Because Democrats are responsible for the death of King Coal? I think the price of natural gas had something to do with it.
I don’t know if coal fired power plants can be adapted to natural gas. Either adaptation or building new power plants would be very expensive.
Natural gas tops coal as top source of electricity in US:
There’s a ton of capital expenditure involved in replacing the equipment at a power plant, far more than just running a pipe and sticking a new burner in the old furnace. But it’s possible and often makes financial sense to retire the coal system and install a combined-cycle gas turbine system next to it, reconnect the wires, and fire it up.
Exactly where they should have been, representing the interests of everybody’s environment, including poor whites’.
Do you think the average Swede or Dane is? And yet they do seem to pick 'em.
Liberals like to gripe about the “Southern Strategy” that won over many working-class white to the Republican side. What they conveniently forget is that the Democratic Party leadership made a conscious decision to boot working-class whites out of the New Deal coalition at the same time Richard Nixon started trying to win them over.
Under the guidance of Cal-Berkeley president Fred Dutton, the Democrats amde a calculated decision to abandon the white working class, and rebuild the party by appealing to the New Left (i.e. Dutton’s students) and ethnic minorities. The Democrats stopped even pretending to care about the white working class, whom they regarded as ungrateful, unreliable bastards.
It’s not a coincidence that movies like ***Joe ***and TV shows like All in the Family came along in the early Seventies. That will show you how the Hollywood Left had come to view the American working man: as a stupid, dangerous bigot.
Since the early Seventies, the Democrats have been “a coalition of the fringes.” The Democratic coalition includes the super highly educated AND the completely uneducated, the very rich AND the very poor. And the ONLY thing these groups really have in common is disdain for the white folks in the middle.
A white Sociology professor at UCLA and a welfare mom in Compton almost have nothing in common, but will both vote a straight Democratic ticket.
Sounds about right.
It’s nonsense. The white working class abandoned the Dems because of the Civil Rights Act. Does the Hard Hat Riot ring a bell?
That’s what you’d like to tell yourself. But the white working class voted overwhelmingly for LBJ in 1964, in spite of the Civil Rights Act.
The Fred Duttons of the world saw the Hard Hat riots and had to decide, “Are we the party of the hippies or of the blue collar workers we built our coalition around 40 years ago?”
They went with the hippies, drove out the hard hats, and told themselves that the white working class were stupid bigots whose interests could be safely ignored.
Why can’t both be true?
Eh? I said nothing about the death of King coal. I talked about Hillary’s recently announced plan to close coal mines and put thousands of coalminers out of a job.
Sweden and Denmark don’t share America’s proud tradition of being dumb as shit.
They have no choice but to vote for liars. This is politics we’re talking about.
And please don’t even try to tell me Trump isn’t.
I’ve seen no evidence of this at all. History has shown time and time again that the one voting block most pandered to in this country are working class whites. They have more clout than any other group in this country other than rich businessmen.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten the insanity that was the 2008 presidential election. Remember Hilary Clinton trying to convince America that Obama was too unelectable to win the general? Her claim had nothing to do with minorities and other “fringe” groups, and all to do with appealing to uneducated, blue-collar whites. You know, the kind of folks who politicians on both sides have to pay lip service to in order to win the swing states. The whole wearing a button down flannel and rolling up your sleeves schtick is part and parcel of American politics.
I actually think the pandering that has gone on is one of the reason we see such anger from working class whites. It has raised their expectations and made them feel extra entitled. Yes, they are taking the brunt of outsourcing and economic trends…but so are many minorities. Why the difference in outrage levels? Because minorities have a lot of experience feeling disenfranchised and alienated from power. So much experience in fact that they are generally too cynical to fall for charlatans like Trump. Working class whites, apparently not so much.
Take it up with adaher. He is the one that said the lies have to stop.
Well of course he is. But Trump supporters say the reason they like him is because the establishment candidates they elected in the past didn’t do what they promised. Oh, but this time, this time it will be different. Those voters are morons. And don’t tell me they aren’t.
But, appealing to the new left and minorities did not in any way constitute abandoning the WWWs. If the latter decided they did not like what the Democratic Party was becoming, that’s all on their own dumb asses, nobody asked them to leave. If my racist uncle stalks out of my house because I invited a black to dinner, I have not abandoned him.
On the issues of trade and immigration, pretty much all voters know where the political class stands: for liberalization, and what restrictions there are, they don’t want to enforce. They’ve learned that from campaign after campaign where politicians tell them they are on their side and we’ll renegotiate NAFTA and oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership and well put in biometric entry/exit systems and go after employers who hire workers illegally and then they get into office and do the opposite.
So yeah, voters know they are being lied to. With Clinton especially, how could they not know? She negotiated TPP but now says she opposes it.
The problem isn’t that Democrats abandoned white workers for minority workers, it’s that Democrats abandoned white workers for upper class environmentalists.
But that does not really give them clout. The problem is they get pandered to but not served. Once in office, pols will only do something for them if it costs the rich businessmen no money.