Mike Rowe's take on why Trump won. (A really good analogy)

I think Mike Rowe makes excellent points.

I think Hillary supporters need to separate their thoughts on WHY people voted for Trump from why they think they were wrong to vote for Trump.

You may think we are all misguided, he won't drain the swamp, whatever. That doesn't answer why people voted for him. Maybe if you could separate those things out it would be easier to listen to why people voted the way they did.

I have had very reasonable conversations with Bernie supporters about this. Our political leanings are vastly different. However, they have several theories on why people voted for Trump and many of them mirror why they voted for Bernie in the primaries.

I'm seeing the opposite as well. When people continued to complain about Obama after he won, his supporters called the whiners racists. Now that they are whining, all I'm hearing is "Don't invalidate our FEELINGS." SMH

I would have believed that here if the voters would have ousted all of the incumbents running, but an overwhelming number of them got re-elected.   Even the ones that have been sitting on their hands doing nothing for a long time.   

You know what they say about doing the same thing time after time and expecting different results? Yeah, that.

From things I have heard about people that have worked with Trump, he is actually out to stiff you after you put in your long month's work and send him a bill. He'll either not pay you and force small businesses to take him to court, or he'll declare bankruptcy and all those invoices magically go away:

"In another case, the Philadelphia cabinet business of Edward Friel Jr. was never paid more than $83,000 for work completed in 1984, the weight of which Friel's son said started the fall of the company.

USA Today analyzed at least 60 lawsuits and more than 200 mechanic's liens for the report...
The court records showed not only a pattern of not paying, but also of Trump companies tying up small businesses and individuals in lengthy legal dealings until they either settle, give up or sometimes go out of business altogether. "

Oh, we're going to get a shake up all right. And most people are going to get shaken down.

I think some people voted for Trump for the reasons Mike Rowe mentioned.

Some people voted for him because he was the Republican candidate. Whether it is lower taxes, pro-life, Supreme Court nominees or whatever, many people are going to vote Republican no matter what. Just like many people will vote Democrat no matter what.

I also think a lot of people voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. Just like many people voted for Hillary because she wasn't Trump. It was a choice between the lesser of two evils. We Democrats lost because we greatly underestimated the number of people who would never vote for Hillary Clinton. And the mistake we made was not figuring this out way sooner. Because the people who would never vote for Clinton where there from day one. Either they didn't want another Clinton (or Bush if Jeb had been nominated) or they distrust her. There may even be some people who just won't vote for a woman but I think that really is a minority.

The other reason she lost is that she did not tell people what she would do for them at least not in her ads. Trump did. While most of his ideas seem completely unworkable to me, they were something tangible. I read both of the Op-ed pieces in USAToday just a day or two before the election. I'd already voted and had long before made up my mind but I was curious. I have to say Trump's piece was more persuasive. Her piece focused on 3 things, at least one of them didn't really impact anyone I know at all. She never mentioned healthcare and even if those of us who support the ACA know it needs improving. Living in a swing state I saw ads constantly and all of them were running clips of the awful things Trump had said. Hearing them over and over wasn't going to sway someone who hadn't already been persuaded.

Of course it is easy to see this now. But I think the media told her she was winning and no one wants to be the one casting doubt.

Then again maybe this is all just about making a change. We made a change 8 years ago and 8 years before that and 8 years before that. Maybe the elections just run in cycles like the economy and no matter how much you mess with them, you are going to switch back and forth.

Yep.  How many empires have lasted forever??  None??  We aren't any different.  The rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer.  It's hard to tell when people are continually adding more new people to the population than are dying out.  But we are at a point now where it's too expensive for many to have kids AND have a life of doing more than getting a few weeks of paid leave every year.  Retirement is now a joke, the people who spent their lives paying into SS are unlikely to see any of it in the very near future, and because many people are waiting longer to have or are foregoing having children altogether means that our population isn't growing the way it used to (we are probably going to see our population decreasing very soon, maybe we would have already if not for immigration)...that means growth can't be sustained and it becomes even more obvious that the money is going straight to the top.  Decades ago, it wasn't a bad idea to have your own small business, but businesses have merged, bought each other out, etc and are such empires now that it's nearly impossible to get your foot in the door for much of anything because someone can make it cheaper and sell it cheaper than you could ever hope to do.  Small business is all but gone, which means that money is going to big companies instead of staying within our communities, making the money recycled throughout the community less and less...because the rich aren't spending it and putting it back into the economy, they are rich because of the resources that is horded and not spent.  Eventually, that cannot be sustained and the empire topples, to start anew and repeat the process.  When you think about it like that, communism isn't that bad of an idea.  Same input and same output for everyone can be sustained.  Sure, it might squelch the desire to innovate, but you don't end up with the huge collapse at the end.  Am I saying that's what's best?  Absolutely not, but I can definitely see the appeal.

I didn't follow Bernie much, but from my husband (who was a major Bernie supporter), I gather that his premise was to try and avoid that collapse by changing how much goes to the top to try and avoid that collapse.  The the thing is...when you have more, what incentive do you really have to get by with less?  Most people that have more don't have more because they are charitable or behaving for the greater good of those around them.  They have more because they are ruthless business people who see profit and their own gain over anything else, including the suffering of families because 'it makes good business sense to go bankrupt'.  Employees don't win when companies go bankrupt, but the people at the top still get their massive paydays.  Donald Trump won't bring about change.  He's spent his entire life (one that is closer to over than not, decreasing the incentive even further) benefiting from the system that keeps giving him more and who wants to give up having it that good, even if you don't come close to even needing it?  Certainly not him.  He's greedy, he's said that salaries are already too high (easy to say when you are extremely wealthy).  He's going to further adjust the system so he continues to benefit and probably so he benefits even more and we end up with less even faster.  Hillary probably wouldn't have done much better because she's one of the elite.  In order to not end up crashing and burning, our government needs to vote out EVERY career politician and bring in people who aren't rich...but that isn't likely, because it comes back to a question of resources, they have the resources (financial and personal) to bury any true do-gooder.  We created this system of putting the greedy in office to represent us, but in the end, because it's not infinitely sustainable, we all lose and start over at the same place.

Lisae said:

Lisa I just want to tell you how much I have appreciated your posts over the past couple days. We don't agree politically, but I do like your fairness of perception. I really liked the post above.