There are only 75,000 coal miners in the whole country:
See the thing is that is just not a true statement. The alignments have moved, they are not the same, but they are still based on basic demographics more than anything else.
The GOP had sucked up White non-college educated (those that continued to vote anyway), especially rural ones, while the Democrats have become more dominant in surburban America in addition to the cities. The business conservative and neo-con elements of the GOP stayed in and putatively stayed at the wheel of the clown car but this cycle is them rejected as drivers.
To me that’s the big story.
Trump as candidate puts the traditional members of the GOP in an existential crisis, a battle for the future of the brand.
Do they go all-in on Trump knowing that he is not likely to win, but moreso knowing that he moves the party identity further away from them and into the resentful ignorant White camp … erasing gains they’ve made in some demographics (the recent Star of David tweet debacle one small example) and push back any future progress to make the brand acceptable to members of minority groups and college-educated White women who might otherwise find some appeal to a conservative message if only it did not come bundled with resentment and/or restrictions targeted against them and theirs?
By the way, PastTense, great post username combo!
A point which I thought was obvious enough that I didn’t need to belabor it, but thank you for doing so for me.
The survival strategy is to take their lumps this year and then try to bounce back in the midterms. The delegate revolt is wishful thinking, but it will provide some political cover for the less backward-thinking elements of the party.
The Trump/white supremacist road is doomed to failure in the long term as cultural demographics change (and, hopefully, some of the Pubbie manipulations of voting requirements and gerrymandering are undone). It’s competitive now, but it’s slowly slipping away.
Looking for more on the rural/urban divide I found this very interesting WSJ bitfrom* before *the cycle, in 2014:
Fairly prescient I think.
Thing is that the Democrat will still prevail in the cities and will more clearly win the suburbs this time. Rural White non-college educated, especially males, not, but they may, as usual, not bother to vote when the day comes.
Johnny Ace, I agree. Taking their lumps now though does mean distancing themselves from Trump despite his role as their candidate. Not sure if Ryan’s half-measures of endorsing Trump but condemning individual statements that he makes will be enough but dare they totally disrespect the rest of the clown car? (Leave aside the fact that no respect is due.) The downside of that for them is that they are percieved as having tossed the White Working Class that has come to them under the bus … they won’t per se go to the D side but good turnout hopes in the future, other than for Congresscritters who promise to burn the whole thing down, not too likely.
I was raised in the Republican Party, pro-free-trade, anti-racist–a lot like Hillary Clinton, actually. I didn’t take the whinging about NAFTA seriously at the time, because it seemed disconnected from reality to me.
But I now think that the Clintons and their wing of the Democratic Party managed to throw away a lot of support–maybe without realizing they were doing it, or less charitably, without even caring. They took labor for granted, even as they let unions wither away. They saw minorities as their base, but passed a crime bill that cost many minority men voting rights. Democrats took the poor for granted until the poor stopped voting altogether, and then decided they were finally free to chase Wall Street money. And of course, they went free trade, which is seen as class war to many labor types.
I should give figures like Newt Gingrich credit for turning movement conservatives into an organized, disciplined party and the absolutely dominant power in this country. But a few Democrats have sure seemed eager to run away from the union membership, even though that union membership was the very people that got out their party’s vote. These “middle-class focused” Democrats include the Clintons, maybe Rahm Emanuel, and especially Chuck Schumer.
Actually, I think the Clintons & Bob Rubin tipped over into “upper-class focused.” But the Clintons have been about their own upward mobility for a long time.
The Democrats won’t do that, though.
Insulting Trump by calling him Drumpf is a losing move. It’s petty and stupid. There’s nothing insulting about being named Drumpf; it’s a dialectical variant of Trump, that’s all. But Democrats mocking it means the supposedly anti-racist party is insulting German-heritage names, thus “proving” to the voters in previously winnable but largely German-American states like Michigan and Missouri that the Democrats are “the real racists.” I understand why John Oliver mocks it. He admits that he has the anti-European bigotry of many English. But the Democratic Party should have shut this down and didn’t.
Making fun of Santorum and Trump for having funny names is a good way to remind German and Italian heritage voters that this is deep down the nativist party of Woodrow Wilson, and nobody’s friend, and to signal to, say, Korean-Americans that they’ll dump them too with little provocation, and then tell racist jokes about them.
Now, some Democrats can’t help it. They really are racists and snobs who, like Rush Limbaugh, think funny names are the height of humor. But all of them? No. I now seriously believe that there are “leaders” in the Democratic Party who have decided they don’t want those white working class votes, because they want to lose Republican tax rates are better for their own bank accounts both directly and indirectly.
They have a role to play in this kayfabe we call politics, and that is to keep losing.
Errr no. ‘Drumpf’ is about pointing out that he’s as much from immigrant stock as those he rails against. If anything, it’s anti-racist.
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They really are racists and snobs who, like Rush Limbaugh, think funny names are the height of humor.
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Like, say, Trump and his followers?
I think its a little bit of both.
A decent amount of the working class whites do include those with lesser than open minds on issues of race and sexual orientation.
However, some of it is the cultural elitism that the national Democratic party is perceived to be associated with, such as the lesser amount of rhetorical moral clarity against evil things like Islamic terrorism, “intersectionality,” and transgenders.
The Democratic party has plenty of moral clarity on Islamic terrorism, transgender issues, and related issues. It’s just that many working class white people are ignorant, bigoted, or both, and they would prefer that the party present an ignorant and/or bigoted “rhetorical moral clarity”. Thankfully, the party doesn’t do this, though the party is still far from perfect.
What this mostly did was make me think about how little Drumpf is used. I checked search and found that in most threads in Elections only one or two people use the term. I almost never see it elsewhere, though that’s biased by my reading political sites for news rather than commentary. Where do you see it used?
As for whether unions “withered away” because of Democratic neglect, my take is predictably otherwise. Unions were heavily tied to manufacturing jobs. Those vanished because they moved away from the Rust Belt. Manufacturers, heavily Republican, moved them first to nonunion states* and then the rest of the world offered cheaper labor competition. Republicans as a party fought and demonized unions every moment for the last 40 odd years. And unions were their own second-worst enemy, fighting any change with a pig-headed insistence to keep jobs even when downsizing and retraining could have made huge differences.
*Why were nonunion states nonunion? Mostly because they had cheap black labor to exploit. They certainly didn’t want blacks organized in any way, and especially not unions. Those states also were the loudest against immigrants. Remember that in the early 20th century, eastern and southern Europeans were often considered a lesser race, one impossible to integrate into American democracy, and the target of the 1924 Immigration Act that virtually halted immigration from non-Aryan countries. The morality of those now Red States accepting manufacturing jobs fleeing the melting pot Rust Belt is, shall we say, picturesque. But not in a way that anyone ought to celebrate.
Actually, I think the “Drumpf” usage I heard was mostly **SlackerInc **here, and John Oliver of course. At some point it started seeming to me to be a sort of English-making-fun-of-foreigners thing. It’s not that big a deal, but it’s not smart either. Thankfully, I think it’s died down–or I’m just managing to ignore the sort that use it.
It may just be that it’s a silly name made even goofier to Anglo-Saxon ears with that final f, but somehow it feels bigoted to me. “Trump” means the same thing, and is just as silly. So it’s the blatant Germanization that’s supposed to make him sound dumb? Um…
Um … it was just explained that no that is not the point of the use of the name. Insisting that it is after it was clearly explained seems a bit odd.
Mind you I think it was an overused comment from very early on and found its constant use by the few not at all clever but that does not justify such distortion.