Are you insinuating that Trump has small feet? Prepare for the tweet storm!
Nothing like a tweet storm on a frosty morning.
“BUILD THAT WALL” is a clear-cut monument to racism and stupidity. The cost will be enormous, and it won’t appreciably stop the kind of immigration that anybody cares about. But that didn’t matter… what mattered is that it’s a giant symbolic screw-you to Latino immigrants, and that was the rallying cry of Trump voters.
And you’re really trying to tell us this isn’t racially motivated, or there’s some arcane nuance in play?
Calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” isn’t bigoted?
Now let’s hold on a second. The Economist is a fine publication that gives better treatment of American domestic issues than the American press. If they have any fault, it’s that their articles are more than a paragraph long, which lends itself to misinterpretation by credulous cherry-pickers.
If your objection to the article hinges on adaher’s incorrect takeaway from it, consider this excerpt:
So yeah. The OP’s own cite suggests that Trump voters are racially motivated but insist on portraying themselves as economically concerned, because of course they do. You can’t say you’re racist in America, but we’re perfectly OK with dog-whistles about states’ rights, immigration, being tough on crime, etc. So in a nutshell:
[ul]
[li]Democrats can’t write off this part of the electoral map[/li][li]Democrats also can’t call out racist attitudes where they exist[/li][li]Which leaves Democrats with no choice but to appeal to the economic-anxiety fiction that lets blue-collar racists pretend they aren’t racist.[/li][/ul]
And really… is it so bad to pretend for a moment that everyone is as noble as they pretend to be? Isn’t appealing to someone’s most virtuous conceits the way we usually get them to adope those virtues? Either way, at the current time and in the foreseeable future, democracy involves some unsavory coalition-building, and respecting the public face of all parties concerned.
I like The Economist, and usually consider it to be a 1st rate mag. But this particular article wasn’t very good.
They’ve already been won over. They recognized the mistake they made in 2012 and chose to fix it in 2016.
Har har. Looks like there was a lot of buyer’s remorse among many Virginians that voted for Cheeto.
If so, “the cure is worse than the disease.” By a factor of 100.
Interesting and relevant 538 article examiningHoward County, IA, the only county in America that both Obama and Trump won by at least 20 point margins.
TLDR: Howard County is overwhelmingly white and poorly educated, as you might expect. But its economy, which relies predominantly on manufacturing, is doing pretty well; as of election time, median household income was $50,000 and unemployment was 3%. However, in the last couple decades, its workers have found themselves working harder and longer to make the same amount of money, which has led to dissatisfaction with the status quo. Much to the surprise of party leaders, its caucus went overwhelmingly for Sanders; in the estimate of a party leader, about two-thirds of those Sanders supporters voted for Trump in the general election. Trump was perceived as “shaking up the system”; people liked that he was espousing populist economic ideas in contrast to the orthodox positions of his party leadership. Clinton, in contrast, was perceived as a condescending elitist and career politician, whose campaign focused on fearmongering about Trump rather than making a case for herself.
My takeaway: Obviously, to a Sanders voter who based her decision on a rational evaluation of the candidates’ policies, Clinton was a vastly superior second choice to Trump. Likewise for anyone who took political experience and basic competence into account. But to voters basing their choice on a vague"anti-establishment" sentiment, who didn’t view experience as a positive, Trump was clearly the choice. And although I think all of us in this forum can agree that the country would be better off with more “rational evaluation” voters and fewer “vague sentiment” voters, this is the electorate we’ve got.
None of this analysis has anything to do with race; remember, these people had voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Although I think it is true that racism was a primary motivating factor for Trump’s earliest and most loyal primary supporters, it’s a mistake to assume that that is true of everyone who ended up voting for him in the general election. And although on the surface these people seem to be doing relatively well economically, they do in fact have legitimate grievances; their quality of life has eroded in recent years.
The good news here is that, to the extent that white working class voters supported Trump because they perceived him as being more committed to traditional Democratic economic policies than the Democrats were, Trump’s complete abandonment of populist economics once in office will drive them back to the Democrats. All the Democrats have to do is not screw it up this time.
Heh. Jon Stewart on Obama/Trump voters: "How do you even get there? It’s like saying “it didn’t work out with my girlfriend, so now I’m dating a toaster”.
Shocking. Positively shocking.
One’s faith in humanity crumbles.
Obama-Trump voters are people who agree with Democrats on most economic issues but are conservative / reactionary on issues of race and immigration (to some extent gender maybe too, although mostly race and ethnicity).
In an environment that’s polarized around economics they vote Democrat, in an environment that’s polarized around race, ethnicity and culture they vote Republican.
I didn’t vote Republican and never have, but I voted Obama in 2012 and third-party conservative last year, for similar reasons (I wanted to register a protest against free market capitalism in 2012 and against cultural liberalism in 2016).