Another Times article visiting Obama-Trump country to figure out what happened in 2016. Lehigh Valley was one of the hardest hits by the end of protectionism on American steel, with Bethlehem Steel shuttering factories and jobs in the 1990’s. Now its a regional powerhouse centered around tech, biotech, distribution centers, and the kind of manufacturing you can’t outsource or automate (yet). Products from peeps, to dog food, to ‘Boston’ beer are made in this corner of Pennsylvania where Democrats still outnumber Republicans 2-1 but where Trump won a critical victory in his upset over Clinton. Following the road map predicted by yours truly.
Trump was correct about one thing in 2016. As a candidate, he felt the pain of the people who saw factories shut down and jobs get outsourced. He also correctly criticized the Obama administration that the numbers on the macroeconomic side were masking chronic unemployment and despair in communities across the American hinterlands.
What Democrats need to do is talk about Flint, talk about Akron and Detroit, talk about the fact that cultural and familial breakdown And chronic drug addiction which was once racist my dismissed as a “black” problem is now a white problem too. That the communities in the hinterland that are doing better are the ones investing in immigrants, investing in health care, investing in education.
Ding him for signing corporate tax cuts and trade deals while breaking his promise to bring back the good jobs, make a health care system better then Obamacare, or invest in our infrastructure. We need to run on a federal jobs program for these communities, and we can integrate that promise with other priorities like fighting climate change. It’s the micro economy stupid, and the regional losers need to be heard and their stories need to be front and center in 2020. Every single one of policies have to be framed around helping them.
You seem to take inappropriate joy in rubbing the supposed Obama-Trump thing in our faces. Anybody who actually did vote that way fell for the biggest political ruse in a long time. I can assure you Trump felt nobody’s pain. I never saw where he even pretended to be empathetic and he’s certainly no Bill Clinton on that count. Also, I think either your title or your final sentence (probably the latter based on context) needs an edit since in one place you say microeconomy and the other macroeconomy. FWIW, if we accept your premise you’ve made a pretty good case for nominating Biden since these are his people.
There’s no joy here. We had this debate in 2016 and Paul Simmons and I pointed o that Trump could flip these states. Y’all thought we were crazy and quoted the infamous Schumer quote about converting 2 Romney voters for every Obama-Trump voter. If we follow his advice, we lose to Trump twice.
I think it’s time to invest in what’s been proven to work in 2018. Data for Progress already dig into that data which shows these communities embracing Medicare expansion, fighting for unions, the Green New Deal, and even comprehensive immigration reform (the old centrism of a pathway to citizenship combined with border security, it’s gotta be both). I think if we run on that agenda an and explain it in ways the high school educated can understand, we win. I think if we make it about Trumps record, we win. If we make it about his character, we lose.
I miss Paul. He was a treasure, I hope he returns to us someday.
I agree, but it would help if people listened to his ideas instead of dismissing them with wishful thinking. I’m just copying and pasting data and articles that support my claims, Paul’s done the real legwork of polling and demographic aggregation. Pretty much everything he said about Western PA ended up becoming true.
Then how come nobody else saw it? The rest of us were looking at polls too.
I think at least two things are at work here. Most importantly, Paul has insight and training that the rest of us lack. He does this for a living and he’s good at it. Most professional musicians are better at their instruments than even the most talented amateur.
As in so many things, a second aspect is how his predictions fare elsewhere. Nate Silver explains this in his now famous text (that should be required reading). When an awful event happens, “how come we didn’t see this?” is among the first questions we ask. Then, inevitably, information surfaces that some will say means “we had the information, why didn’t we act on it?”.
The answer lies in the difference between hindsight and prediction. Several cassandras “predicted” the Great Recession of 2008. Some of them were immediately elevated in the media to celebrity status (I’ll resist the temptation to name names) in the aftermath of the catastrophe. The reality is that these individuals had been making the same prediction over and over, in some cases for decades. It is like a meteorologist who predicts that each upcoming storm will be a “blizzard”. We tend to forget when they’re wrong and remember when they’re right.
Paul was a huge proponent of GOTV. As I recall, his primary objection to the 2016 campaign in Western PA was that the nominee’s campaign was taking Western PA for granted and focusing GOTV efforts elsewhere. My own resistance to that theme was and is that I’m not sure how effective explicit GOTV efforts are in situations like this. Paul may well have been correct — voters in that region certainly did not turn out, just as Paul predicted. What I don’t know is what the effect of that strategy was in the places where it was tried.
Was turnout better in the places where Ms. Clinton DID do GOTV? Would the results in Western PA have been different had Ms. Clinton done as Paul advised? We just don’t know.
I don’t remember where Ms. Clinton DID focus her efforts. If the campaign had pursued a different strategy, it might have won MI, PA, and WI — and lost some other key states. Given what we know now about the electorate and about outside interference (such as the FBI and the Russians), I’m not sure that any change in strategy or tactics on the part of our nominee and her campaign would have made a difference.
I greatly respect and admire Paul, and I thoroughly enjoyed the few face-to-face conversations I had with him. I miss him here at BMG. I hope rejoins us, regardless of the outcome of the 2016 election.
Well, any campaign that doesn’t cap off with GOTV frankly isn’t very smart. I wasn’t on the ground in those particular areas but I AM professionally trained in campaign management which included classes on polling models, so if anything I’m annoyed with myself for not seeing some of this.
I’m coming around to the idea that Biden is the likely nominee and hopefully, a winning one. He has to have a better response to Burisma, I say this as a future supporter. It’ll be emails or Swift boats all over again. He’s running on his competence, his family, and his integrity. This is the perfect nothing burger that the right will amplify into a wedge that makes all his strengths a liability. He should fight back at every turn.
Don’t forget, these voters like Bernie too. In different ways they offer a return to class being the main reason for voting Democratic, not culture or education. I think it makes them stronger candidates than the others, which is why it will come down to those two.
I know that region.
I think you’re projecting your solution onto a domain with precious little data. It is true that Donald Trump repeated canned applause lines about the things you mentioned. So did Ms. Clinton.
The problems you mention — cultural and familial breakdown and chronic drug addiction — have always been white problems in that region. White families didn’t admit that, though. It’s MUCH easier to blame “n – – – – – s” and immigrants. I’m quite certain that divorce, abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), and alcoholism are rampant in white families in the region we’re talking about. I’m not minimizing the terrible impact of the opioid epidemic — I’m only saying that problems like this have been pervasive in this region for a very long time.
My take on that region is that the people we’re talking about didn’t vote for Donald Trump because he named those problems. They voted for him because he grabbed women by the crotch (that made him a “regular guy” like them). They voted for him because he made crude and contemptuous gestures towards women, minorities, and immigrants (he mirrored their own misogyny, bigotry, and xenophobia). They voted for him because they recognized in him the brutish bullying that many of them rely on themselves. They’ve always been attacked for these things by “polite society” — they LOVE that a presidential candidate behaves the same..
I wonder how many bars you’ve been in Allentown or Bethlehem — or for that matter, Aliquippa or Sewickley. I think I know the guys you’re talking about, and the women who like them (sort of). The guys I’m talking about were all Democrats — they were all union workers, and every union worker was Democrat. They all hated “management”, and Republicans were always managers.
The guys I’m talking about hated student protesters in the Vietnam era. They were fine with LBJ, His civil rights legislation was fine so long as it only applied to places like Mississippi and Alabama. In the bars I’m talking about, blacks didn’t even try to come in. They loved Richard Nixon he waved the flag and they all viewed themselves a patriotic — it only takes two or three beers to turn patriotism into xenophobia. They hated affirmative action. They talked about “small government” because they blamed blacks (and later, immigrants) for taking their jobs. The guys I’m talking about loved women like Sarah Palin (easy on the eyes and not uppity) and hated women like Hillary Clinton. Mostly they liked women who were fun in the back seat of a parked car or pickup truck (though they never married those women unless forced to by “circumstances”).
I fully admit that I’m projecting my own biases and prejudices here. I’m not trying to argue that I’m right and you’re wrong, I’m observing that your scenario and mine each fits the tiny volume of information we have.
I agree with all the policy proposals you offer. I fear that if you recognize the power of the crude demagoguery at the core of Donald Trump and GOP, you don’t talk about it enough.
There have ALWAYS been unscrupulous, cynical, and self-serving politicians that exploit mob passions for their own gain. Our culture is doing a TERRIBLE job at naming, exposing, and marginalizing the obvious propaganda that is the sweet spot of the GOP message. “Fact check” stories are laughably irrelevant — nobody cares about facts.
We somehow manage to very effectively ostracize pedophiles. Our media is VERY good at programming us to hate nerds, men and women who are overweight, and men and women who are “too smart”.
It is unfortunate that the same media is so absolutely abysmal at putting a stop to the cynical evil of Donald Trump and GOP.
Oh I know the type. Basically both sides of my extended family started Democrat and have become Republican has they made money and moved further away from the city. Two of my groomsmen grew up in Baltimore (they are both white) and have similar stories about their families. My watering hole next to my high school has aspects of that. My wife had to endure people misnaming her, condescendingly praising her English, or asking “but where are you originally from?” when she says she’s from Chicago. When we’ve traveled to KY or southern IL to see her sister we notice the looks we get as an interracial couple.
It’s sucks. The third groomsmen I grew up with in Cambridge and no longer identifies as a man, the fear they live now as an out genderqueer trans person is palpable. There’s a buddy system we use whenever we go out where we go to the bathroom together and I’m always eyeing people who seemed visibly confused or offended by the way my friend looks. I probably couldn’t take them to my favorite bar in Revere, or even if I did, it’s not a space where they would feel comfortable or safe.
My good friend Sumbul has received a record number of death threats since she became the first Muslim mayor in Massachusetts last week.
I see both sides of it too. The Southie busing protestors were undeniably racist and violent, but they had a point that it was not the sons and daughters of privilege taking part in this social experiment. One I grew up with in Cambridge that allows me to be friends with everyone, but one forced upon working class whites by college educated liberals who’ve done a lousy job integrating on their own communities.
Those folks are still union members and I think if we lean into those economic issues as things our candidates will fight for while hitting trump for being an arrogant rich jerk who likes firing people, basically treat him like Obama treated Romney, we might have a shot. I won’t defend the hypocrisy in these communities, but like it or not, the road to the White House runs through them.
Just as it runs through the moderate suburbs where the Romney-Clinton voters live. They don’t like socialism or racism, and threading the needle is hard. In my lifetime it’s taken charismatic megastars to get it done (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). Bland candidates like Biden and Klobuchar have found a way to win big in these communities, so has Bernie, and so did Warren in 2012. Hopefully we can figure it out again
Don’t know if you’ve heard of him but if you get a chance go on youtube and watch KingFace on the Trump effect in Black communities. It’s a new demographic.
I think you go a bit too far in the other direction, but now I find myself asking – do these guys not have mothers, sisters, or daughters? Why would so many think grabbing women between the legs is a positive good?
I don’t think these guys approach it that way.
I think “these guys” are more influenced by the appeal to them of a candidate who they can identify with than by whatever dislike they may have about the specific behavior. I think the misogyny that underlies the attitudes towards women that these deplorables have learned (because it IS learned. It isn’t “natural” or “instinctive”) affects their view of their mothers, sisters, and daughters as much as anybody else.
So my guess is they’d be very upset if any man did that to their own loved one, but upset because they view that loved one as their property. I don’t think they care one iota about the woman in question. We see this all the time in media cliches and tropes about fathers, brothers, and daughters or sisters. The cliche/trope is that the father or brother becomes livid with rage if a date or even passerby in any way acknowledges the sexuality of the woman in question. Tourists and outsiders who visited the North End as recently as the 1980s frequently got into trouble with local Italian male residents of the neighborhood for eye contact with a sister or daughter that lasted “too long”, especially if followed by a smile.
A male in the grips of this disorder (because it really IS a disorder in my opinion) therefore see absolutely no dissonance with their enthusiastic support of Donald Trump and with their own outrage if he or anyone else did the same with their own mother, sister, or daughter.
The common thread in all of it is an intense internalized contempt for women, combined with a view that women are property to be possessed — and once possessed, either used, discarded, or sold.
44% of working class Americans are paid a yearly median average of $18,000 (or $10.22 per hour). What this means is that a large section of our society can’t afford even small mistakes, let alone major emergencies.
Let’s not forget that we had a Democrat in the White House for 16 of the past 27 years.
let’s not forget that actual wages for working class Americans have been stagnant for over four decades of Republican AND Democratic rule.
Step One has to be admitting our own complicit behavior with this.
Step Two is to ask for forgiveness.
Step Three has to be calling out for real, specific, changes that we are willing to fight for regardless of the political price paid by some.
Step Four is to promise to never again abandon the working class citizens of this nation.
@Let’s not forget that we had a Democrat in the White House for 16 of the past 27 years:
Let’s also not forget that we had a Democrat in the White House for 16 of the past 38 years. How does that change your argument?
We had a Democratic majority in Congress for 8 of the past 27 years. We had a Democratic majority of both houses with a Democratic in the White House for … wait for it … just FOUR of the past 27 years. How does THAT change your argument?
In fact, we’ve had Democratic Party control of all three branches of government just four years in the past THIRTY EIGHT years.
Your statistics overstate Democratic Party influence and understate the elephant in the room — America as a whole has been trending rightward since at least 1980. Even Jimmy Carter was criticized at the time for being “too conservative” — he was forced to tack rightward in order to win his single term in 1976.
@Step One has to be admitting our own complicit behavior with this:
Speak for yourself. I’ve been fighting for working class Americans my entire life — even while at least some of them were cheering on uniformed thugs doing their best to beat me with clubs and run me down with police dogs. I was fighting for the working class even while some of us were listening to Rush Limbaugh.
@Step Two is to ask for forgiveness:
Whatever it is we might need to ask forgiveness for has little or nothing to do with this diary. I suggest that the sins for which we should ask forgiveness are more like:
1. Forgive us for exploiting and degrading men and women of color, especially working-class men and women of color
2. Forgive us for celebrating and enabling economic oppression of women, especially working-class women
3. Forgive us for trashing the environment with noxious chemicals and greenhouse gases, even after we knew how harmful these are.
4. Forgive us for allowing Clarence Thomas to be seated on the Supreme Court even though we could have stopped him. Forgive us for humiliating witnesses who attempted to warn us about him (see 1 and 2 above). For those with short memories, I’m referring to Anita Hill.
@Step Three has to be calling out for real, specific, changes that we are willing to fight for regardless of the political price paid by some:
Absolutely. Specific changes such as imposing equal pay for equal work laws on Massachusetts employers and requiring that the Massachusetts minimum wage be raised to $15/hour.
@Step Four is to promise to never again abandon the working class citizens of this nation:
Step four presumes culpability in steps one and two — culpability that I at least do not accept.
There is a missing step from this list (choose your own number):
Step choose-your-own: I promise to never again be seduced by the lies of right-wing Republican demagogues like Rush Limbaugh