Whether anecdotal or supported by statistics, it appears that almost all of the people who voted for Trump would vote for him again. Maybe it’s his bluster, I don’t know. Whatever he’s doing is enough to please his supporters while simultaneously making him the most unpopular president after one hundred days in polling history.
“There are no signs of major slippage in support among those who voted for Trump. His approval rating among those who cast ballots for him stands at 94%. Among Republicans, it is 84%. Asked of those who voted for him whether they regret doing so, 2 percent say they do, while 96% say supporting Trump was the right thing to do. When asked if they would vote for him again, 96 percent say they would, which is higher than the 85 percent of Hillary Clinton voters who say they would support her again.”
Aside from his success in placing Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, his main success so far as president has been simply occupying the office. When Salena Zito of the New York Post checked in with Trump supporters she had met while traveling the old Lincoln Highway back in the fall, she discovered that the new president’s star is undimmed. Here’s a typical response from a registered Democrat in Bulger, Pennsylvania.
When I called him recently, [Robert] Hughes picked up his phone from the gun range. “I could not be more optimistic about the future than I am right now,” he told me. “Honestly, I am still on cloud nine that he won and is our president.”
Why is that? Hughes cites Trump’s unconventional approach to politics, his dismissal of political games and his willingness to compromise to get things done…
Bulger is in Washington County, Pennsylvania, on the border with West Virginia. It’s no surprise that Trump has support from registered Democrats there. Let’s look at the erosion of Democratic support in Washington County over the last eight years. In 2008, Barack Obama won 46,122 votes there which was good for 48% of the two-party vote. In 2012, Obama won 40,345 votes there, which was good for 43% of the two-party vote. Last November, Hillary Clinton won 36,322 votes, which came to 37% of the two-party vote. Perhaps it’s more instructive to look at it this way: in 2008, the Democratic candidate lost in Washington County by 4,630 votes. In 2012, he lost by 12,885. In 2016, she lost by 25,044, which was more than half the total (44,492) that Hillary Clinton lost by statewide.
Another way of looking at this is to consider the effect on down ballot Democrats. In 2012, Democrat Bob Casey Jr. was reelected with 54% of the statewide vote, but he lost in Washington County (46.7%-51.3%), or by about 4,300 votes. Meanwhile, Republican congressman Bill Shuster won reelection despite losing in Washington County 42.7%-57.1%. In 2016, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Katie McGinty, lost in the county 37.7%-56.3%, or by about 18,000 votes. Rep. Bill Schuster prevailed 56.9%-42.1%.
If you still don’t get the picture, let’s compare the percent of the vote the Democratic candidate got (in the county) in the seven general assembly districts that represent all or parts of Washington County.
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 37- 2012 38.9% 2016 25.6%
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 39- 2012 48.6% 2016 28.7%
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 40- 2012 No candidate 2016 26.8%
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 46- 2012 17.9% 2016 37.8%
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 48- 2012 No opponent 2016 No opponent
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 49- 2012 62.8% 2016 46.2%
Senator Gen Assembly Dist. 50- 2012 69.8% 2016 57.7%
Other than an improvement in District 46, the results speak with a resounding voice. The problem wasn’t contained to the presidential ballot line. Support for the Democratic Party collapsed relative to 2012. When we consider the previously cited presidential numbers going back to 2008, the size of collapse comes into even better focus.
This is just one county in Pennsylvania, and not a particularly well-populated one, but it alone accounted for more than half of Trump’s statewide margin of victory. On Tuesday, I highlighted numbers from Greene County, which lies adjacently to the south of Washington County. Though smaller and therefore less consequential, the erosion for the Democrats in Greene has been far worse than in Washington.
In 2008, Obama carried 50% of the vote in southwest Greene County, costing him 60 net votes against John McCain. In 2016, Clinton won 29% of the vote in Greene County, costing her 6,367 net votes against Donald Trump.
Compared to 2008, Clinton carried 11% less of the vote than Obama in Washington County, but fully 21% less of the vote in Greene. Combined, they accounted for roughly 30,000 of the 44,000 votes she lost by in the Keystone State.
Whether you’re looking at this from the perspective of winning Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes in 2020, or for the prospects of winning back seats in Congress, or (especially) by the desire for the Democrats to ever control the state legislature again, these numbers are somewhere between troubling and catastrophic.
It matters if these voters aren’t responding negatively to Trump’s first 100 days. We need to figure out why they supported him in the first place but also why more of them haven’t already come to regret or doubt their decision.
And, no, we can’t abandon these folks for both practical and moral reasons. I’ve laid out the practical reasons. The moral reason is that the underclass needs a left-wing to represent and champion them regardless of their color or values. If the Democratic Party doesn’t want to be the left-wing for these folks, it will get even worse results in these counties in the future. And some left-wing alternative will have to be created even if it is no longer associated with the Democratic Party in any way.
Remember, too, these folks (or enough of them, anyway) supported the black president. In 2008, he lost Greene County by 60 votes. This isn’t ancient history and whatever racism may exist in these areas (and it’s substantial), it isn’t determinative of how they’ll vote.
When you were a teenager, were you were told by every adult in your life (Mother, Father, Grand’rents, uncles …) that buying (shoes, suit, dress, tattoo, car, …) was a mistake?
Did it stop you from buying it?
Did you admit to it being a mistake before you got out of high school?
get real.
what?
Trump has done pretty much nothing except issue executive orders which will lead to nothing but pain for “Trump Democrats”.
Trump was sold to these people by preachers, NRA, AmLegion, Fox News, Billo, Rushbo, Savage and the rest of the rightwing concordance. He was sold as the best thing since cut bread. Not a chance of a mistake. Just trust them. If these democrats admit to having made this mistake, everything they have trusted for years comes into question. Religion, guns, blind patriotism.
They were lied to, about and for. Its hard to admit that practically everyone you trust has screwed you red and royal.
And just like a teenager, they will deny buyer’s remorse until the bitter end.
The president of the United States is not an ill-advised tattoo. It doesn’t take a long time to realize there’s a difference between what you thought he would do for you and what he’s actually managing or intending to do for you.
You’re right that there are powerful psychological reasons why people refuse to take responsibility for their actions when the political outcome isn’t what they expected. See also, people who thought Clinton’s strategy was fine, people who spent two years demonizing her from the left, people who voted third party in swing states, etc.
In a world full of voter-as-consumers, I’m not so sure.
How many people’s connections with the entire world of politics disappears the moment they drop their ballot into the scanner?
You can’t unmake a statement. The idea probably doesn’t even occur to them.
Look at it from a low information pov. On the ground not a lot has changed yet, the sky hasnt fallen and the predictions of doom havent panned out. Trump is still tying the guys who were in power when life got harder in knots though. For them, what is there to regret?
From a low information voter’s point of view, it looks like he’s trying to keep his promises, and that’s enough to please them for now. I might even be pleased if the situation were reversed and president Sanders was fighting for my interests with mixed success. The fact that resistance to Trump’s effort to kill ACA has kept the program going for now, works double in his favor. Retired and older white Trump supporters haven’t lost their benefits, and they still give him credit for trying to kill their benefits.
Well put.
IMO the best option is that these people get disillusioned with the process and stay home (even Trump couldn’t fix our system). They are not going to change their vote.
OTOH, it is often enough to produce the horror we’re living through.
Determinative.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
never “determines” how s/he votes?
Cuz that’s what’s required for your response to be valid.
My suggested revision simply acknowledges that an individual’s racism sometimes, in some cases, is determinative of how s/he votes. (Another way to put that would be: racism wouldn’t be a 100% reliable predictor of how every individual racist will vote. But it would be a reliable predictor of some voters’ individual responses to blatant appeals to racism such as just happened last election, and also of a disproportionately positive response to such appeals from the racist population.)
In light of recent history, amazes me you’d even find that a controversial or arguable suggestion.
So, yeah, disagree: think my grasp of the meaning of “determinative” is just fine, thanks.
My background and training is as a logician.
Something that is determinative is not sometimes the deciding factor.
Washington County split its vote between McCain and Obama despite being ideally suited for a guy like McCain, a war veteran/hero who has the blessing of the NRA, and is old and white and generally conservative in his outlook. Obama was almost the worst fit you could imagine, and no one wonders why he got slaughtered in neighboring or nearby counties in West Virginia or Kentucky.
The point isn’t that these areas are more racist than the norm. That’s inarguable. The point is that they gave a lot more votes to the black Democrat than the white one. And that means that racism was not determinative of how they voted. It was a factor. It was a big factor. It wasn’t what ultimately explains the change in their voting behavior.
what’s your point? (If it is as it seems — an appeal to authority, i.e., your own — it thus fails.)
I would have thought it clear from my repeated emphasis on “individual” that your use of “sometimes” is ill-chosen. “Some people” would have been more to the point. (“Some racists” even more so.)
That said, it looks silly to me to insist that a factor can only be “determinative” if it “determines” all outcomes in all cases at all times, which is what your objection implies: i.e., in the instance of the ’16 election, if all racists responded to Trump’s appeals to their racism by voting for him; and on all occasions past and future always voted for the more/most racist option available to them, regardless of any/all other factors.
This was in fact the objection underlying my original suggestion.
Linguistics and the plain meaning of words argue that a factor can be “determinative” of the outcome of an individual case/instance at a particular time, while not necessarily dictating (i.e., “determining”) the identical outcome at all times, in all instances, by all individuals. For those individuals, in those cases, on those occasions when their racism is the deciding factor in (i.e., “determines”) how they vote, their racism is “determinative”.
And that said, this has already consumed more time/effort than my original suggestion of a relatively minor revision, which doesn’t greatly impact the overall thrust of your post, merits. Obviously, you haven’t persuaded me re: “determinative”. If I likewise have not persuaded you of the validity of the above counter-argument, then we have reached “agree to disagree” territory. I was not willing to let go unchallenged your claim that I don’t understand the meaning of “determinative”, however.
you’re not making any sense.
In a strictly logical sense, a factor that can be present or absent cannot determine an outcome. For our purposes, the factor is “won’t vote for the black guy because they’re racist.”
Of course that’s true for some people. It’s not true for the universe we’re considering, which is people who voted for Obama but did not vote for Clinton.
The objection then is that racism may not have determined how they would vote for Obama but it did determine how they voted for Clinton. I explored this possibility last week when I noted that the implication of a recent survey was that the racists weren’t activated by coded language used by McCain and Romney but were activated by more explicit racism from Trump.
But, even here, the data are unclear, with a much stronger correlation by income than racial attitudes, and Trump’s voters were less racist in aggregate than Romney or McCain or Bush voters.
The evidence that race was the determinative factor in the election and in moving all these Democrats into the Republican column is extremely weak. The strongest case I have found for it is actually a dramatic decrease in the racism of Clinton voters over Obama voters, indicating that racist Dems left the sample.
But determinative is a very strong word, or should be. It means that whatever you are discussing is the necessary ingredient, without which the outcome would be different. For example, an anti-choice voter who would have voted for the pro-choice candidate except for their relative positions on choice.
When you are asking us to believe this is the case in 2016 on the issue of race and you’re talking about a county that recently gave 50% of its votes to a black candidate and only 37% of its votes to a white Democrat, that’s an extremely hard sell.
Perhaps the racially salient difference between McCain and Trump is greater than the difference between Obama and Clinton? That is, Trump’s heated, glaring racism did a more thorough job of capturing the (sometimes latently) racist vote than Obama’s calm, measured blackness did in alienating it.
Trump is ‘one of us’ to his supporters in a way that McCain was not. I enjoy talking to myself, to I’ll just repeat that his appeal to his supports is an ethnic or pseudo-ethnic one. The policies he enacts, or fails to enact are of (distantly) secondary importance.
I tried to say at greater length, so extra point for succinctness!
I also added bonus typos!
Remember, I mused about that exact point here:
So, it’s not like I didn’t take that argument seriously. I took it very seriously.
When I look at the voting patterns, though, I don’t see that shining through. What I see is a broader pattern of cultural rejection of Democrats up and down the ballot, regardless of the race of the candidate, and even in spite of the race of the candidate.
From my background in science, including statistics, the word “significant” has a specialized meaning that, though related, is not the same as its meaning in common usage. It’s narrower, technical, specialized.
From yours in logic, you seem to limit “determinative” to a similarly specialized meaning that is narrower than its plain meaning or meaning in common usage.
Insisting on that narrowly defined meaning seems analogous to me objecting to someone using “significant” to describe something they haven’t actually tested with data and a valid statistical test that resulted in a p-value below a previously decided/declared alpha-level (usually 0.05 by convention, but that’s somewhat arbitrary). Out of habit, because of my background and training, I tend to avoid use of “significant” even in non-scientific contexts (even when its common-usage meaning would be perfectly appropriate/acceptable), especially with others I know share some science/statistics background, but not only then (with others, I think that’s just habit of mind of trying to be careful about saying what I mean accurately).
You’re also back to talking about “determinative” of a collective outcome (e.g., countywide election result), while I’m focused on “determination” of a discrete, individual outcome, i.e., being the deciding factor in how a particular individual votes on a particular occasion.
Finally, this isn’t “In a strictly logical sense”, it’s nonsense:
Cancer is a factor that can be present or absent, whose presence or absence can most certainly determine the outcome between survival and death (for just one very obvious counter-example).
For your purposes maybe. For my purposes, the factor is “will [did!] vote for the guy who inflamed and implicitly and explicitly appealed to their racism because they’re racist.” (Repeating, since it seems necessary: talking about discrete voting decisions at an individual level.)
It does seem to me that racism in 2008 was not determinative in 2016. If it were the other way, I would expect more votes for Clinton. So something else happened here. Something like what many have been saying: things like economic well being and a general feeling the democrats were not helping.
so I have no response.
But, yeah, for sure, “something else happened here.”
Lots of “something else”s. Including those you mention. (OTOH, also previously and often noted: the economic distress and economic interests of the WHITE working class don’t differ substantially from those of the [non-white] working class, except by being LESS severe and relatively only recent. Hmm.)
One such relevant something else — an important difference from ’08 that I’ve noted repeatedly in this thread (as have many others elsewhere, including booman acknowledging it): Trump “inflamed and implicitly and explicitly appealed to their racism” [and various other species of deplorable bigotry, obviously].
And again, my focus has been on “determinative” of discrete, individual voting decisions on particular occasions, not on the aggregating-up of those discrete outcomes to local-to-national election results.
That said, the data don’t exist to verify OR refute this, but I think Trump’s successful appeal to deplorable bigotry of all forms, not just racism, WAS (probably!) decisive (I won’t use “determinative” in this context for reasons that should be obvious).
I also recognize, as many people have already noted, that in an election that close (let us never forget, nor let him forget, Trump LOST the popular vote by a substantial margin) the same could be said of probably literally dozens of other factors had any one of them broken a different way. E.g., if Comey did not commit official misconduct and violate long-standing FBI rules/guidelines, and instead kept his trap shut; or at least applied a consistent standard for when he yapped and about what. Or Russia didn’t interfere against Clinton on Trump’s behalf. Or Assange didn’t interfere with grossly selective leaks to harm Clinton on Trump’s behalf. And so on.
Karma has a way of biting you in the ass, doesn’t it?
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/08/clinton-touts-support-from-white-americans/comment-p
age-46/
Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?
movie.
Relevance to this conversation to this point unclear to me (presumably, you think you see some). But that’s fine. Enjoyed the chuckles.
Relevance is that the outcome of the bowling match is determinative for who will enter the next round robin.
It is not indicative or suggestive. It’s conclusive, final, and the entire answer.
except the assertion that the other assertions (all true!) demonstrate or explain the relevance of the excerpt to the rest of the conversation.
you seem resistant to the meaning of the word “determine” in all its permutations, as if it means something less than what it does.
We have other words for that, like influenced, tilted, moved, motivated, persuaded, impacted, added, and complemented.
There are inappropriate in certain contexts, like answering the question of when daybreak begins. Daybreak begins at a defined time, when the Sun cracks the horizon. The time of daybreak is determined by that moment. It isn’t impacted or influenced by that moment.
Likewise, the champion is determined by the winner of the game. The champion isn’t awarded because one team was persuasive.
You’re arguing against a logical conclusion I made by arguing about the usage of the word I chose. But your usage is not correct.
Under your own terms, you don’t even quite argue that its correct. Instead, you say I should answer a different question, like whether or not some individual may have had race act as the determining factor in 2016 when it was not the determining factor in 2008 or 2012.
The question I sought to answer was an aggregate question, as in “why did the Democrats lose 21% of the vote in Greene County over eight years?”
The answer to that question could well be that no single factor was determinative. Depending on how you define things, that could be a necessary and absolute answer. But you’re arguing the opposite, which is that there is one factor that was determinative.
And, that, is not only a bold and unsupported assertion, but it should be a direct refutation of what I argued.
Except it isn’t, because you’re unwilling to go that far. Instead, you say that it had an influence. And I never said otherwise.
No, I argued an exception to the over-broad statement of your conclusion about the aggregated results to allow for individuals’ discrete decisions at particular times (how could this be other than clear from the exact words I used in my initial suggestion of a revision, i.e., “…isn’t [always and automatically]”…). I did not argue against your word choice. Rather, my suggestion carved out exceptions for discrete individual decisions from your blanket conclusion about aggregated results. The blanket way you stated your conclusion did not seem to allow for this being the case . . . ever. That was the entirety of my initial suggestion.
Then I rejected your subsequent insistence, based on your training in logic, on a very strictly narrow and specialized interpretation of “determinative” (etc.) that does not comport with the plain meaning of language or with common usage. Still do. The decisive factor resulting in a particular discrete outcome “determines” that outcome, and so is “determinative” of it. I didn’t argue against your usage of the term, I argued against your insistence that yours is its only valid usage.
Again, no (and that last clause puts words in my mouth that I did not utter). Rather, I pointed out that, in fact, some individualS (many in my estimation) may indeed at some time(s) “have had race act as the determining factor” in those individual, discrete decisions of how they voted, and that therefore the blanket, universal nature of your statement of your conclusion for the aggregated 2016 results was over-broad in not allowing for that possibility (or, in my view, that virtual certainty).
Um, no, wrong again (except, obviously, at the individual level, in the case of discrete decisions by individual racists, where not only do I argue their racism could be “determinative” — of those discrete, individual decisions — I presume in at least some cases at some times, it is!). In fact I just argued the opposite of the “opposite” you claim I’m arguing right here in this very thread.
Let’s look at your cancer example.
If you propose that cancer causes death, that is not the same thing as proposing that death is caused by cancer.
So, if you ask the question “What causes death?” the answer cannot be cancer.
If you ask instead, “Did cancer kill him?” the answer could very well be “yes.”
Maybe you’ll have to ponder that for a bit but I trust you’re capable of grasping the truth of it.
When I say that something cannot be determinative if it can be absent, cancer is a perfect example.
Yet, you used it to refute me.
So, you’re stuck on arguing that racism may have been the cause of death here, which is fine. But here’s the form of the argument you and I are making.
I’m saying that if A was already present in B and didn’t cause C, then you shouldn’t expect A to be the explanation for why B turned into C.
You’re saying that higher doses of A were introduced that met the threshold to turn B into C.
I tackled that question and found it completely unconvincing, meaning (as I said) that higher doses of A could not be the determinative factor. I based this is part on the fact that A was reduced when a white candidate was substituted for a black one. I based in part on the survey data that showed Trump supporters as modestly less racially antagonistic than Romney, McCain or Bush voters.
From my analysis, there’s scant evidence that increased A (racism) caused B to turn to C. Some of other factors must be added to form a sufficient explanation. And that is what “not determinative” is supposed to mean, both in this case and in a court of law.
You seem to get this, yet you’re still hung up on my choice of words.
It’s okay to ask if someone died of cancer. It’s not okay to argue that cancer is what causes death.
I will ask this again, and I completely agree with you about almost all of this, but does it matter?
It is impossible to argue that economics was not at least partially responsible for some of this swing.
It is probable that race was well.
But if the conclusion is that it is all race, then what?
You have to try and win these votes somehow or you will never be a majority party.
So that leaves you focusing on economics, because that is something you can control.
We can also exhibit some control over the exercise of racist and sexist beliefs when they are activated to commit civil rights violations, denial of voting and marriage rights being two of many crucial examples.
Myself, I think the racist elements of Trump’s campaign rhetoric and Presidential actions act as superchargers for many voters’ economic concerns, growing those economics into monstrous fixations which can be responded to by Trump’s promise for a simple, quick fix. Trump is very clearly saying that getting rid of brown and black people will deliver solid middle class jobs and SS/Medi/Medi security to white people. These are despicable lies, but they’ve been internalized by many Trump supporters.
It’s not just Trump supporters. There are many who claim to be of the left, here on this site, that believe reducing the labor supply via ethnic cleansing will increase job openings and reduce unemployment.
The thing is…..blaming minorities for whatever ails whites has been a fact of life in America ever since it’s founding. It has never mattered which minority, it’s whomever is convenient. In many cases extreme violence has played a central role in this storied history. When push comes to shove… it’s what we do
So a demagogue comes along and appeals to this trait, and even though the numbers are smaller than ever, they are large enough, with a huge push from the FBI for him to become POTUS.
Then the excuses for this fly out…..it’s the economy, it’s that Clinton was the worst candidate ever!, OMG emails, and the current one..’but they voted for the black guy, explain that!’
They voted for the black guy because the other guys did not appeal directly to the id within their personalities, and once someone did, it came out in sufficient numbers to turn an election….with the FBI’s help.
This happens over and over in America when whites feel put upon. And they feel put upon now.
As far as the original diary by our host…as long as Trump and Sessions continue to mine this character trait, they will follow him. It pretty obvious to me that Trump realizes this…the one consistency is his appointing racists in positions they can oppress minorities.
Wondering why they are not ‘back’ is just part of a continuing theme of making excuses for white people blaming minorities whenever they can. Giving white people a ‘by’…..again. Those white people (and frankly…more than a few on this site) will NEVER acknowledge this trait, NEVER accept responsibility for the results of that trait.
And to repeat myself……the fucking jobs are not coming back! And even when a factory comes back, it’s not the same jobs. It’s less pay, and fewer workers.
.
Whom did McCain hate?
Whom did Romney hate?
It was all in code, if it was there to be seen at all.
Whom does Trump hate?
There’s the margin of victory….
Yep! You’ve been right on this one.
He hates openly, and without reservation. As long as he does that, they won’t abandon him.
.
They could have gotten Obama in 2012 but they didn’t have the guts to nominate an out-and-proud bigot.
They nominated an out and proud misogynist when the other party nominated a woman, and that worked a treat.
The President’s willingness to harness the combined power of racism and misogyny during the campaign gave him a peculiar power which I underestimated. And I agree that many members of this community remain resistant to acknowledging that Trump’s racism and mysogny were central to his appeal as a campaigner, a resistance to face reality which is true of some of the broader progressive community.
I love Bernie, I voted for Bernie in the primary, but he has not been a great leader on these issues. If he had, he might have won the primary. If he had, I would have been more confident he could have beaten Trump in the general election if he had gained the Party nomination. But it’s easy for me to imagine a general election campaign with two candidates opposed to the TPP, but with only one candidate who directly appealed to older white people, the demographic which votes most frequently, on both social and economic issues, and only one candidate who gained nonstop media attention. It’s hard for me to have confidence that Sanders would have won that fight.
I would assume you occasionally read comments on the right. So I would assume you know why they refuse to acknowledge what won Trump the presidency. The only way you will remove their economic meme is from their cold dead hands.
.
things are when a March for Science is even needed! It boggles the mind that Reality is under such a sustained frontal assault that massive demonstrations in its defense seemed not merely warranted, but absolutely necessary.
I concluded during the War-Criminal-dubya admin that the fundamental divide destroying us isn’t explicitly political (though the overlap with political divisions is huge), it’s the one between Reality-Based and Reality-Denying “factions”. (Even calling them “factions”, with its somewhat pejorative overtones, seems problematic since to me the Reality-Based side just equals normal, sane people.)
Nothing since has caused me to second-guess that conclusion. If anything, I think it’s just gotten worse.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
The cultural circumstances that would lead us to even need mass rallies to support science is one that has been cultivated for decades. It’s taken decades of propaganda – talk radio, cable TV “news”, and our current set of internet tabloids spewing fake news and clickbait to create a social climate where the results of many carefully controlled experiments and non-experimental studies testing any of a number of hypotheses can be cavalierly dismissed, and those who conducted the research can be targeted as “enemies” of “real Americans” as a knee jerk reflex. That in itself should be very worrisome, and it will take easily a generation if not longer to repair the damage (assuming that is still a possibility). More and more I am turning to Hofstadter’s essay on the paranoid style in American politics and Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory to try to make some sense of how we got to this particular low point, and to get a sense of how much further we could conceivably sink.
“We” need to figure out why [the white working class] supported Trump in the first place!!!???
Who “we,” DemMan?
Lord, Booman! It’s really very simple.
They supported Trump because he made them believe that he was going to do something positive for them while Hillary Clinton and the Dems not only basically ignored them but branded people like them as “deplorables.”
What did these see when they tuned into Trump’s rally telecasts?
They saw hours upon hours of cameras panning over images of people just like them cheering and waving “Make America Great Again!” slogans.
Then they saw overpaid mainstream talking heads in expensive haircuts talking about how stupid they were and how intelligent the people who worked for HRC appeared to be. You know…upper middle class, major college-educated twits of all races and sexes.
It’s really not that hard to figure out.
“Racially” based? “Sexually” based? Only on the lower levels of decision. The first level? For almost all voters? It’s “Who’s most like me and who are they supporting?” If there aren’t that many brownish people/aren’t that many professional class working females or males/ aren’t that many people of alternative sexual preferences in their circle of acquaintances or area, and a candidate quite clearly aims his campaigns against those kinds of people and for people “like” them…who the hell do you expect them to vote for!!!???
Sigh…
You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is going to be blowing, and you don’t need a statistician, either.
You just need to step out of your societal bubble…and I mean any and every societal bubble…wth your common sense hat on. And then look the fuck around !!!
Add to all of those above factors the utter failure of Obama’s 8 years in terms of helping working white people get out from under the boot of the banks and corporate neglect in terms of bottom line, profit-based outsourcing of industry and jobs plus a Dem candidate who comes off as a haughty, ruling class boss and what do you get?
You get a Trump win.
Duh!!!
It was the failure of the Democratic Party to find a way to appeal to these people’s interests and needs that alienated them, and a further failure on its part to recognize that they were going to come out in large numbers and vote. It wasn’t the Russians; it wasn’t a vast racially-based, reactionary movement against the supposed advance of equality for all people in the U.S., it was simply because these people believed that 8 years of a Democratic president had failed to produce positive results in their lives.
Successfully change that perception…soon…and the Dem Party won’t die. Fail in that attempt and pay the consequences.
Keep going in what is quite clearly the same apparent Schumer/Pelosi-dominated direction and…???
FUGGEDABOUDIT!!!
AG
P.S. I have a gut feeling that we are going to see the same sort of mistake made in France this time around. Le Pen squeaks through and the transatlantic Trump/Brexit reactionary snowball gathers even more steam.
Why?
How?
Like this:
Watch.
The French white working class is pissed, too.
They’re gonna come out and vote.
Watch.
Look, AG, what we need is the next level analysis.
I agree with you pretty strongly up to a point. And that point is where I look at the numbers from 2008.
The Palin rallies were the precursor of the Trump rallies. And the McCain rallies were also filled with folks who look and act just like folks from Washington County, Pennsylvania.
But the county split its vote in 2008.
And it gave Obama 43% even in 2012.
So, we need more of an explanation that the one you’re relying on.
“…what we need is the next level analysis.”
Definitely more thought needs to be put into the specifics of what the democrats need to do to overcome this situation. But part of the dems problem is what we call “analysis paralysis” where we tend to overthink the what the problem really is.
For all Obama did to help the nation recover from the crash, and the numbers tell the story in that regard, as far as individual working class white folk go, their desperation only intensified. Simple, I know, but its kind of like saying I got ten men, nine are unemployed and one makes a million dollars a year. The “average” income for these ten men is $100K per year, and dems have focused on statistics in that way to say they’ve succeeded, but to those nine men with zero income, nothing has changed. Its made worse by insisting things got better because then if you are one of the nine, now you’re being told you don’t even have a problem.
Offering to continue the Obama approach, and then offering someone who appeared to symbolize the elite closed club of politics to these voters should have been an obvious non starter.
My answer(s):
#1-Trump was way better at it than has been any candidate aiming at this segment in living memory. Better than Reagan, way better than McCain/Palin
#2-Obama was a great pitchman. He has real talent in that department.
and
#3-This voting bloc now sees itself as way worse off now than it has been for many years….more threatened economically and more threatened in terms of the world situation in general. And perhaps most importantly…it has lost all faith in media that are perceived as pro-Permanent Government and all faith in both parties. Trump rattled the Republican cage successfully during the primaries, and then…as he continued to rattle that cage during the campaign…he rattled the Dem cages even harder.
They loved it!!!
Result?
So it goes.
The chances of a Dem rebound?
Slim to none if they continue on their present centrist course.
Slim to none.
Sorry.
So it goes.
Calcification begets death.
AG
#2 is wrong:
Reagan 50.7%
McCain/Palin/GWB/financial meltdown 45.7%
Trump 46.1%
However, #3 is correct. Democrats have been cheering on the aggregate economic indicators while ignoring that income/wealth inequality has increased since ’08. Voters don’t eat GDP — they eat off wages that have been flat while housing/healthcare/food prices have been rising. One candidate offered more of the same and the other claimed that he could fix it (he can’t but at least people felt heard by one of the candidates).
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/24/15375206/respect-trump-voters-truth
Matt’s exactly right about what the truth is but that’s almost exactly what Clinton ran on and it got zero traction. Obama got away with treating people like adults due to his personal charisma (and he still drove a decent number of wingnuts absolutely batty). Clinton treated people like adults and got a temper tantrum in response.
I was reminded today that housing costs are the leading edge of inflation and wage increases are its tail.
You may not have seen this, but I think you will appreciate. Matty obviously did not–it’s all lay back and enjoy the inevitable for neolib economists.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40298-gentrification-represents-a-geography-of-inequality
Now a standalone post.
Why Trump Voters Continue To Support Him? Duh!!!
Please comment there.
Thank you…
ASG
Oh, Christ, please go away
As I posted here, I find this argument unconvincing. The racists were activated by Trump and his alt-right backers in a way that rMoney and McCain never attempted or desired.
That is a big part of Trump’s greater appeal to the racist vote.
But – another big part is the correlation between misogyny/sexism and racism. What looks, by statistical analysis, like a racist vote is, in part, a sexist vote.
Right on que:
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58fcb373e4b00fa7de1502c3?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
And the common refrain with this bunch of racist bullies is the same as it was back when they were snot-nosed spoiled kids: “can’t you take a joke?” Feh.
There is a question for me if Hillary was a sort of Black Swan for sexists. They will never get as such a quintessential liberal feminist as she is. Plus she called them deplorable.
Yikes!
Whom did McCain hate?
Whom did Romney hate?
Whom did Palin hate?
Whom does Trump hate?
(The 2008 election happened when the country was falling down an elevator shaft, too.)
It all kind of dissolves into one conclusion:
You cannot really be said to represent POC without defending their economic interests.
For the most part these economic interests overlap with the WWC who have traditionally voted Democratic.
So the reason these voters left doesn’t matter in the end. And all of the Clinton-Sanders anger is kind of irrelevant too.
There are portions of our agenda we can’t compromise on (abortion, gay rights, civil rights) but that was not enough to cause the collapse in the counties in PA and in FL that lead to our defeat given that these same areas supported Obama.
NBC has a new poll out: and it is quite interesting:
It is possible that the debate over Obamacare has changed what people want out of government.
A good thing.
I am not so sure it is all that hard to come up with policy proposals that would be popular with voters who left.
What I am less sure of is whether we can convince those same voters that the Democrats can be trusted to deliver on those proposals.
“You cannot really be said to represent POC without defending their economic interests. For the most part these economic interests overlap with the WWC who have traditionally voted Democratic.”
Amen.
POC work for a living, go to college or send their kids, buy homes, need healthcare, and every last thing that the WWC say they need. But when it comes to us, the democrats focus has been “civil rights,” “race,” etc. Come to a black church, talk about black heroes of the past, speak in an affected dialect, and that’s it. Is it any wonder the that the black unemployment rate being traditionally at least twice that of the national average has been acceptable by the democrats?
As a POC, abortion, civil rights, etc are important, but the black unemployment rate has traditionally always been higher than the national or white unemployment rate. Black folk are struggling too, and yet all you hear from democrats is hand-wringing over “how do we get these WWC voters to love us again?”
The democrats have been coasting for far too long paying lip service to too much while keeping one eye out for those high drawer donors whose wants are the reason why, in most cases, the middle class is declining and the working classes, of all “colors” are struggling. In the “wealthiest nation on earth.”
Here’s a clue: don’t just talk about, but get serious on jobs, on affordable education, on home ownership; focus on enforcement of fair consumer regulations, for ALL. Real solutions. And not just with the usual incremental, “politics as usual” we’re afraid to win because we might lose approach put forward with extreme caution so as not to offend the paymasters who ultimately call the shots.
And build up leaders with passion and the conviction and courage to go out and speak plainly to people about the issues that affect them, instead of going to the well to pick candidate’s been around forever, simply because its “their turn.”
Its not rocket science.
You know, when I talk to the black people in the state of Arkansas they don’t complain about jobs directly. They complain about the civil right issues that put more black people in prison than white people and for longer for the exact same crime and how that makes it hard to damn near impossible for black people to get or keep a job, let alone a job that pays even half decent. Decent jobs are just right out the window because decent jobs don’t employ convicted felons. And with black people being more likely than white people in the same income category to have been convicted of a felony, there is the cause for a huge part of black unemployment being above white unemployment.
They don’t complain about the ‘Good Ole Boy’ system that always seems to get a white guy a better job title that pays more for the same work.
Civil Rights issues and fighting racism are economic and job issues for black people.
You can come up with all the education grants, affordable schools, and home ownership programs you want, but black people and everyone else down here knows that if you don’t address the civil rights issues and racism before the program gets running almost none of the black people here are going to get anything out of those programs.
What you say is very true. Look a little harder and you will see that the prison pipeline is a recognizable feature of urban/large suburban Democratic regimes. The Ferguson vampire complex that battens on the poors. The violent police rxns to legal protest are from Dem admins.
When Dems jumped on the “law and order” bandwagon, it got amphed up to 11. But you can hardly keep it present in the MSM, can one?
The rural component is more a jobs/corporate rentals system run by Republicans. It is getting so expensive, it is starting to get side-eye from taxcutters. Pricing itself out of business?
So why is this not a BIG ASK from POC for their votes? I think it sank that Baltimore guy to have it exposed.
Institutional racism is what has to be brought down. The problem is that is a matter of cultural persuasion and not government power outside of enforcing the existing laws — which is what Jeff Sessions was installed to prevent.
The political work in the South is substantial; Democratic laziness over the past 30 years has left a mess by not wanting to confront the issue of racism head-on.
They squandered all of the “progressive” messaging of the 1950s and 1960s by completely selling out to business interests.
In retrospect, the worst of it was Jim Hunt, Richard Riley, and Bill Clinton jumping onto business’s notion of what “school reform” was. I admired them for wringing out more money for schools when they did it in the late 1980s, but it led to the monstrosity of charter schools and “No Child Left Behind”. And it allowed the system of white boards of education for black schools to remain in place in rural areas.
This
is certainly the key question, but the question that needs to be answered before it’s even on the table is the one that csm asks in the adjacent comment: can the Democrats even be convinced to put candidates and platform before the voters that offer them that choice?
I don’t see how this happens other than by organized intervention from the left. Absent that, all the inertia in the DP is headed in the wrong direction.
The rest of that WaPo poll Booman linked up top is even worse news for Dems.
For me the early results of that question is not so much. But it is encouraging that Perez is touring with Sanders, the non democrat.
To be honest I had originally thought that the whole Perez-Ellison fight was a shiny object — taking a break from rearranging the deck chairs to squabble over who gets to be the captain. But it’s still early days; that may too been too harsh and cynical a judgement. Then the question is, how much institutional support for real change is behind Perez, vs. to what extent is he a figurehead for business as usual? I don’t have a hard answer for this; I’m not sure that anybody here does. This does seem to be a state issue — what states are Perez and Sanders touring in?
“It was fitting. Because while Perez and Sanders weren’t visiting Reno, Chicago, Fargo and Minnesota, their itinerary was kind of close: Maine, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona and Nevada.”
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/22/525089501/sanders-unity-tour-with-dnc-chair-exposes-rifts-but-also-sug
gests-common-goals
Gosh, did the local birdwatchers in those red states add the DNC to their lifetime list?
I see that Texas is on that list. And you’re in Texas, right? What do you think of this:
Texas is the Future
Hot air from Cockburn? Or is there something to it?
Texas is Blue Doggy for the most part. Sam Rayburn Dems long gone. So neoliberal is probably the best you will get from us. And lots of Catholics make for abortion squishes.
I’ll take a blue dog over a republican any day of the week. Get enough blue dogs, you get a majority again. Of course, we could all hold our breath until states like Texas start producing Warren like Dems, but then, our faces would be the only things turning blue.
Better quality Dems in the Midwest and East. Cheaper seats, too.
That may be true, but we’ll never sniff the majority in the senate with only those from the midwest and east.
True, but if we lose those from the midwest and east we’ll never get a senate majority either. When Snowe left the Dems gained a vote for majority leader, when Collins goes we should be ready to gain another.
Yes, true. You kind of reinforce my point with this as well. Angus King isn’t a Sanders or Warren type democrat, but he’s one more seat closer to a majority. If i could get a couple of Joe Manchin types out of Texas, instead of Cruz, Cornyn, I’d be damn happy.
Make sure your deep blue senators are progressive, and be pretty tolerant of what it takes to win West Virginia.
It really isn’t complicated.
So much this.
Uh huh….http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/san-antonio-mayor-blames-poverty-on-broken-people-who-arent-in-a-rel
ationship-with-their-creator/
There is a reason Perez is traveling the country with Bernie.
I do think among the people I talk (and some of these are pretty mainstream Democrats) to that there a sense of urgency around some of the issues Bernie raised that wasn’t their before.
It’s not so much that they really agree with Bernie so much as that they think the Party has not done a good job on those types of issues.
So I think some people get it.
But the rubber meets the road when the politicians needs to raise money.
And that is exactly where Perez has been embarrassing himself with bafflegab–mega donors. (What a great word.)
Hopefully they are talking to people. The rallies are less important than the conversations with people on the ground.
A good deal of politics is done in small events. If they are meeting with local activists instead of big dollar donors in the Hamptons it is a win.
The Party needs to get the fuck out of DC and NY and listen.
I actually like it.
The only conclusions I can draw from this are
The abandonment has already occurred. That was the danger in McConnell’s regime of “NO” to Obama that the Democrats in Congress (and most of us as well) did not grasp. Those people voted for Obama in 2008 (those who did) as a last hope for a better life. The GOP strategy was to make sure that those people at least would never see a better life and would blame it on Obama, not them.
This time around the great hope is that kicking “the furriners” out will reduce the labor force and bid up wages. What Trump has been doing from Day 1 with force and stretching the law as need be is kicking “the furriners” out. And Trump voters, for now, are savoring the fear on Hispanic faces. And the brutality that ICE has shown. And the dismay of Silicon Valley employers of H1-B workers. It hasn’t changed their economic situation yet, but he delivered on his first step to the max. And is fighting any way he can against the courts’ attempts to stop him. They do not yet know they have been further abandoned.
Obama did have a honeymoon in which racist sentiment received scorn from even some of the GOP until August of 2010. And the great “death panel” campaign of the GOP. What happened between January 2009 and August 2010 if analyzed from the perspective of those voters destroyed their hope and turned them angry.
How does the opposition to the current war and austerity political establishment move back from our own abandonment to get a polity again that knows how to build peace and prosperity? That’s the hard question of the moment. And yes, that does take at least 175,000 per Congressional District in 218 Congressional District distributed enough geographically to also create a majority in the US Senate. And it does that overwhelming state legislative gerrymanders in order to take back state legislatures. The mechanics are clear-cut and Daily Kos’s “Nuts and Bolts of Politics” series can get you down in the weeds enough to know what campaigns require.
Very simple. The people they’ve been taught to hate are, in their eyes, finally getting the comeuppance they deserve. Early days of a Presidential administration are the ones of vicarious pleasures of victory; you must be patient with Congress.
That is no longer what we need to figure out.
We need to figure out how to have a positive vision of policy that will deal with these people when they discover that their abandonment persists. One of the big things that it must respect (true across all ethnicities) is the sense of dignity as view from within their particular cultural norms. That includes a pride in their location and a decision not to move elsewhere. Spatial justice is something that academic geographers have studied. Maybe now is a good time for a political movement, or party, to frame policies that redress long-term geographical injustices. That means that economics cannot be the sole factor in the fate of communities. Nor can the value that the community supposedly returns to the economy be the sole basis of its prosperity or lack of prosperity.
More than a matter of racial resentment, the 2016 election was a matter of geographical resentment. Free untrammeled enterprise without government regulation will not get these communities where they want to be in 50 years. Figuring out what specifically will get them where they want to be and having them understand that is the key to the political future of the US beyond Trump.
We have less than 5% unemployment. I know Sanders and Trump screamed about the horrible economy, but by the numbers it’s just not. Survey results of Trump voters show this too. Now that their man is in there, it’s all good.
This isn’t to say there aren’t problems, but things are not the hellhole Sanders and Trump presented. I suspect you’ll see Trump, if he can get his act together, make a strong case saying that too in his reelection bid if things don’t take a dive.
Honestly, I think a huge deal has to do with Obama himself. As great as he was on the stump, he wasn’t awesome at messaging, certainly not in the way Clinton was. Most presidents would crow about less than 5% unemployment.
The gains post 2008 have never made it to rural areas.
In any event citing the unemployment number ignores a multitude of economic indicators showing things are not good. Income is not where it was before the financial crisis, and real median family income is lower than is was in 1999.
I don’t know if there are any policies that can solve that, if you were starting a business or expanding a business where would you go? A big city with all its people & resources or a rural location with few people and few resources?
The other problem you run into with many rural areas is that the locals are often hostile to outsiders, or in a better case scenario suspicious of outsiders. Community leaders themselves may not be keen on bringing in businesses that are viewed as upsetting the traditional order. So there is a lose-lose situation that plays out. Small towns lose population due to attrition (the old-timers die eventually, and the youth move out due to lack of opportunity and services), and the very behaviors needed to stop the proverbial bleeding will be fought against by the very same old-timers. What I do know is that the part of rural America I lived in for a decade has more ghost towns now than when I left (at least of my last trip through there a couple years ago). Hate to see it happen, but nothing seems to stop it.
I think there’s also a little built in victimhood that they are lashing out from. Those really small towns were self-sustaining and people are saying that those “jobs” were shipped overseas or stolen by Walmart or some other boogeyman. When if fact the problem was with farming automation and advanced technology there just isn’t as many people working around those towns anymore and definitely not enough to support any size of a town.
So that makes people more isolated and more likely to try and protect what they have even if doing that costs them everything like you said.
There was a time when the unemployment statistics meant full-time jobs. And there was a time when the economic target was less than 3% employment.
The practical content of both of those figures has changed on the ground in terms of people being able to support themselves and lay claim to the “American Dream”. The economy is still horrible for a lot of people. It is horrible enough that discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and other factors is not offset by economic penalties.
In my opinion, Obama himself takes too much of the blame for a Democratic Congress that did not see their futures in strong support of a black President. Both on policy and political defense, they were AWOL during the critical 2009-2010 year.
It depends on where you are as to whether there is an economic hellhole. Like I said, spatial justice is a huge issue. What that means concretely is the cumulative impact of location studies that assumed redlining, certain minimum sizes of enterprises, and cultural aversion for certain places have exaggerated spatial inequalities. You can see this in the frequent 10 best cities to live in articles.
I very much agree with you about spatial justice.
How do you fashion a program to address: maybe I am less sure about that.
It used to be how money was allocated in federal programs back in the LBJ era. Then Congress in 1966 started channeling everything through state governors offices.
Let me think of what potential remedies to press for under current conditions. It does require not giving business and the rich everything they ask for. It involves active enforcement against redlining. It might even require something that breaks up “exclusive” (class-based) neighborhoods and untrammeled gentrification.
Can you see who immediately would see justice as “draconian”?
That unemployment number leaves a lot unanswered, That number includes millions of part time workers who can’t find full time work and the participation rate has fallen a good deal in past years. There is a hidden work force waiting for work. Plus there are all the issues with inequality wage growth and suboptimal GDP growth. And this does not account for universal health care or college debt and costs. It may not be a hellhole but it is not great for millions out there, often in rural areas.
Even in urban and suburban areas we’re right now on the cusp of the bottom dropping out in retail. Those (mostly) part-time workers are becoming unemployed at a rate that is dwarfing the job losses in the coal and steel industries.
I agree. Retail is in a lot of trouble competing with Amazon and on line shopping.
Private equity has played its part, too, in weakening large retail orgs. Take a look at the spring victims and their associates.
So is Amazon the chicken or the egg?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/wolf-richter-private-equity-in-the-thick-of-bricks-and-mortar
-retail-implosion.html
Yet? Or ever?
Do you ever talk to your blog colleague LeTourneau? She seems accepting of a suburban realignment that you have been warning about. A conversation on that might be interesting.
Mr. Longman may be right that the evidence of racism as a reason for Trump’s supporters to vote for him is thinner than some contend; and figuring out precisely why so many who supported Obama did not support Clinton is a central tactical issue.
But what we do know is that Trump’s racism, misogyny, ignorance, lying, and lack of any remotely adequate qualifications of knowledge, experience, and character for the presidency were not disqualifying. Those who voted for him had plenty of opportunity to understand these things about him; if they did not choose to understand them, that was a choice. Whatever was in the hearts of these people, they voted for racism, misogyny, falsehood, fear, and hatred.
At the moment, what the Democrats have is mainly, as C.S. Lewis put it in “Till We Have Faces,” “words, words — to be led out to battle against other words.” The Democrats are not obliged to win. They are obliged to use their words to advocate thoughtful, humane policies based on truth and evidence. That may not be enough. It may be necessary to let the deluded people who voted for Trump’s lies experience the actual consequences of doing so — along with all their (and Trump’s) innocent victims. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “Experience keeps a hard school, but fools will learn in no other — and scarce in that.”
I’m reminded of a comment in Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”: “The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority . . . other than through the tragic logic of history. . . . If [voters] voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead–and responsibility was then forced on [them] willy-nilly and destroyed both [them] and [their] foundationless temple.” We have every obligation to try to prevent that from happening; but there is nothing we can do to ensure that it doesn’t, if enough people continue to behave as Trump’s voters did.
Very true. “Those who voted for him had plenty of opportunity to understand these things about him; if they did not choose to understand them, that was a choice. Whatever was in the hearts of these people, they voted for racism, misogyny, falsehood, fear, and hatred.”
It continues to bother me. I understand what may happen in some areas of the south. But it seemed so our of character to see this in the mid west.
Honest question Booman, does one have a moral obligation to save a group of people from themselves who are actively trying to destroy your life to the point you die and/or advocating for your death via government enforced law?
Has anything really happened that would change someone’s opinion?
Those who are paying a lot of attention see failures, but those are mostly failure to perform. Nothing that’s going to change people’s lives immediately has happened yet, has it? There are some executive orders that are going to generate issues down the road … but right now…..
A supporter sees acting tough in the desert and North Korea, more Trump campaign showbiz, and baffling discussion about “stuff” in Congress. Seems ok.
I don’t see how someone who proudly voted for Trump would back away within 100 days; that just seems far too optimistic. He needs to fail repeatedly for regret to set in (and/or preside over a recession). It’s not clear that he has really failed at anything yet – the travel ban, healthcare overhaul, tax “reform,” etc. could all still occur in one shape or another, and Trump is such a shameless liar that he would claim that the forms in which they emerged were 100% consistent with his campaign pledges (and many of his disengaged voters may not even notice or care). Moreover, while the blessing of his first 100 days is that hasn’t been able to do much of consequence, the curse is that he gets to take credit for Obama’s economy/accomplishments to the extent that they help him.
It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to chip away at him. Were we to win control of the House and/or Senate in 2018, we could stop his agenda and also begin mounting investigations, which could really start demoralizing his base.
We think of the Bush years now as if it was inevitable that even a lot of white conservatives would turn on him but that’s not true. It took an inconceivably (before Trump) level of incompetence before the non-crazies turn against him
The turning point was the strike at Social Security. That was Bush’s first political defeat at the hands of Democrats. You have to start getting wins against the guy in order to shake his supporters. You CAN’T simply rely on incompetence.
even that was small potatoes to what happened afterward, yeah it was a political loss but I don’t recall a large back lash from the right that he lost that one
It was a major event in stiffening the backbobe of democrats and gave the base hope Bush could be beaten. Situation is somewhat different now.
I’d be curious to see any research indicating what these voters’ economic, and quality of life priorities are and how or why they don’t think Democrats share those priorities. I’d like to know if the science verifies what my gut tells me. when it comes to the disappearing middle class and the increasing financial insecurity they and all of us are suffering, they don’t see a clear alternative plan from Democrats. The fact that Obamas DOJ vigorously defended bankers during and after the 2008 crash, and Obama himself is cashing in now with a $400,000 gratuity from Cantor Fitzgerald, doesn’t help. If Trump voters don’t see Democrats as sharing their social, tribal, moral values as well, why not vote for the GOP Demagogue? At least with him they get to see liberals and brown people cry.
Just look at Bill and Hill’s fat “speaking fees” from TBTF banks and you know where their priorities are.
Now Obama is bust collecting his 30 pieces of silver that he hardly needs.