Middle America

[Wesley_Clark]

@Kent_Clark

First off, I said Buttagieg was trying to exploit the sentiment, not that he himself was a gen-you-wine Middle American.

If you want a few “Middle American” concerns that don’t have anything to do with skin color, try these:

1. The collapse of blue-collar industries that have been sent overseas.

2. The WalMartization of retailing and the death of small town retailing

3. Consolidation of the farming industry

4. Lack of healthcare outside of anywhere except large cities

5. Infrastructure

6. Education, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and all those other pesky social problems that some people seem to think only exist in cities.

For point 4, when my uncle had a stroke he not only had to wait at the local hospital for hours, but then they had to transfer him to a nearby large city so he could get proper treatment. No idea how much the extra time lost hurt his recovery.

I guess a lot of us are demoralized. I mean the democrats can come up with valid, well thought out policy agendas for all 6 of these items but they’re still barely going to win 30% of the white rural vote due to identity politics. I mean for several of those points Hillary Clinton had thoughtful policy ideas, and people voted for the bombastic moron with fake answers instead due to identity politics.

Maybe strong policy ideas may take 5% of voters who’d normally vote GOP and switch them to democrats. In that case, democrats would only lose the rural white vote by 30 points (65-35) instead of a 40 point margin (70-30). May not sound like much, but its 100,000 net democratic votes for every million white rural voters.

[Little_Nemo]

@Kent_Clark

Lack of healthcare outside of anywhere except large cities

Well, we have one political party that has pushed for a public health care system that says health care should be a right for every person and we have one political party that supports a private health care system that says health care should be provided based on where the most profit can be made. Which platform do you think is more likely to see health care expanded out into remote rural areas with low populations?

[Kent_Clark]

@Little_Nemo

Well, we have one political party that has pushed for a public health care system that says health care should be a right for every person and we have one political party that supports a private health care system that says health care should be provided based on where the most profit can be made. Which platform do you think is more likely to see health care expanded out into remote rural areas with low populations?

If anyone in this thread is expecting me to say anything remotely complimentary about the Republican party, they’re looking at the wrong poster.

The bigger question is, are Democratic candidates aware of “Middle American” concerns? And will they make the 2016 nominee’s fatal mistake of seeming to be unaware that there are voters outside of big cities?

[Acsenray]

@Yankees_1996_Champs

The term “Middle America” has been used for decades to describe “flyover America, Heartland America”, voters and people, predominately white Americans who have moderate views that swing to Republican, Democratic, or Independent.

Richard Nixon won them. Ronald Reagan won them. George HW Bush won them. Ross Perot got a chunk of the votes to get 19 percent in 1992. Bill Clinton won them. George W. Bush won them. A black man named Barack Obama from Middle America won them.

Donald Trump won them.

A lot of people on Twitter, especially left-wing people dismiss Middle America’s concerns.

Newsflash: You have to compete in Middle America to win. Yes, white voters are declining overall, but they still count and you have to cobble a coalition.

This would go to all parties.

What do you think about Middle America?

I dispute your definition of “middle America.” I am a middle-class coastal liberal from the Midwest. I’m middle America. Stop trying to define me out of the mainstream.

[DinoR]

@Wesley_Clark

To me the only way to win them over is to rebuild the labor movement. Rural whites are overwhelmingly republican, unless they join a labor union. Then they become democrats.

Union households were another area where Clinton struggled. Nationwide she was fine but it hid a deeper issue. Trump cut into the normal margin by double digits in those Midwest states that swung in 2016. She even lost the union household vote in Ohio.

Getting them to join unions isn’t a panacea when the correlation is that weak.

[Little_Nemo]

@Kent_Clark

The bigger question is, are Democratic candidates aware of “Middle American” concerns? And will they make the 2016 nominee’s fatal mistake of seeming to be unaware that there are voters outside of big cities?

The Democrats are aware of Middle American concerns and are offering proposals and platforms to address them. But it’s the old “What’s the matter with Kansas?” issue. There are people who will reject the genuine help that the Democrats are offering because they’d rather listen to the lies the Republicans are offering.

The Democrats will say “Yes, the economy is changing and some jobs are disappearing. Vote for us and we will start programs to help you learn the skills to get new jobs.”

The Republicans will say “You don’t have a job? It’s because the Democrats gave your job to a Mexican. The Democrats hate good hard-working Americans like you. Vote for us and we’ll stand up to the Democrats and kick out those Mexicans.”

The Democrats offer you solutions to your problems. The Republicans offer you somebody to blame for your problems.

[Translucent_Daydream]

@Little_Nemo

The Democrats are aware of Middle American concerns and are offering proposals and platforms to address them. But it’s the old “What’s the matter with Kansas?” issue. There are people who will reject the genuine help that the Democrats are offering because they’d rather listen to the lies the Republicans are offering.

The Democrats will say “Yes, the economy is changing and some jobs are disappearing. Vote for us and we will start programs to help you learn the skills to get new jobs.”

The Republicans will say “You don’t have a job? It’s because the Democrats gave your job to a Mexican. The Democrats hate good hard-working Americans like you. Vote for us and we’ll stand up to the Democrats and kick out those Mexicans.”

The Democrats offer you solutions to your problems. The Republicans offer you somebody to blame for your problems.

When is a democrat going to be honest with folks and say, “The reason the “Mexican” got the job is because he is cheaper than a robot for now, but you are already more expensive than the robot. The “Mexican” is going to lose that sweet poverty-dollar an hour job in a few years to the fucking robot as well.”

I hate to break it to you guys, but thats whats coming for us all. I just opened up a food laboratory in the Midwest that five years ago would be working at least 5 - 7 people. Its only me here today and a bunch of machines that, due to recent advancements, replaced all of those people and outworks them 4 to 1 on any given day. The only reason I am around still at this laboratory is because I know how to program and repair these robot overlords.

Is there a plan from the Dems on this? I’m sorry but “job retraining” isn’t going to cover it. I have the ability to service at least 15 - 20 of these food labs loaded with robots. Robots are way better than they were, they don’t break down much anymore, and when they do, parts are way more likely to be on the shelf.

I know that the GOP doesn’t really have a plan for this, but if the Dems don’t get one and start hammering this hard, we are all screwed. From the front lines of the robot uprising, this seems to me way more important than healthcare or anything else.

(I am using “Mexican” incorrectly in the same fashion that people often do when talking about these things. I mean no offense to any people from Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America.)

[JKellyMap]

Translucent Daydream, that’s a fascinating post, right from the “front lines” of the major trend that underlies so much of what gets expressed as support for Trump and in other ways — in the Midwest US and far beyond.

[bump]

Maybe I’m off base on this, but I’ve never really perceived “middle America” as being a geographic descriptor, or a code-word for “rural”.

I always understood it to refer to a certain socio-economic strata of American society that was predominantly if not wholly white, predominantly blue collar skilled labor (factory/plant workers, farmers, tradesmen, firemen/cops). They were mostly somewhere between the middle of the middle class to the upper part of working class- i.e. not economically busted, but not flush either. They aren’t overly educated- most are high school and maybe a little technical school. They tend to be fundamentally little-c conservative- if it’s not broke, don’t fix it would be the mantra of this group, and they put a lot of stock in tradition and the way things were- things were good for their parents and grandparents, so they must have been doing things right, would be my interpretation of the worldview. This translates into a rather muscular foreign policy, and a domestic policy that aims to keep things they way they are, or even revert to past ways.

So when confronted with more educated or less insular people, they tend to be dismissive, because a lot of the time, the ideas they’re espousing run counter to the tradition and reverence for the past that they value so highly, especially if the new ideas are going to be costly.

[Procrustus]

@bump

Maybe I’m off base on this, but I’ve never really perceived “middle America” as being a geographic descriptor, or a code-word for “rural”.

I always understood it to refer to a certain socio-economic strata of American society that was predominantly if not wholly white, predominantly blue collar skilled labor (factory/plant workers, farmers, tradesmen, firemen/cops). They were mostly somewhere between the middle of the middle class to the upper part of working class- i.e. not economically busted, but not flush either. They aren’t overly educated- most are high school and maybe a little technical school. They tend to be fundamentally little-c conservative- if it’s not broke, don’t fix it would be the mantra of this group, and they put a lot of stock in tradition and the way things were- things were good for their parents and grandparents, so they must have been doing things right, would be my interpretation of the worldview. This translates into a rather muscular foreign policy, and a domestic policy that aims to keep things they way they are, or even revert to past ways.

So when confronted with more educated or less insular people, they tend to be dismissive, because a lot of the time, the ideas they’re espousing run counter to the tradition and reverence for the past that they value so highly, especially if the new ideas are going to be costly.

hmmm. There certainly are people like that. I’ve just never heard them referred to as “middle America.” More like “white working class.” The OP mentioned “flyover country” and “heartland,” both of which (I think) are geographic descriptors.

[bump]

@Procrustus

hmmm. There certainly are people like that. I’ve just never heard them referred to as “middle America.” More like “white working class.” The OP mentioned “flyover country” and “heartland,” both of which (I think) are geographic descriptors.

Sure, but I’m pretty convinced that when politicians talk about “middle America”, they’re not talking about merely the people who live in those geographical areas. I think it’s a sort of shorthand for the group I mentioned, as they’re pretty thick on the ground in those areas, and less so on the East and West coasts.

[RTFirefly]

@Translucent_Daydream

When is a democrat going to be honest with folks and say, “The reason the “Mexican” got the job is because he is cheaper than a robot for now, but you are already more expensive than the robot. The “Mexican” is going to lose that sweet poverty-dollar an hour job in a few years to the fucking robot as well.”

I hate to break it to you guys, but thats whats coming for us all. I just opened up a food laboratory in the Midwest that five years ago would be working at least 5 - 7 people. Its only me here today and a bunch of machines that, due to recent advancements, replaced all of those people and outworks them 4 to 1 on any given day. The only reason I am around still at this laboratory is because I know how to program and repair these robot overlords.

Is there a plan from the Dems on this? I’m sorry but “job retraining” isn’t going to cover it. I have the ability to service at least 15 - 20 of these food labs loaded with robots. Robots are way better than they were, they don’t break down much anymore, and when they do, parts are way more likely to be on the shelf.

I know that the GOP doesn’t really have a plan for this, but if the Dems don’t get one and start hammering this hard, we are all screwed. From the front lines of the robot uprising, this seems to me way more important than healthcare or anything else.

(I am using “Mexican” incorrectly in the same fashion that people often do when talking about these things. I mean no offense to any people from Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America.)

And what are we going to do about all the secretarial jobs that vanished when word processing software and cheap computer file storage made them superfluous?

I keep hearing about the robot apocalypse which will happen when robots take old jobs away faster than new jobs get created, but there are just too many things that robots can’t do well.

Dems don’t need a plan for this. They just need a plan to keep us at or near full employment (Warren’s got a plan for that :)), and make sure that people with jobs can live on them (the Dems in general have plans for that).

[Little_Nemo]

@Translucent_Daydream

When is a democrat going to be honest with folks and say, “The reason the “Mexican” got the job is because he is cheaper than a robot for now, but you are already more expensive than the robot. The “Mexican” is going to lose that sweet poverty-dollar an hour job in a few years to the fucking robot as well.”

I hate to break it to you guys, but thats whats coming for us all. I just opened up a food laboratory in the Midwest that five years ago would be working at least 5 - 7 people. Its only me here today and a bunch of machines that, due to recent advancements, replaced all of those people and outworks them 4 to 1 on any given day. The only reason I am around still at this laboratory is because I know how to program and repair these robot overlords.

Is there a plan from the Dems on this? I’m sorry but “job retraining” isn’t going to cover it. I have the ability to service at least 15 - 20 of these food labs loaded with robots. Robots are way better than they were, they don’t break down much anymore, and when they do, parts are way more likely to be on the shelf.

I know that the GOP doesn’t really have a plan for this, but if the Dems don’t get one and start hammering this hard, we are all screwed. From the front lines of the robot uprising, this seems to me way more important than healthcare or anything else.

But why are the Democrats being told they need to take the weight for this? The guy that owns the company and made the decision to fire all the workers and buy robots to replace them isn’t a Democrat. He’s a wealthy corporate executive and the Republicans just gave him a tax break to pay for those robots. So why are all those workers who lost their job voting for the Republicans?

[Translucent_Daydream]

@Little_Nemo

But why are the Democrats being told they need to take the weight for this? The guy that owns the company and made the decision to fire all the workers and buy robots to replace them isn’t a Democrat. He’s a wealthy corporate executive and the Republicans just gave him a tax break to pay for those robots. So why are all those workers who lost their job voting for the Republicans?

Its really simple. The republicans are giving people someone to blame, not something.

How do you know that the owner isn’t a democrat? My company is run by democrats. If I had the money, I would hire back the people that “the robots” have replaced, but I don’t. My competitors still have the robots as well. If I want my business to still be in business, I have to replace the costly people with not costly robots. It seems like sometimes people think that the “guys at the top firing everyone” are fat dudes scratching their bellies to fit more food in. That usually isn’t the case.

What about the secretaries that were going to be put out of work? There are way way way less secretaries than there were ten years ago, and there were less ten years ago. The “secretary” position was largely swallowed by someone else doing another job that now has to function in that role as well.

Case in point 1: When I was in education ten years ago, my managerial role had three full time secretaries that reported directly for me. Now the person that had my position has one student worker that answers the phone and transfers those calls to the directed official, and we had a departmental admin that also does auditing three times a month function as “the secretary.”

Case in point 2? At my current business, we had a secretary before, now the sales admin sits at her desk for the occasional secretary task, but largely does her same job. She doesn’t get paid anymore than the difference between letting the secretary go. Our secretary was very busy before, but a lot of her tasks got largely automated via software telephone answering, software sorting and software managed letter generation. It wasn’t the word processor that put her out of business, it was the AI software stuff that can be programmed in 30 minutes to do her routine tasks for a week. I can work an extra 30 minutes a week to get done what we were paying 35 hours a week at 14.50 an hour to do. The software pays for itself.

And before anyone thinks that we are bad at our job, and have to rely on the robots to pick up the slack, that isn’t the case either. My “widget manufacturing methods” are the best in the country at the lowest cost and fastest turn around in the nation. I have to be the best as a small company to compete with the corporate people that would just run at a loss with a huge overhead to squeeze me out of the market. I have to operate at a margin that the corporate guys can’t touch.

To keep the rest of the employees that we do have from being swallowed by robots, my wife and I don’t have insurance. At the point where we are going to have to jump that beast, we are going to lose two more employees.

[Translucent_Daydream]

I wanted to jump in and add that a lot of these people that voted for Trump in the Midwest (you know, where it only seems to matter for the next election) voted for him because he started talking shit on China. In their minds, they see China as a land full of factories full of people working for a cup of rice, underbidding them and unfairly competing for their labor. To these people, they will never be able to compete on the same level and its “unfair”.

Its only partly true. China is a land full of very optimized factories that feed directly to each other and are loaded with…robots.

We don’t seem to be able to re-isolate China from the rest of the world, so we can’t just shut them out of the worldwide market place. Since China’s government has a unique ability to modify their markets, they will always set the “floor”. Businesses, huge and corporate as can be or small like mine, have to operate with the same floor.

Joe Schmo has a hard time with this concept, so its easy to think that there is huge guys at the top trying to figure out how to fuck people out of a job. He is always going to vote for someone who essentially says “fuck those guys”.

Democrats need to come in with something other than “job training”. I can do the job of 390 people right now that used to work full time 5 years ago by working 60 hours a week salaried. Nobody had a choice in this, we are fighting staying afloat as it is. In five years, I can theoretically do the job of three times of that without leaving my desk at home. I know this because I am developing the technology to do it right now. Hopefully I get to start to control the “floor” so to speak so we can keep the people doing something else and employed, but I am one man and China is China, and they are all beating me to the same floor.

ETA: The Democrats REALLY REALLY need a plan for the next 15 year window to deal with the robots. I am single-handedly putting thousands out of work. Just me.

[Tatterdemalion]

@Little_Nemo

But why are the Democrats being told they need to take the weight for this? The guy that owns the company and made the decision to fire all the workers and buy robots to replace them isn’t a Democrat. He’s a wealthy corporate executive and the Republicans just gave him a tax break to pay for those robots. So why are all those workers who lost their job voting for the Republicans?

Salt of the earth, common clay of the new west, you know …

[JKellyMap]

… morons!

[RTFirefly]

@Translucent_Daydream

What about the secretaries that were going to be put out of work? There are way way way less secretaries than there were ten years ago, and there were less ten years ago.

Well yeah, and the resulting mass unemployment due to them having been displaced by technology…?

The “secretary” position was largely swallowed by someone else doing another job that now has to function in that role as well.

Look, I do a shitload of writing in my job.

Forty years ago, that would have involved my either writing stuff out longhand and having a secretary type it, or dictating to a secretary who would take shorthand and then type it up. I’d write revisions by hand on her typed draft, sometimes with circles and arrows to show where a sentence or paragraph should be moved to, and she’d do another draft on her typewriter. And I’d look at that, and make more changes, and back and forth until finally I had something decent.

Now, all that happens in my head and on the screen in front of me as I type. My first draft is like several drafts in the old days all folded together.

And remember “Take a Letter, Maria”? Yeah, like I need Maria to type my emails for me.

So that’s typing. How about filing? Click on the “save as” icon, and done. Like you need a secretary for that.

The work that secretaries used to do is simply gone. That’s all. And the gaping hole left by the disappearance of all those jobs that haven’t been necessary in years? Where is it? It doesn’t exist. New jobs have arisen to replace the old ones.

[Translucent_Daydream]

I hope you are right, but that’s not what I’m seeing here on the ground here in robots. My brother just single handedly built a new assembly line for a large yogurt company that services the whole nation.

Not too many folks are there to feed the robots and they work in the darkness all day and night.

They flew him in from 2000 miles away for a week. He won’t work again for another 6 months. The area where the automated factory is built is still jobless but they got a shit load of a tax rebate to be there

[septimus]

@RTFirefly

… The work that secretaries used to do is simply gone. That’s all. And the gaping hole left by the disappearance of all those jobs that haven’t been necessary in years? Where is it? It doesn’t exist. New jobs have arisen to replace the old ones.

Do you think those laid-off clerical workers moved into managerial positions? Some ended up working in the fast-food business which now employs 4.6 million. (Several millions more have low-paying jobs in slow-food restaurants.) The average age of fast-food workers is 29 years; over a quarter have children.

McDonalds restaurants alone employ almost a million … and McDonalds is spending a billion dollars just this year to replace workers with ordering kiosks and other automation. McDonalds was shamed in 2013 when it published a helpful financial brochure for its employees, devising budgets that assumed the employee had a second job. Do well at McDonalds, get promoted to assistant manager, and earn a whopping … $14 per hour!

In 1983, the 95th and 80th percentile household incomes were about 7 and 4 times the 20th percentile income respectively. Today those ratios are about 10 and 5. No, Americans are not sharing equally in the prosperity of the automation age.