I’m 100% certain this person saw an electoral map with most of Oregon red by land mass and then based their political opinions on it.

Oregon WILL be deeply red

Just keep asking questions. Like:

• oh really, what makes you say that?
• huh, do Republicans dominate the state Congress?
• what connections do you have to Oregon?

Just keep poking and prodding. Ask questions you know the answers to. You don’t need to correct them. The questions will probably be entertaining enough.

Engaging with “politically minded” Americans is a total waste of time

I’ll try to talk about what I think with people who casually bring up something political without it being the focus. Try to normalize a class conscious perspective to the extent that I can, you know?

But with people who “care” I’ve found it’s kinda pointless and I don’t try. They don’t listen and won’t remember what you said later, at best they’ll decide you’re “really liberal” and operate from there. At one point it was fun just to hear the weird shit they would say, but things are getting bad and it’s not really funny anymore, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to broadcast “I’m a communist” to people who would probably turn you in if it was an option.

i just disassociate and ignore it when ppl say stupid shit hehe yay

I have very recently trained myself to just let people be wrong sometimes. You have to pick your battles and dedicate the energy to people who you think will actually listen and just nod and smile at the ones who don’t. Also sometimes the thing the person is being wrong about is just not that important and doesn’t really need to be corrected.

laugh in their face, followed by “oh, you’re serious? let me laugh even harder”

Some people are just cranks.

With people that dumb I don’t bother. They tend to be more than just ignorant they are willfully ignorant.

I do bother to try to push people farther to the left that are engaged and trying to learn.

I mostly just rage bait dumbasses to highlight how dumb they are for other people.

You could condescend to them, but then you’d be acting condescending to 100% of the people in your life. Everyone believes stupid shit, everywhere (and I mean everywhere). This fun feature came with our material conditions. You can instead adopt the socratic method, ask more (and this usually involves also challenging the premise rather than just the assertion), which should hopefully get them to stop saying stupid shit as soon as they hit their first contradictory snag. If they’re stubborn and don’t feel apologetic or confused, then pick your battle, you obviously won’t make a communist right then and there. If you’ll see this person long-term, and they still vaguely engage with you on politics despite you exposing a contradiction, then you can help steer them into a socratic dialogue by prodding more. Some of my friends (who admittedly engage with my infodumping, so ymmv) are quite “apolitical” but still engage with me even though I like to focus on the semantics of their statements (not sure if this is the right word), which help orient their thinking. If you overdo it then it might come off combative.

Depending on how much you care about them and think they may come around one day, you could just do what we do here and laugh in their face.

I do it sometimes to people who are being douchey to me about it.

I just let people believe whatever. There is no way that they are going to change their minds even with facts and logic™

We are well past the part where we as a people would unite and make some big change before it’s too late.

To the people still organizing and trying to get through: keep up the good work! We might not be able to change anyone’s mind who is over 25 but we can get em while they’re young. With any luck they will be marching their parents into the pit before long

Depends on a lot of things, obviously this person is revealing their ignorance to you in an obvious way. You know more than them.

As far as how to respond and communicate any further, many questions come to mind:

• Is this a person you are obligated to have a continued relationship with?
• is this a person who you want to have a continued relationship with?
• Is there a power dynamic on your relationship with this person?
• Do you think they would be hostile if any particular topics were to come up?
• Does this person have a any position of implicit or explicit social or political power/influence?

These answers would all influence my response, but I don’t particularly enjoy engaging with people who’s understanding of the world is so misaligned from mine that I usually just move on as quickly as possible.