Post by aj2hall on Oct 24, 2024 22:00:21 GMT
I know a lot of us struggle to understand how people could vote for Trump. Here are a few intersting theories, there may be a little truth in each of them.
In Michigan, blue collar workers who have been incarcerated might be reluctant to vote for a prosecutor
www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/22/opinion/thepoint#why-harris-is-struggling-with-blue-collar-voters-in-detroit
Many blue-collar residents of Detroit went to prison at some point in their lives, instead of college. In the aftermath of mass incarceration, there are more than 100,000 adults in Detroit who have been convicted of a felony, and some 19 million around the country. That’s a lot of people, in a state that Trump won by less than 11,000 votes in 2016.
Last year Michigan became the first state in the nation to pass a law that automatically registers people who emerge from prison to vote, and a fair amount of grass-roots effort goes on in Detroit to make sure they do. These former inmates — who often struggle to get jobs and housing because of long-ago convictions — don’t love the idea of electing a prosecutor. Every time Harris calls Trump a felon, that’s a “a reminder of what she thinks of us,” one man who is trying to rebuild his life after a prison sentence told me.
The Michigan Republican Party is leaning into this and even enlisted former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who served time in federal prison for corruption, to speak for Trump as a man who gives second chances. Trump commuted Kilpatrick’s 28-year prison sentence in 2021.
Trump’s felony convictions might be a deal-breaker in the suburbs. But for tens of thousands of blue-collar city dwellers, a felony is just a fact of life.
Inflation. It's the economy stupid. This one is puzzling to me. I understand struggling with the high cost of groceries. But what do these people think Trump will actually do? Regrettably, prices are not going back down. And Trump's policies will most likely increase inflation. I think we can blam,e in part, Republicans for stripping funding from public schools and undoing the Fairness Doctrine that led to the evil Fox empire.
www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/opinion/trump-election-inflation-working-class.html
Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.
Cultural insecurity
wapo.st/4faVHMe - Gift article
Trump supporters are more likely to believe
gender obstacles that made it harder for women to get ahead are largely gone
gains women have made have come at the expense of men
are
uncomfortable with people speaking a language other than English in public
and are less likely to believe
white people benefit from advantages
the legacy of slavery greatly affects black people today
Americas openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are
compared to Biden supporters
Pride and shame
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/13/eastern-kentucky-shame-trump
“Well, this is how I think all of us have to learn to become bilingual about understanding a good half of the whole half of the country that doesn't agree with us.
“I think Donald Trump runs us through an anti-shaming ritual routinely. And it's got four moments. Moment one, he says something outrageous, something transgressive. You know, ‘All migrants poison the blood of America.’ Okay. Moment two, the punditry shames Donald Trump. They say, ‘You can't say that! We're an immigrant society. Shame on you.’
“And moment three, Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shame. ‘Look what they're talking about. They're making me feel bad. Have you been made to feel bad yet? You and me, we're the same. I'll protect you.’ He's shamed. Moment four is the Donald Trump roar back, first the Democratic Party, now it's the whole government. It's the deep state.
“And the left listens to moment one and two. And the right listens to moment three and four. And if we're bilingual, we can speak the language of emotion. And we can kind of see, tune in differently. Democrats will say, ‘Oh, he's rambling. He's saying nothing. He's irrational. How could these people be duped?’
“And what we need to do is say, when he's rambling, he's going through one, two, three, and four. And they're hearing it. He’s their good bully So there's another language we aren't tuned into, and the point of the book is to get that across.”
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/10/kentucky-addiction-politics-shame
Browning says Trump capitalized on the isolation and distrust that runs rampant in Appalachian Kentucky to secure support from voters there but failed to deliver on his promises. He says Trump came through on less than a quarter of the jobs he promised back in 2016, but people in Appalachia still support him.
“I think what he's done is tapped into that shame and the sense of being forgotten and alienated,” Browning says, “not in an empathetic way, but in an angry and malicious way.”
Abandoned and forgotten by the Democratic Party, coal workers attacked as being dirty
As the story goes here, a war on coal was declared by former President Barack Obama.
“If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” then-candidate Obama said during his 2008 campaign. “It’s just that it’ll bankrupt them, because they’ll be charged a huge sum because of all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
To be clear, Obama’s plan to punish coal-fired power plants was never realized. And eastern Kentucky lost coal jobs for many reasons: Machines took over lots of the work; coal plants got hurt by clean air rules passed in the 90s; and Appalachian coal struggled to compete against cheap natural gas in Pennsylvania and cheap coal in Wyoming.
It’s a complicated history. But to Scott, the narrative here is clear.
“What they're hearing is coal is dirty,” Scott says. “‘Well, I work in coal all day,’ would say one coal miner. Does that mean he's dirty too? Does that mean his family's dirty? Does that mean his money's dirty? Does that mean what's putting his children through college is dirty?”
Politics, he says, is what people perceive: being abandoned by Obama, then embraced by former President Donald Trump.
In 2016, candidate Trump came to Appalachia, pledging to bring mining jobs back: “For those miners, get ready,” Trump said, “because you’re going to be working your a**** off, alright?”
To be clear, most coal jobs have not come back. But Trump delivered hope in a place with no backups to coal jobs.
Gary Bentley was laid off from a local mine. Both of his grandfathers and one of his great-grandfathers were coal miners.
“I chased the industry myself in 2012. I moved to western Kentucky, did job interviews in New Mexico because I thought mining was the only job I would ever do for the rest of my life,” Bentley says. “I actually know a few people and they went from, driving 20 minutes to a local coal mine, to driving three, four hours one way just to have the bare minimum coal job.”
Like many, Bentley eventually left the industry for factory work. Then he opened a heating and cooling company in another part of the state. He’s part of the Appalachian brain drain.
Bentley is a Democrat. But he agrees with Republican Mayor Scott that the coal crisis in eastern Kentucky became an opportunity for the GOP.
And in his mind, local Democrats lost the plot, focusing on abortion, LGBTQ rights and gender identity.
“Conservative Christian people, they definitely don't want to publicly come out and support it or vote for it,” Bentley says. “Now all of those things are important and should be addressed. So I would not want the Democratic Party to shy away from it. But I do think they're going to have to find other issues and be like, ‘Is it more important to have a gender-neutral bathroom, or is it more important for you to have a job?’”
Many people here echo what Ronald Reagan famously said in the ‘60s, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.”
The question is, why the fervor for Donald Trump, a New York City developer with zero blue-collar roots?
Mayor Scott sees Trump as a good kind of bully.
“You could very much argue that from the perspective of the coal miners that Barack Obama was the bully, right?” Scott says. “Then you have Trump coming around the corner and be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing to these people? I want to protect them.’ ”
There’s a sense of being bullied and shamed across rural America, sociologist Hochschild argues. Trump taps into a feeling among conservatives that their American dream has stalled — that others are cutting in front of them to achieve the dream, she says.
“There was a cultural populism that really has lit a fire. And one man I talked to said, ‘Oh, Donald Trump, he's like lightning in a jar,’ ” Hochschild says. “What, what happened? Good people. downtimes, shame, and I believe in a certain way that Donald Trump has managed to speak to that feeling.”
People here echo a feeling of being ignored, forgotten. To Hoschchild, Trump is hearing them — and they’re responding with their loyalty and votes.
Trump as a counter bully to Democrats. Democrats are at fault for the loss of coal mines and responsible for the opiod crisis.
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/11/trump-eastern-kentucky
“They felt they were waiting in line for the American dream and their feet were getting tired. And they felt that people were cutting in line ahead of them,” Hochschild says. “But that there was a bully in line, and that bully was the EPA under Obama. People felt like something had been taken away from them. Tremendous loss.”
Again, they feel bullied by elites, city folks, Obama and Biden.
Who is their bully? Hochschild says it’s Trump.
“That counter bully wasn't perfect. He had a lot of flaws,” Hochschild says. “But at least he was, as they saw it, our bully.”
Our last Ketucky stop is back to downtown Pikeville, where there are signs everywhere advertising drug addiction recovery. Appalachia remains the country’s epicenter of the opioid crisis.
The rate of overdose deaths per 100,000 people is 70% higher than outside Appalachia. And Republican Ford blames the flow of fentanyl on a failed border — under Biden. Ford believes a wall would help.
“We have to have a tough border policy coupled with a tougher, more practical response to the drug problem,” Ford says. “If that’s the game, and if we’re in a war and that’s what it appears to be, we need to prosecute it like it’s an actual war.”
Put it all together, and Ford, like many in eastern Kentucky, sees a Democratic party that’s failed this place and a Republican candidate who speaks to a wounded pride.
These theories are older, but some might hold true today
Attraction to authoritarianism
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.
racial resentment
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
or fears of cultural displacement
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/
In Michigan, blue collar workers who have been incarcerated might be reluctant to vote for a prosecutor
www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/22/opinion/thepoint#why-harris-is-struggling-with-blue-collar-voters-in-detroit
Many blue-collar residents of Detroit went to prison at some point in their lives, instead of college. In the aftermath of mass incarceration, there are more than 100,000 adults in Detroit who have been convicted of a felony, and some 19 million around the country. That’s a lot of people, in a state that Trump won by less than 11,000 votes in 2016.
Last year Michigan became the first state in the nation to pass a law that automatically registers people who emerge from prison to vote, and a fair amount of grass-roots effort goes on in Detroit to make sure they do. These former inmates — who often struggle to get jobs and housing because of long-ago convictions — don’t love the idea of electing a prosecutor. Every time Harris calls Trump a felon, that’s a “a reminder of what she thinks of us,” one man who is trying to rebuild his life after a prison sentence told me.
The Michigan Republican Party is leaning into this and even enlisted former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who served time in federal prison for corruption, to speak for Trump as a man who gives second chances. Trump commuted Kilpatrick’s 28-year prison sentence in 2021.
Trump’s felony convictions might be a deal-breaker in the suburbs. But for tens of thousands of blue-collar city dwellers, a felony is just a fact of life.
Inflation. It's the economy stupid. This one is puzzling to me. I understand struggling with the high cost of groceries. But what do these people think Trump will actually do? Regrettably, prices are not going back down. And Trump's policies will most likely increase inflation. I think we can blam,e in part, Republicans for stripping funding from public schools and undoing the Fairness Doctrine that led to the evil Fox empire.
www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/opinion/trump-election-inflation-working-class.html
Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.
Cultural insecurity
wapo.st/4faVHMe - Gift article
Trump supporters are more likely to believe
gender obstacles that made it harder for women to get ahead are largely gone
gains women have made have come at the expense of men
are
uncomfortable with people speaking a language other than English in public
and are less likely to believe
white people benefit from advantages
the legacy of slavery greatly affects black people today
Americas openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are
compared to Biden supporters
Pride and shame
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/13/eastern-kentucky-shame-trump
“Well, this is how I think all of us have to learn to become bilingual about understanding a good half of the whole half of the country that doesn't agree with us.
“I think Donald Trump runs us through an anti-shaming ritual routinely. And it's got four moments. Moment one, he says something outrageous, something transgressive. You know, ‘All migrants poison the blood of America.’ Okay. Moment two, the punditry shames Donald Trump. They say, ‘You can't say that! We're an immigrant society. Shame on you.’
“And moment three, Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shame. ‘Look what they're talking about. They're making me feel bad. Have you been made to feel bad yet? You and me, we're the same. I'll protect you.’ He's shamed. Moment four is the Donald Trump roar back, first the Democratic Party, now it's the whole government. It's the deep state.
“And the left listens to moment one and two. And the right listens to moment three and four. And if we're bilingual, we can speak the language of emotion. And we can kind of see, tune in differently. Democrats will say, ‘Oh, he's rambling. He's saying nothing. He's irrational. How could these people be duped?’
“And what we need to do is say, when he's rambling, he's going through one, two, three, and four. And they're hearing it. He’s their good bully So there's another language we aren't tuned into, and the point of the book is to get that across.”
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/10/kentucky-addiction-politics-shame
Browning says Trump capitalized on the isolation and distrust that runs rampant in Appalachian Kentucky to secure support from voters there but failed to deliver on his promises. He says Trump came through on less than a quarter of the jobs he promised back in 2016, but people in Appalachia still support him.
“I think what he's done is tapped into that shame and the sense of being forgotten and alienated,” Browning says, “not in an empathetic way, but in an angry and malicious way.”
Abandoned and forgotten by the Democratic Party, coal workers attacked as being dirty
As the story goes here, a war on coal was declared by former President Barack Obama.
“If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” then-candidate Obama said during his 2008 campaign. “It’s just that it’ll bankrupt them, because they’ll be charged a huge sum because of all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
To be clear, Obama’s plan to punish coal-fired power plants was never realized. And eastern Kentucky lost coal jobs for many reasons: Machines took over lots of the work; coal plants got hurt by clean air rules passed in the 90s; and Appalachian coal struggled to compete against cheap natural gas in Pennsylvania and cheap coal in Wyoming.
It’s a complicated history. But to Scott, the narrative here is clear.
“What they're hearing is coal is dirty,” Scott says. “‘Well, I work in coal all day,’ would say one coal miner. Does that mean he's dirty too? Does that mean his family's dirty? Does that mean his money's dirty? Does that mean what's putting his children through college is dirty?”
Politics, he says, is what people perceive: being abandoned by Obama, then embraced by former President Donald Trump.
In 2016, candidate Trump came to Appalachia, pledging to bring mining jobs back: “For those miners, get ready,” Trump said, “because you’re going to be working your a**** off, alright?”
To be clear, most coal jobs have not come back. But Trump delivered hope in a place with no backups to coal jobs.
Gary Bentley was laid off from a local mine. Both of his grandfathers and one of his great-grandfathers were coal miners.
“I chased the industry myself in 2012. I moved to western Kentucky, did job interviews in New Mexico because I thought mining was the only job I would ever do for the rest of my life,” Bentley says. “I actually know a few people and they went from, driving 20 minutes to a local coal mine, to driving three, four hours one way just to have the bare minimum coal job.”
Like many, Bentley eventually left the industry for factory work. Then he opened a heating and cooling company in another part of the state. He’s part of the Appalachian brain drain.
Bentley is a Democrat. But he agrees with Republican Mayor Scott that the coal crisis in eastern Kentucky became an opportunity for the GOP.
And in his mind, local Democrats lost the plot, focusing on abortion, LGBTQ rights and gender identity.
“Conservative Christian people, they definitely don't want to publicly come out and support it or vote for it,” Bentley says. “Now all of those things are important and should be addressed. So I would not want the Democratic Party to shy away from it. But I do think they're going to have to find other issues and be like, ‘Is it more important to have a gender-neutral bathroom, or is it more important for you to have a job?’”
Many people here echo what Ronald Reagan famously said in the ‘60s, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.”
The question is, why the fervor for Donald Trump, a New York City developer with zero blue-collar roots?
Mayor Scott sees Trump as a good kind of bully.
“You could very much argue that from the perspective of the coal miners that Barack Obama was the bully, right?” Scott says. “Then you have Trump coming around the corner and be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing to these people? I want to protect them.’ ”
There’s a sense of being bullied and shamed across rural America, sociologist Hochschild argues. Trump taps into a feeling among conservatives that their American dream has stalled — that others are cutting in front of them to achieve the dream, she says.
“There was a cultural populism that really has lit a fire. And one man I talked to said, ‘Oh, Donald Trump, he's like lightning in a jar,’ ” Hochschild says. “What, what happened? Good people. downtimes, shame, and I believe in a certain way that Donald Trump has managed to speak to that feeling.”
People here echo a feeling of being ignored, forgotten. To Hoschchild, Trump is hearing them — and they’re responding with their loyalty and votes.
Trump as a counter bully to Democrats. Democrats are at fault for the loss of coal mines and responsible for the opiod crisis.
www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/09/11/trump-eastern-kentucky
“They felt they were waiting in line for the American dream and their feet were getting tired. And they felt that people were cutting in line ahead of them,” Hochschild says. “But that there was a bully in line, and that bully was the EPA under Obama. People felt like something had been taken away from them. Tremendous loss.”
Again, they feel bullied by elites, city folks, Obama and Biden.
Who is their bully? Hochschild says it’s Trump.
“That counter bully wasn't perfect. He had a lot of flaws,” Hochschild says. “But at least he was, as they saw it, our bully.”
Our last Ketucky stop is back to downtown Pikeville, where there are signs everywhere advertising drug addiction recovery. Appalachia remains the country’s epicenter of the opioid crisis.
The rate of overdose deaths per 100,000 people is 70% higher than outside Appalachia. And Republican Ford blames the flow of fentanyl on a failed border — under Biden. Ford believes a wall would help.
“We have to have a tough border policy coupled with a tougher, more practical response to the drug problem,” Ford says. “If that’s the game, and if we’re in a war and that’s what it appears to be, we need to prosecute it like it’s an actual war.”
Put it all together, and Ford, like many in eastern Kentucky, sees a Democratic party that’s failed this place and a Republican candidate who speaks to a wounded pride.
These theories are older, but some might hold true today
Attraction to authoritarianism
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.
racial resentment
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533/
or fears of cultural displacement
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/
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