Meanwhile, in other places like the South or the West and East coast, if you vote contrary to the large majority, you may as well not even bother.
A qualified no - Trumps relatability may not matter in this context. There are two parts to this: the message and the messenger.
Speaking in broad strokes here...
I believe more people are relating to (i.e. are inclined to agree with) Trumps [closed border] message and therefore do not need to relate to Trump the messenger.
Fewer people are relating to the open border message and thus, to help guide their analysis, people are looking to the messenger and finding them less relatable.
So there isn't an equal burden of proof / relatability and that's part of the problem. The left is already perceived as being out of touch and their loudest / most visible voices may not be helping that.
