Donald Trump is the white boomers’ last gasp — believe it or not, the future looks brighter
The embattled GOP nominee represents the last stand for an entire generation of conservative white men — R.I.P!
By DAVID MASCIOTRA for Salon.com. OCTOBER 23, 2016.
Please note the date.
The presidential election of 2016 has not involved a public policy debate as much as it has chronicled the ongoing struggle of Donald Trump to resemble a sentient and literate human being. As he continues to fail, it becomes increasingly clear that the reality television star, and his group of goblin advisors – Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Steve Bannon – represent the last gasp of the white conservative baby boomer.
Throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the straight white male boomer’s story enjoyed cultural hegemony. To live as one of these men was to have an all-access VIP laminate around your neck, and a lifetime permission slip in your pocket. You could view and treat women as toys for your personal amusement, denigrate gay men as freaks fit for the circus, and stratify men of other races into a category of inherent inferiority. Life was good for the white male boomer, but suddenly it all started to end. Uppity blacks started to demand liberty and inclusion. “Nasty” women began to assert themselves as equals, and LGBT people demonstrated themselves to be “normal” folks as capable of achievement and decency as anyone else. Each morning the conservative white boomer wakes up realizing that his story matters a little less than it did the day before.
Faced with the erosion of their cultural power, coinciding with their own mortality, conservative white boomers could adjust and adapt to reality, keeping an open mind to new developments, while welcoming the diversification of American institutions, still cognizant of the amazing run of prosperity and influence they enjoyed. Or they could throw a temper tantrum. Most of them, already detached from the real world, opted for the latter.
The United States currently has the highest standard of living in its history, the longest life expectancy and the most extensive and expansive level of freedom, for all its people, since its foundation as an independent country. Certainly, the persistence of poverty, the draconian “war on drugs,” the garrison quality of the federal budget, and the undue influence of corporate power over political power demand aggressive actions of correction and reform. But they do not culminate in the creation of Dante’s Inferno, especially considering that the United States once enforced Jim Crow, subjugated women into secondary roles and excluded gays from mainstream society. The victories of the left have steadily made America more livable, humane and just. Conservative white boomers, unwilling to look at the totality of progressive change, see only the distance between the authority they currently exert and the authority they once enjoyed. Delusions of grandeur and illusions of the apocalypse cloud their vision.
Barack Obama (in the conservative white boomer view) is not a moderate president who, among his flaws and failures, can claim the accomplishments of presiding over 78 months of consecutive job growth and helping 20 million people acquire health insurance for the first time. He is a black militant usurper of all that is good – a Zulu warrior committed to performing unwanted abortions on every Christian woman. The willingness to address minorities with respectful language is not an enhancement of societal decency and civility; it is “political correctness” gone mad, the suffocation of free speech that will forever end education and destroy the exchange of ideas. The growth in Latino immigrants and other foreign-born citizens is not a continuation of the American tradition of hospitality and diversity; it is an invasion of exotic saboteurs who will demolish America’s economy and cultural norms.Advertisement:
This paranoia is all so silly that it quickly becomes boring, but the more thoughtful citizen cannot ignore it, because it has conquered significant territory in political discourse. Donald Trump, the new god of the white conservative boomer, has based his entire campaign on a forecast of Armageddon. “America is going to hell,” he claims, comparing the United States to the “Third World.” In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he likened the entire country to a “divided crime scene.” Typically, rants such as these are only heard from a megaphone held by a maniac on a street corner. Now it is the heart of the Republican pitch to voters across the country, along with allegations that the election is “rigged,” fears that ISIS will “take over this country,” and warnings that soon America will have a “one-party government.”
One of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories is that the entire media has collaborated to make a fool out of him, as if he weren’t already succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in that capacity. Much of the mainstream media, however, has aided and abetted his campaign by repeating the whine of the white boomer as if it were legitimate.
The most compelling evidence that the United States is a “hellhole,” according to the mainstream media, is that only one-third of voters, according to various polls, believe that the country is “on the right track.” Demographic specificity exposes the real anxiety underneath the political pessimism.
The same polls that show whites are cynical about politics, depressed about the economy and worried for the future, also show that an overwhelming majority of black and Latino citizens are hopeful about their own lives and the trajectory of the United States. The title that the University of Chicago gave its report on the emotional divide of the country offers a definitive summary: “The Public Mood: White Malaise but Optimism Among Blacks, Hispanics.”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that the most optimistic group of Americans, regardless of race, comprises those under the age of 35. The hope of the dreaded millennials, whom the boomers love to target with endless sanctimony, is actually helping to “power the economy,” according to the story.
When commentators repeat the cliché that Americans are “angry” and “want change” – some important policy debates aside – what they are really doing is presenting the despair of white male baby boomers as if it represented the entire country. The same enraged masses who supposedly want to flip over all the tables give President Obama a 58 percent approval rating, yet Americans are subjected to exhausting discussion of “working-class anger,” as if only white working-class people mattered, and “manufacturing jobs,” as if anyone under age 40 dreams of employment in a textile mill.
The white conservative boomer frame of the political dialogue has functioned as a strong advantage for Trump. But because he cannot escape the limitations of his generational biases, he consistently commits political suicide – blowing every chance for capitalization.
When an “Access Hollywood” tape emerged proving everyone’s worst assumptions about Donald Trump’s sexism and misogyny, he barely bothered to apologize. Instead of admitting shame, he dismissed his celebration of sexual assault as “locker-room talk.” Giuliani, Gingrich, Christie and the usual sycophants of right-wing punditry read from the same script. The cliché is mindless in its implication that the degradation of women is acceptable if the guys doing it threw a ball around for a few hours, but it also reveals the mindset of the conservative white boomers who have not grown with the years. Likewise, the widespread perception of perpetual crybaby Trump as an “alpha male” exposes the weird obsolescence of the conservative boomer mindset.
Trump attempted to deflect accusations of sexual assault by mocking the accusers’ looks, just as Gingrich defended Trump’s insults against a former beauty queen by saying, “You aren’t supposed to gain 50 pounds after winning a beauty contest.” These men actually believe their retrograde objectification of women is funny or clever, because mentally they still live in an era when many men did find such things amusing, and women were unable to retaliate. Now, one woman – Hillary Clinton – is well positioned to execute retaliation of historical proportions.
Nostalgia for the lost era of white male boomer control created the Trump candidacy. Now it’s killing it.
I Know Why Rural Americans Voted For Donald Trump
11/09/2016. Please note the date.
by Elliot M. Cho M.A. Candidate (Poli. Sci.), Carleton University, Ottawa.
Let’s face it: Trump enjoyed huge support from American rural communities. Regardless of what Canadians from rural communities think of themselves, my experience tells me that they are not much different from their American counterparts. Same music, same wheels, same worldview.
The whole world appears to be in shock after Trump’s unexpected victory. Not sure if there’s any point saying this now, but I had a feeling that this was coming.
I’m afraid that what I’m about to say here would make some of you upset: I have lived in a place that made me understand what it was like to live through the time of Kristallnacht or in the Jim Crow South. Ironically, it was the place that taught me how Trump supporters think and behave.
Let’s face it: Trump enjoyed huge support from American rural communities. Regardless of what Canadians from rural communities think of themselves, my experience tells me that they are not much different from their American counterparts. Same music, same wheels, same worldview. Much of it is the same.
Most of all, they don’t feel ashamed of what they are. Rather, they feel proud of it.
More often than not, these rural communities I’ve been to are impenetrable to anyone who is new to them. I am not only talking about immigrants or people of colour. The same could happen to white people as well. Some of them have lived in their community for generations. It is a community that is made not just by people sharing the same worldview, but people sharing the same blood. Nothing can break this tie so easily.
Because these communities are close-knit are active in organizing community events, they often get together and socialize. And if they find one of theirs experiencing troubles with the authority, or from outsiders, they get together and defend them fiercely, no matter what.
Many of people who are fortunate to live in large, diverse communities like Ottawa or Toronto since childhood may be unaware of this phenomenon. But the effort to cherish and celebrate this sort of rural, us against them worldview seems to have been ongoing for many years now.
TV shows – think Duck Dynasty – that celebrate self-proclaimed “redneck culture” have gone viral on many occasions. Country music videos now portray brandishing assault rifles in public or driving gas-guzzling pickup trucks as “cool.” It’s not something that you should feel embarrassed of. Rather, it’s something that you should feel proud of doing.
When they are surrounded by people who are either their family or neighbours sharing the same worldview, with their culture and beliefs being validated by the media and in entertainment, it is unlikely that they will be open to ideas that people on the other side are representing.
But most of all, they don’t feel ashamed of what they are. Rather, they feel proud of it.
As you see, this is already an incredibly strong platform for building political support. Now, when this platform is imbued with anxiety, fear and hate, it can provide a volcanic synergy for a political movement. That is what exactly happened in this election.
In the Land of Self-Defeat
What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology — and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal.
By Monica Potts for The New York Times. October 4, 2019.
Please note the date.
CLINTON, Ark. — Inside Washington, there’s a sense that this scandal really is different. Even the White House’s memorandum of the phone conversation President Trump had with the Ukrainian president in July makes it clear that Mr. Trump asked a foreign country to help him undermine a political rival. But while national polls show support for impeaching him is growing, it’s still divided sharply along partisan lines. Democrats strongly favor it, while Republicans tend to oppose it.
I’ve been following this story from my little corner of the world in rural Van Buren County, Ark. Tim Widener, 50, who lives outside my hometown, Clinton, summed up the town’s attitude well: “It’s really a sad waste of taxpayers’ money,” he told me.
Mr. Widener could have been talking about anything. His comment reflected a worldview that is becoming ever more deeply ingrained in the white people who remain in rural America — Washington politicians are spending money that they shouldn’t be. In 2016, shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory,Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the attitudes she observed after years of studying rural Americans: “The way these folks described the world to me, their basic concern was that people like them, in places like theirs, were overlooked and disrespected,” she wrote in Vox, explaining that her subjects considered “racial minorities on welfare” as well as “lazy urban professionals” working desk jobs to be undeserving of state and federal dollars. People like my neighbors hate that the government is spending money on those who don’t look like them and don’t live like them — but what I’ve learned since I came home is that they remain opposed even when they themselves stand to benefit.
I returned to Van Buren County at the end of 2017 after 20 years living on the East Coast, most recently in the Washington area, because I’m writing a book about Clinton, Van Buren’s county seat. My partner and I knew it would be a challenge: The county is very remote, very religious and full of Trump voters, and we suspected we’d stand out because of our political beliefs.
Since coming back, I’ve realized that it is true that people here think life here has taken a turn for the worse. What’s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.
Most Americans live in cities, but our political system gives rural areas like Van Buren outsize voting power. My time here makes me believe that the impeachment scandal will not hurt Mr. Trump — and that Democrats who promise to make the lives of people like my neighbors better might actually help him.
I realized this after a fight over, of all things, our local library.
In April, a local man who operates the Facebook group, “Van Buren County Today Unfiltered,” posted the agenda for a coming meeting of the Quorum Court, the county’s governing body. The library board wanted to increase the pay it could offer a new head librarian, who would be combining her new job with an older one, to $25 an hour.
Only about 2,500 people live in my hometown. The library serves the entire county, which has an estimated 16,600 people, a marked decline from the population at the last census in 2010. The library has historically provided a variety of services for this community. It has offered summer reading camps for children and services like high-speed internet, sewing classes and academic help. I grew up going to the library and visited it often when I returned. It was always busy. I thought people would be supportive.
Instead, they started a fight. The battle began on the Facebook post, which had 240 comments by the end. The first comment came from Amie Hamilton, who reiterated her point when I interviewed her several months later. “If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it,” she wrote. “We the people are not here to pay your excessive salaries through taxation or in any other way.”
There was general agreement among the Facebook commenters that no one in the area was paid that much — the librarian’s wages would have worked out to be about $42,200 a year — and the people who do actually earn incomes that are similar — teachers and many county officials — largely remained quiet. (Clinton has a median income of $34,764 and a poverty rate of 22.6 percent.) When a few of us, including me, pointed out that the candidate for the library job had a master’s degree, more people commented on the uselessness of education. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.”
I watched the fight unfold with a sense of sadness, anger and frustration. I started arguing. It didn’t work. The pay request was pulled from the Quorum Court’s agenda.
I didn’t realize it at first, but the fight over the library was rolled up into a bigger one about the library building, and an even bigger fight than that, about the county government, what it should pay for, and how and whether people should be taxed at all. The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here.
The answer was, for the most part, not very much.
A 2016 analysis by National Public Radio found that as counties become more rural, they tend to become more Republican. Completely rural counties went for Mr. Trump by 70.6 percent over all, which makes my county politically average — Van Buren gave Mr. Trump 73 percent of its vote. Rural America is not a monolith, but a majority of rural counties fit perfectly into Mr. Trump’s preferred demographics: They are largely white (96.2 percent in Van Buren), and rates of educational attainment are low.
People are leaving rural areas for cities because that’s where the jobs are. According to one analysis, between 2008, during the Great Recession, and 2017, the latest year for which data is available, 99 percent of the job and population growth occurred in counties with at least one city of 50,000 people or more or in counties directly adjacent to such cities. It’s hard to generalize what’s happening to rural counties, but many are faced with a shrinking property tax base and a drop in economic activity, which also decreases sales tax revenues.
Many rural counties are also experiencing declines in whatever industries were once the major employers. In Appalachia, this is coal; in much of the Midwest, it is heavy manufacturing; and in my county, and many other counties, it’s natural gas and other extractive industries.
This part of Arkansas sits on the Fayetteville Shale, which brought in natural gas exploration in the early 2000s. For about a decade, the gas companies paid local taxes on their property, equipment and the money they made from extracting natural gas, and landowners paid property taxes on the royalties they earned. It was a boom. Many people at the time, here and elsewhere, expected that the money would last longer than it did.
Instead, the price of natural gas plummeted in 2009 and profits declined. Production slowed. One of the biggest natural gas companies in the area, Houston-based Southwestern Energy, stopped paying taxes to the counties here, arguing that the rates were unfair. The company and five Arkansas counties, including mine, are still locked in litigation over some of the money it owes (it recently paid a portion of it).
Van Buren’s County’s chief executive, Dale James, told me that county revenues had declined by at least 20 percent from when gas production was at its height in 2008. The county budget is now just over $11 million, including revenue from local taxes and state and federal grants.
When local economies are flagging, state governments don’t step in to help as much as they once did. The Pew Charitable Trust found that state aid to local governments fell by 5.3 percent during the recession’s lowest point, in fiscal year 2013, and it still is below what it was before the recession. On top of that, 45 states restrict the way local governments can collect property taxes on their citizens in some way: In Arkansas, property and sales tax increases, the main source of revenue for many local governments, have to be approved by voters.
It means many county governments are getting less money on several fronts. A report from the National Association of Counties from 2016 was titled, “Doing More With Less.” It’s the new normal.
Local budgets pay for the infrastructure and institutions people deal with every day — schools, roads, water, trash collection, libraries and animal shelters. Cuts to those services are felt in a visceral way.
The fight over the pay for the new head librarian had a larger context: The library moved into a new building, with new services, in 2016. Construction began during the natural gas boom years, and ended after the bust, just as the county budget was being squeezed and services were being cut.
During the boom, the new building had seemed necessary, but with the revenue decreases, the county knew it was going to have a hard time paying the $2.1 million still owed on it. (Disclosure: My mother was on the library board when some of the decisions about the new building were made.)
The library made its own budget cuts, but the savings weren’t enough to cover the shortfall in paying for the building, and there was a real danger of the library closing, leaving its new, hulking brick building empty. The people who didn’t frequent the library argued that the community didn’t really need it anymore, anyway. After all, if you have internet, you can get whatever you want in a day.
Such was the situation when the pay raise showed up on the Quorum Court agenda. Why give one person a raise when the county was slashing its budget, when we were going without so much else? The head librarian candidate, Andrea Singleton, eventually took the job at the old salary, just over $19 an hour, although at first the fight made her upset enough to consider leaving.
“It was enough to make me want to run away,” Ms. Singleton, who had been on the library’s staff for four years when she was offered the promotion, told me. “But I got over it.”
When I spoke to other county residents, many thought all of the budget cuts were a sad but necessary correction to the county’s previously profligate ways.
Ms. Hamilton, the Facebook commenter, told me that the voters fixed the county’s problems by electing Republicans to countywide offices in 2018, including Mr. James, who replaced a Democrat who’d held the office for four terms. “Some people are more fiscally responsible than others,” she said.
Ms. Hamilton, who is 52, had moved to the county during the natural gas boom, in 2008, and continued working with that industry even after it left. She commutes each week to work in the Midland-Odessa area of Texas. She noted that Clinton is a small town and simply couldn’t afford the luxury of government services. “If you’re looking for a handout, this is not the place; we can’t support that,” Ms. Hamilton said.
Mr. Widener, 50, has lived in the county on and off for 18 years, and was born in the nearby town of Conway, home to the University of Central Arkansas. He commutes there for work in the university’s information technology department. He told me the idea of paying the librarian $25 an hour was “typical government waste.” He added, “It’s the same thing in Washington.”
The typical private-sector wage in Van Buren, $10 to $13 an hour, was right for the county, many people said. Anything more than that was wasteful, or evidence of government corruption.
Almost everyone I spoke with feels that the county overspent during the gas boom years, and that the bill is coming due. “We got wasteful and stupid, and now we have to go back to common sense,” Corrine Weatherly, who owns a dress- and costume-making shop, Sew What, told me. Ms. Weatherly also runs the county fair, and so she shows up to almost every Quorum Court meeting.
This worldview will continue to affect national elections. The most dominant news source here is Fox News, which I think helps perpetuate these attitudes. There’s another element, too: For decades, the dominant conservative theory of politics is that government should be run like a business, lean and efficient, and one of the biggest private employers here is Walmart, where Mr. James was working when he was elected.
There’s a prevailing sense of scarcity — it’s easy for people who have lived much of their lives in a place where $25 an hour seems like a high salary to believe there just isn’t enough money to go around. The government, here and elsewhere, just can’t afford to help anyone, people told me. The attitude extends to national issues, like immigration. Ms. Hamilton told me she’d witnessed, in Texas, a hospital being practically bankrupted by the cost of caring for immigrants and said, “I don’t want my tax dollars to be used to pay for people that are coming here just to sit on a government ticket.” Mr. Widener, who described himself as “more libertarian” than anything else, told me his heart goes out to migrant children who are held in detention centers at the border, but he blames the parents who brought them to this country.
Where I see needless cruelty, my neighbors see necessary reality.
The people left in rural areas are more and more conservative, and convinced that the only way to get things done is to do them yourself. Especially as services have disappeared, they are more resentful about having to pay taxes, even ones that might restore those services.
And many of those who want to live in a place with better schools, better roads and bigger public libraries have taken Ms. Hamilton’s suggestion — they’ve moved to places that can afford to offer them. This includes many of my peers from high school who left for college or jobs and permanently settled in bigger, wealthier cities and towns around the region.
Over the summer, after the uproar about Ms. Singleton’s pay, library supporters gathered signatures for a special election that would have slightly increased the amount of county property taxes collected for the library, helping it pay off the new building and stave off closing altogether. It set off a new furor, even though the increase was estimated to cost about $20 a year for properties assessed at $100,000, and many people have properties valued at much less than that.
Phillip Ellis, who was chosen to be chairman of the library board right before the controversies began, thought the outrage about the potential tax increase was more about philosophy than actual numbers. “I think it’s just anti-tax anything,” he said.
He recounted some of the complaints people in the county had made to him about the proposed increase. “They’d say, ‘So-and-so has a big farm and they may not even use the library,’” he recalled. He would tell them, “Well, I don’t have children and never use the school.” With that sort of mentality, he said, “no one will do anything.”
That was the crux of the issue — people didn’t want to pay for something they didn’t think they would use. I suspect that many residents are willing to pay for some institutions they see as necessary, like the sheriff’s department, but libraries, symbols of public education and public discourse, are more easily sacrificed.
The library tax vote was quickly scrapped: Instead, Mr. James has suggested extending a 1 percent sales tax that went into place in 2001 to help pay for a new hospital building. Residents are due to vote on the idea in March.
Many other counties have turned to sales taxes as property taxes dwindle: It means that people who stop to shop when they’re passing through pay it as well, but it’s also a tax that tends to fall harder on lower-income households. It is also likely to be more expensive for some residents than a property tax increase would have been, but it will be paid in small amounts over time at the grocery store and Walmart, and voters are less likely to notice it.
If the tax extension passes, it’s estimated to pay off the library debt in about a year. But it delays a reckoning on whether and how the people who live here should contribute to the well-being of the county’s infrastructure and services.
A considerable part of rural America is shrinking, and, for some, this means it’s time to go into retreat. Rather than pitching in to maintain what they have, people are willing to go it alone, to devote all their resources to their own homes and their own families.
It makes me wonder if appeals from Democratic candidates still hoping to win Trump voters over by offering them more federal services will work. Many of the Democratic front-runners have released plans that call for more federal tax investment in rural infrastructure. Mr. Widener told me he had watched some of the Democratic debates, and his reaction was that everything the candidates proposed was “going to cost me money.”
Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too. And Trump voters are carrying the day here in Van Buren County. They see Mr. Trump’s slashing of the national safety net and withdrawal from the international stage as necessities — these things reflect their own impulse writ large.
They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library. As long as Democrats make promises to make their lives better with free college and Medicare for all sound like they include government spending, these voters will turn to Trump again — and it won’t matter how many scandals he’s been tarnished by.
Why Rural America Is So In Love With Donald Trump
Resentment breeds action.
By J. Edwin Benton for the NationalInterest.org. March 12, 2020.
Please note the date.
Key point: Given their intensifying feelings of resentment for being ignored and left behind, rural and small-town dwellers were particularly receptive to the slogan touted by Trump in his campaign – “Make America Great Again!”
If one word can capture the sentiment of rural and small-town dwellers in recent years, it is “resentment.”
I am a scholar who studies politics at the state and local level. Residents of rural and small-town communities believe they are not getting their fair share of government attention and vital resources compared to urban dwellers. They believe that America is moving away from them.
As the 2020 presidential campaign gears up, these resentful Americans will play a key role. How strong supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 election vote in 2020 will depend on whether the president has delivered on the promises he made to help them out.
Will this growing divide affect American politics beyond Trump?
Left behind
Political scientist Katherine Cramer has spent over a decade doing field work in 27 small Wisconsin towns to understand how people use social class identity to interpret politics. Cramer found that people in these rural areas feel as though they are being ignored by urban elites and urban institutions like government and the media at a time when they are struggling to make ends meet.
They believe their communities are dying, the economy is leaving them behind, and that young people, money and their livelihoods are going somewhere else.
They think that major decisions affecting their lives are being made far away in big cities. And perhaps most importantly, they feel that no one is listening to them or their ideas about things that are important to them.
Most distressing to those living in this situation is the belief that no one, and especially no one in government, really cares.
From resentment to division and deadlock
To date, the phenomenon of “resentment” has been responsible for adding another layer of heightened division among Americans, including an increase in political polarization.
That makes it much more difficult for federal government officials, as well as those at the state and local level, to reach consensus on important issues of the day.
University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” helps in explaining how this frustration and anger of small-town and rural area dwellers has resulted in increasing political support for Republican candidates, generally, and for Trump, specifically.
Given their intensifying feelings of resentment for being ignored and left behind, rural and small-town dwellers were particularly receptive to the slogan touted by Trump in his campaign – “Make America Great Again!”
Trump won the country’s small town and non-metropolitan areas by 63.2 percent to 31.3 percent, with his largest vote shares coming from the most rural areas.
Like other Republican presidential candidates over the last 10 years, Trump garnered a large majority of the vote in traditional rural areas like Appalachia, the Great Plains and parts of the South.
Surprisingly, however, Trump also won a substantial proportion of the traditionally Democratic small town and rural vote in several key Midwestern industrial areas. He won 57 percent of that vote in Michigan, 63 percent in Wisconsin and 71 percent in Pennsylvania.
Why Trump triumphed
Trump implied or clearly promised to repeal Obamacare, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deport around 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
Other appealing policies were tax cuts for both businesses and individuals; significant reductions in the regulation of business and industry; and import tariffs on foreign goods that compete unfairly with American-made products.
Data collected by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (from a national survey of more than 54,000 respondents) clearly show that people living in small towns and rural areas who supported these kinds of policies were decisively more likely to vote for Trump rather than Clinton in 2016.
Above all, Trump promised a shift in the focus of the national government so that much more attention would be directed to rural areas and small towns and the challenges they faced.
This evidently buoyed the hope of Trump supporters in these areas that they would be getting something closer to their fair share of government attention and resources.
Voting implications
There is ample evidence of voting patterns in recent years – even before the 2016 election – that suggest that voters in rural areas and small towns were increasingly voting for Republican candidates in national and state elections. This trend was quite visible from Republican and Democratic vote proportions in the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections.
In 2008, 53 percent of rural voters cast ballots for the Republican presidential candidate; 59 percent did in 2012; and 62 percent did in 2016.
This was most clear in the 2016 election in the 2,332 counties that make up small-town and rural America, where Trump swamped Hillary Clinton by winning 60 percent as opposed to 34 percent of the vote.
Trump’s 26-point advantage over Clinton in rural America was much greater than had been the case for Republican presidential nominees in the four previous elections.
The Trump appeal and the growing urban-rural division in the country is also evident from the fact that Trump’s vote percentage in rural America was 29 points higher than he received in the nation’s urban counties and far larger than for Republican presidential nominees between 2000 and 2012.
Moreover, responses to a 2017 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of rural and small-town voters in the 2016 election indicate that they were more likely to vote for Trump and also agree with him on a variety of issues.
Those included immigration, tax cuts, eliminating regulations on businesses, making better trade deals, targeting more infrastructure projects and federal government services to rural areas and small towns, and appointing more conservative judges to the federal courts.
But, did this trend of strong support from rural voters for Republican candidates, including Trump, continue into the 2018 midterm election?
About half of Trump’s ideas and policy proposals have been accomplished, with the others yet to gain traction in Congress, two years after his election. So his record of delivering for these rural voters is mixed.
Nevertheless, they stuck with Trump in the 2018 election.
“Rural voters stormed to the polls in virtually unprecedented numbers in 2018 and once again delivered for the president they voted for in 2016,” The Hill reported. They delivered Trump “a handful of critical Senate and gubernatorial elections in ruby red states.”
While not totally surprising, the Trump camp did not know what to expect going into the midterm election, given the numerous investigations of the president and his low public approval rating.
Somewhat more surprising is what has been happening in a purple state like Florida, where Republicans have improved on both their turnout and overall performance in rural areas for several elections in a row.
Newly elected Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ran ahead of Trump’s 2016 performance and former Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s 2014 vote share in 13 of 16 counties in the Florida Panhandle. Rick Scott unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by piling up large margins in the small towns and rural areas of the state. Similar scenarios in U.S. Senate races took place in key states like Missouri, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, where Republicans won huge victories in rural counties.
Beyond Trump
Survey data collected from over 90,000 people by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in November 2018 paint a vivid picture of the continuing urban-rural/small-town divide.
Results show that residents of small towns and rural areas are much more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.
In addition, the most ardent supporters of Republicans are among those small-town and rural dwellers who are white and male, have less than a college education and vote on a regular basis.
I believe that the urban-rural/small-town divide will continue to act as a major force in politics for the remainder of the Trump era – and probably longer.
It’s the Economy. And Trump’s Stupid.
Trump is the dumbest person America could have picked to lead us through these complicated times
By Richard Hine for the Daily Edge. June 25, 2020.
Please note the date.
Another 1.5 million Americans filed jobless claims last week.
US GDP fell 5% in the first quarter.
And the IMF just slashed its forecast for the full year—from a decline of 5.9% in US GDP to a staggering 8% contraction.
We know Trump failed to protect us from the coronavirus. He owns that 100%. But it’s also worth remembering (as I have been saying all year), that Trump’s disastrous mismanagement of the economy has also set the stage for the current disaster. As the National Bureau of Economic Research announced earlier this month, the Trump Recession actually began PRE-LOCKDOWN, in February.
Even setting all the corruption aside, Trump is simply too stupid to be President.
You can argue about the wisdom of electing a “businessman” with no military or political experience to the Presidency. But you can’t argue that Donald Trump has been the worst-possible “businessman” for the job.
Even in the areas in which he’s supposed to have shown he’s a winner, he’s actually a total loser. Trump even managed to fail bigly as a casino owner during the biggest boom in US casino history. If we really wanted to put a hotel and gaming executive in charge of the US economy and the world’s biggest casino—Wall Street—we could have picked….
*checks notes*
… literally ANY other casino executive in America.
During the biggest boom in US casino history (1995-2005), here’s what you have ended up with if you invested $1,000 in: Penn National Gaming: $33,400 MGM: $5,300 Boyd Gaming: $3,800 Argosy: $3,400 Harrah’s: $2,400 Casino America: $1,600 Donald Trump: $110.
In a country that’s known for entrepreneurial self-made billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, Trump is best known for inheriting his wealth and blowing it.
Looking at his other claim to fame—as a reality TV star—it’s easy to make the case that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner are both smarter business people. And in the world of TV as a whole, there’s no doubt that Oprah Winfrey is more talented, more empathetic—and far more successful in business.
The truth is, Trump has always been the stupid person’s idea of a successful businessman, complete with his gold toilet and his collection of trophy wives and girlfriends. After his TV show made him famous, his willingness to go full racist as a political candidate made him the acceptable, business-suited face of the alt-right. When he became the “family values” GOP’s adulterous, pussy-grabbing nominee, the party grudgingly rallied behind him in a last-gasp battle waged by conservative white male boomers desperate to retain their hold on power.
Back in 2016, it seemed that Trump’s real ambition was to build his mailing list and become fat and unhappy in the conservative grifter mold of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, with perhaps a Trump TV network added to the mix in partnership with his disgraced, now-deceased pervert pal Roger Ailes.
As the face of conservative opposition to President Hillary Clinton, Trump could have spent the last three-plus years building a nice profitable business without even having to launder money for international criminals and mobsters. Unfortunately, Robert Mercer (along with his employees Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway) and Vladimir Putin had bigger plans for him.
So instead of Trump moving his shameless hustles from the general market to the conservative griftosphere, the unthinkable happened: The former figurehead of a corrupt fake University… the perennial loser more famous for his multiple bankruptcies than for ever building a successful business… the idiot who couldn’t even make money running a casino… was put in charge of the world’s biggest economy without having the slightest clue what that meant or what to do.
Three and a half years later, we are seeing the results: Trump’s abject stupidity has led America into a complete and utter economic disaster.