Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on Twitter
No surprises here. Trump is stupid. It’s not a coincidence that one of the most reliable indicators of Trump support is lack of education. Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical. Trump is four of those things.
This reminds me of those Diane Sawyer news specials where she’d be interviewing some down and out person, prostitute, drug addict, petty criminal etc, where she shames them into bumbling, dissembling rationals for what they are doing. But here Swan is not doing any shaming and Trump comes off sounding like a crack addict.
Are we sure this isn’t a Lincoln Project presentation????
The demographics I saw from Pew I think said Trumpers were unusually white, male, poor, no college, evangelical, and old. The big problem for America is that group votes way more than everybody else.
It should be trivially easy to beat a group of poorly educated old people, you simply outsmart them at every step. Unfortunately, some of his supporters are very well educated — you forgot to include the smart, well-educated cynical and greedy people who see personal advantages in promoting idiots like Trump. And those well-educated cynics are much harder to beat. Which is how Trump got elected in the first place, how’s he’s kept power despite doing several impeachable things, and why its important not to underestimate his chances. Many of his followers are as you describe. Some definitely aren’t. Assuming your opponents are idiots has led to a lot of avoidable losses in war, business, and politics.
I wonder how many times he said “people say” or “nobody knows” or “lots of things can happen” or any number of vague hand-wavery statements?
It’s very close to how Wikipedia defines the term weasel words as it applies to Wikipedia editing. The term can have broader meaning in other contexts, but on Wikipedia it’s something people editing it are warned against doing–surrounding statements with phrases like “Some people say…” or “It has been noted that…” instead of coming up with actual, you know, sources.
@Northerner: Agreed. And how smart are we, that we keep having to struggle to generate turnout among Democrats, with so many supporters convinced that their vote doesn’t count, and potential supporters convinced that Democrats and Republicans are all the same?
@drj: but there’s way more poor white people than rich white people. So the absolute number is many more poor people supporting Trump than rich.
And it’s no surprise that rich white people supported Trump, the one thing you can count on Republican presidents to do is cut taxes on rich people. Reagan did it, George W. Bush did it, and Trump did it.
@Monala: I can totally understand that, there have been political science studies that concluded that there was, on average, almost no correlation between what the public wants and what politicians do, the strongest correlation was with what do rich people want.
Again…
The discussion should be around his mental acuity, and how much his obvious mental and physical decline have affected his capacity for the office.
This is ~38 minutes of a man who is clearly not up to the task.
Focusing on specifics is beyond the point. The entirety of the thing shows he should not be President.
Just remember the generation of “Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical, working class rubes” that so many smug neoliberal boomers condescend to were the ones who put in Social Security, recognition of trade unions, anti trust laws they actually enforced, Glass Steagall, iron clad regulation of Wall Street finance capital, 90% top marginal rates, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the EPA, OSHA, SEC, ICC, FCC, the interstate highway system, virtually free public college tuition, the FHA and vastly expanded opportunities for minorities and a doubling of real wages in 25 years for the middle class (current boomer pace of real incomes doubling? 350 years) .
California and New York were red up till 1988. The New Deal and Great Society were made possible not by college educated whites (they were solidly GOP till the new millennium) but by the very rubes the Dems have decided are now repugnant. The giant progressive strides of the New Deal that the GOP has spent 80 years now trying to destroy were built on the backs, sweat and labor of the poor, stupid, ignorant, white, male, Christian, high school graduates who voted for FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ….a map of red/blue from 1932 – 1964 would have the colors reversed.
It’s amazing that if a party like the GOP says, “we don’t need the vote of uneducated, poor, old, male African American Baptists?”…they would be rightfully scorned as racist elitists.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
And we wonder why we can’t obliterate the GOP from the face of the earth????? Those rubes you hate kept the GOP out of power in the House for 56 out of 60 years, kept the Senate Dem for 48 out of 60 years and lead the biggest middle class boom ever. That all ended in 1992 and the neolib election of Bill Clinton and the era of big government officially moribund.
But keep shitting on the gal that brung ya…..and then wonder why Trump pulls out another EC victory because we failed to appeal to at least some of these voters again.
Obama got that white dipschite vote in the upper midwest states and that sealed his two victories.
@Northerner: I’ve read variations on this argument that Dems are being elitist by saying out loud that most of the Trump voters are stupid (I like KingDaddy’s term “aggressively stupid”). They conclude that we underrate them at our peril or that we are “writing them off.” Nope. The flaw is the premise that we speak the same language as the Trumpbots. We at least attempt to use reason, logic, evidence in making important decisions. We also believe that the scientific method is an essential tool in trying to understand our world. Trumpbots don’t. If you want a painful experience, watch some of them try to explain why they support Trump. It is genuinely aggressively stupid. We are NOT going to reach them. Trump has a floor of about 40% support. These folks are operating from their amygdalae not their pre-frontal lobes. We need to out vote them (assuming that we will be allowed to).
Q, you got the timeline wrong. We lost those voters because of LBJ and his support of civil rights legislation. All of those poor and less educated white folk supported social safety nets as long as they were for the poor white folk, but not when non white folk were allowed the same protections as them. It was civil rights that drove them out of the tent, not Clinton.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
When they are doing what they’re doing? Yes.
On the other thread there was an anecdote about a “good guy” who just happened to be buying all the Trump gaslighting. Seemingly objects to all the terrible things that Trump does but is perfectly fine with him and the current party line. The question becomes “when do you stop being a ‘good guy’ when you can’t or won’t break away from evil”? Well guess what – they are acting like deplorables so that’s what they get tagged as. To even remotely consider voting for Trump at this point means there’s something wrong with you. It’s no longer a political disagreement – they are choosing to vote for a hot mess that is destroying our nation and getting us killed. There’s no fence anymore and you can’t claim to be a decent person while pulling the lever for this demented idiot.
White, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters side with Trump for a reason. No, it’s not economics because he’s done more to ruin them in 4 years then Obama could ever dream of doing. No, it’s not religion because whatever BS they’re calling “faith” needs to twist itself into theological knots to justify letting the Walking 7 Sins be God’s Champion.
You can’t rest on your laurels. Whatever good this voting bloc achieved, they’ve wasted it chasing after con men who pandered to their darker impulses. They flipped NY blue? Have you looked at a map lately – NY would still be bright red if not for NYC and to a lesser extent Buffalo, Rochester, et al. NY is Alabama North in a lot of rural areas and would happily revert back to its old Republican ways…. although granted a NY Repub is not the same as their Southern cousins. Remember the first Congresscritter to publicly kiss Trump ass and go full sycophant came from WNY.
But keep shitting on the gal that brung ya…..and then wonder why Trump pulls out another EC victory because we failed to appeal to at least some of these voters again.
Making deals with the devil is EXACTLY how we got into this mess in the first place. Appease the lunatics who willing chose Trump but turn into Trump Lite and they’ll think about it? Disregard the will of millions of voters for a few thousand who just happen to be in the right place… only to have them turn on you and accept the worst choice because he lets them indulge in their inner hater? How much of our soul do we have to sell for them to make it more then 50/50 chance leaning GOP?
If this were a relationship, it would have gone past toxic and straight into abusive. Give me what I want or I’ll vote to destroy it all isn’t a healthy stance. Do what I say or else is how abusers think. If white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters need to force their will on America by picking Trump to hurt the rest of us….. well, maybe they’re getting shit on by the rest of society for a good reason.
Those rubes you hate kept the GOP out of power in the House for 56 out of 60 years, kept the Senate Dem for 48 out of 60 years and lead the biggest middle class boom ever.
And for a big bulk of that time Congress was dominated by a conservative coalition. It was majority Dem, but a lot of those Dems were extremely conservative–they were instrumental in the passage of Taft-Hartley and the collapse of the push for universal health care, among other things. Your implication that conservative Dems first arose in the 1990s is pure nonsense.
That all ended in 1992 and the neolib election of Bill Clinton and the era of big government officially moribund.
You are pushing a mythical history here. Whites–particularly in the formerly “Solid South”–began leaving the Democratic Party in droves during the 1960s, leading to near-absolute Republican domination of the White House for the next few decades. Dems ran a strong liberal–McGovern–and got absolutely destroyed. The only times they won during this period were when they nominated a Southern moderate, Carter, who managed to reconstruct the Solid South for one cycle and just barely eke out victory against a party damaged from Watergate. As for Clinton, in trying to cast him as the cause of the Democrats’ loss of uneducated whites, you’re forgetting that he was the last Democrat to win those voters. “Bubba” was winning poor states like West Virginia and Louisiana, and all over the country in rural and blue-collar counties, that have not voted Democrat since. The exodus of those voters from the Democratic Party and the increase in urban and college-educated support happened after Clinton left office.
What’s missing from your analysis is a recognition of how crucially racism played a role in the realignment you decry. What enabled FDR to achieve his massive landslides was that the Depression opened a temporary window in which white supremacists and liberals found a way to coexist within the same party. After FDR died, that almost immediately began falling apart.
Your belief that adopting a left-populist economics would cause these voters to come back to the Dems en masse is pure fantasy. It’s simply not what animates these voters.
Your belief that adopting a left-populist economics would cause these voters to come back to the Dems en masse is pure fantasy. It’s simply not what animates these voters.
How many of them whole-heartedly believe “socialism” is evil and universal healthcare is the devil’s work? How many are anti-union and against safety nets?
Even if we were to implement an economic paradise where everyone was paid a living wage, no one ever worried about medical bills and jobs thrived like they did under unions, these folks would still be angry and vote GOP. They’d complain their taxes were too high and the wrong people were benefiting from *their* money / hard work. Entitlements are for the*, not those people.
There isn’t enough money in the world to make a bitter person happy. Addressing why they’re bitter is the best way of helping but that means admitting that there’s a deep seated problem with this voter bloc economic booms won’t cure.
@Teve: the issue is, the only way to really change this, is for each and every election, come out and vote. My daughter told me that Bernie Sanders would win the Dem nomination this year because he has so much support among young people. I said that would happen if and only if they came out and voted in large numbers. They didn’t.
Republicans get it. Democrats, progressives and liberals do not.
@The Q: enough people (in the US, not just here at OTB) have shared stories of those old, white, Christian high school educated men who changed into raging rightwingers after being exposed long-term to Fox News or rightwing radio. A lot of the people you describe are no longer of the same mindset that created the New Deal and other progressive policies.
@The Q:
Dude, the Baby Boomer generation began with births in 1944. So unless they (we) time-traveled, we did not create Social Security. FDR’s programs were run by well-educated, well-heeled liberals of the Greatest Generation.
What the Boomers did was rock and roll. That’s us, though initially the black ‘us.’ Also recreational drugs and long hair. But we did not create the pre or post-war liberal order. No Boomer even reached Congress earlier than the 70’s. Our political muscle didn’t really manifest until the 80’s which gave us what? Ronald Reagan, not FDR. Reagan’s lies about government, his race-baiting, his simple-mindedness, and his authoritarianism laid the groundwork for the modern GOP.
The rest of your nonsense has been dealt with upstream, but to re-iterate what everyone who knows anything about politics can tell you, the pivot came with the Southern Strategy. That’s when the GOP took over the job of race-baiting previously managed by southern Democrats. Reagan, Carter, Clinton, the Bushes and Trump. That’s the Boomer political legacy and I’m not impressed.
Just remember the generation of “Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical, working class rubes” that so many smug neoliberal boomers condescend to were the ones who put in Social Security,
yeah when Social Security was initially set up jobs that were primarily done by black people were excluded from qualification.
@The Q: What I don’t understand, continue to not understand, and will probably NEVER…EVER [h.t. to Chris Jericho] understand is 1) how it is that those “Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical, working class rubes” came to the realization that voting against their own interests was the key to political success for them, and 2) how it is that you’re not getting that’s what happened. It’s all well and good to be nostalgic about the glory days of the progressives, but get a grip!
@Teve:
It’s even more insidious than that. I recall hearing that Social Security had been premised on Black people not living long enough to collect it.
@Monala: The system is rigged against Democrats voting any number of ways. You’re not gonna find many Karens holding lattes waiting in line for seven hours to vote. And Dems still won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
@Teve: that’s true for presidential elections. But Democrats are far more likely to drop off in turnout (or drop off in larger degrees) than Republicans for midterm and local elections.
Depressingly (since this applies to more family members than I care to think about) I’m starting to think that whoever noted that real change doesn’t happen until generations die off is right. Between their sheer size and medical advances the Boomers are hanging on past the point previous generations became less relevant. I’m not even sure I’d call it wrong, just…sheer, absolute, total resistance to change.
Are the Boomers really such a hidebound drag? Wasn’t this the generation that gave us hippies; free love; sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll; massive protests; Black Power; power to the people; the Chicago 7; flower power; turn on, tune in, drop out; the youthquake; the Weather Underground…
Yes, but that cohort was a subsection of the generation, plus a good portion of the ex members of the counter culture only owned the individualism and signed on to Reagan.
Kayleigh mentions the ratings of the Coronavirus press briefings and says it’s when the President is at his best
@WalshFreedom
Ratings???? They’re fucking bragging about their ratings???? 158,000 Americans are dead, millions & millions of Americans can’t make rent or mortgage, and all team Trump can do is brag about their fucking TV ratings???? Fuck Trump.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
I question your math.
Males are about 50% of the country — a little less I believe. And many of them are non-white, young, more or less than high school educated and not evangelical.
That all ended in 1992 and the neolib election of Bill Clinton and the era of big government officially moribund
He wasn’t my choice either, but I don’t think we were going to win with Jerry Brown. Just as we hadn’t won with Dukakis, Mondale or Carter’s second run. Democrats were reacting to the rise of hard Conservatism from Nixon onward, and voter attitudes for Democrats were slow — the powers of incumbency.
Clinton slowed the right-wing lurch. And he helped stop genocide in Europe. That’s not super exciting left-wing programs, but it’s not nothing.
Throughout America’s history, we have been divided roughly one third liberal, one third conservative, and one third racist, and whoever courts the racists has gotten the ball. But, the Democrats aren’t going to be making common ground with the racists for the foreseeable future — so you can either get on board trying to build a broader coalition (which means making the racists uncomfortable, so others are comfortable), or consign yourself to losing.
It’s the only path forward. Outreach to the racists would lose us more votes than it would gain.
That’s not what I was arguing about — you’ll notice that nowhere do I say anything about trying to convert his supporters to vote for Biden. I don’t think its possible, there’s a much better chance trying to get a few of the 40% who don’t bother voting to vote than to change the vote of someone who has already picked a team (something like 95% of people vote for the same party every election throughout their lives).
I’m arguing against assuming all of Trump’s supporters are stupid and uneducated. It’d be nice if it were true, because stupid and uneducated people who are led by stupid and uneducated people are easy to beat in almost everything (even in sport they don’t do well), because they can be outsmarted every step of the way.
But some of Trump’s supporters (or perhaps better put, some of the people using Trump to further their own ends) are very intelligent and educated (obviously I’m not talking about Trump himself at this point). They’re also cynical, greedy and self-serving enough to not care of the overall destruction someone like Trump brings, so long as their personal stock rises. Assuming they’re going to be easy to beat is a mistake. Assuming your opponents are all idiots rarely turns out well.
Most of them simply vote for their team, and don’t spend 10 minutes thinking about politics even before an election. Its not a question of voting for or against interests for most people (actually 40% don’t bother voting at all), because most can’t tell you what anyone running stands for except in terms of very general platitudes. They vote for who they always vote for.
All the political discussion (online and everywhere else) comes from a few million people interested in politics. That sounds like a lot, until you remember that there’s about 120 million people who bother to vote. Most think its their duty to vote, but don’t consider taking time to actually listen to politicians as part of that duty.
I’m arguing against assuming all of Trump’s supporters are stupid and uneducated.
I have several educated Trumpsters on my facebook feed. They aren’t stupid but they gobble up the GOP bullshit all the time. When floyd was killed some of them broke free for a tiny bit then went back to blaming Floyd for his death because OMG RIOTS VIOLENCE THE LEFT IS EVIL AND THE DEMONCRATS ARE KEEPING TRUMP FROM DOING MORE GOOD AND ARE DESTROYING AMERICA CAUSE THEY HATE IT AND RELIGION!!! The one consistency is that they all feel the need to be publicly religious on facebook. They also tend to refuse to believe that left wingers can be religious. So they get highly upset when you quote scripture at them. Pointing out fallacies in their logic also triggers them. Even if you try to do it in the nicest non confrontational way possible.
These are college educated people with up to a bachelor’s degree.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
Not even remotely correct. In the US, about a quarter of people are evangelical, about 30% of people are over 55, less than half of elderly people are men, and 75% of people are white, so if we define Old as 55+, based on a back of the envelope calculation this demographic is probably around 10% of the population.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
The Q, you should have known your number was wrong because males aren’t even 50% of the population. For your number to be close to right, literally every man in America would have to be an old white evangelical. Obviously that’s nonsense.
One more thing about @Q’s post: It’s an incredibly Republican way of looking at this situation. It’s straight up “the Forgotten Man” BS they’ve peddled to the poor schmucks for decades. It’s grievance identity politics at its finest – “the Dems aren’t treating you like you deserve. Punish them and follow us despite the fact we ignore and mistreat you too!” Demanding Dems change their political identity to conform to a specific group’s decidedly not-Dem political leanings sounds remarkably like Never-Trumpers demanding Dems run someone they can vote for…. you know, instead of the nice female candidate already out there instead of Dumpster Fire Donald who they ultimately picked?
Dems have reached out to this demographic repeatedly and routinely get their hands slapped because it’s not *exactly* what they want. Offering job training to coal miners comes to mind – Hillary got lambasted for correctly pointing out coal jobs are dying and we need to transform places like Appalachia if they want to survive. Guess who cussed her out and voted for Trump for *daring* to suggest they go back to school and learn a new way of earning a living? We could have gotten the drop on a ton of technology and brought manufacturing home to our shores. Hell, even if it was just making PPE or medical equipment, we’d have had a HUGE leg up on COVID and not be in the mess we’re in. Are they mad at Trump for not delivering and ruining their lives even further? Nope – guess who’s voting Trump again because he’s still peddling the lie they don’t have to change; it’s the world that needs to accommodate them.
I have several educated Trumpsters on my facebook feed. They aren’t stupid but they gobble up the GOP bullshit all the time.
I suspect some of them don’t believe the bullshit either, but they find it convenient that other people do and are quite willing to promote it. I know quite a few people like that, the “never give a sucker an even break” crowd. They tend to see life as a zero-sum game, so if they can get you to believe BS that hurts you and helps them then its your fault for believing them rather than their fault for spreading what they know is BS.
@Northerner: Oh they are true believers even when I talk to them in person. I do know the type of people you’re talking about though and I excluded them for that reason.
It’s straight up “the Forgotten Man” BS they’ve peddled to the poor schmucks for decades. It’s grievance identity politics at its finest – “the Dems aren’t treating you like you deserve. Punish them and follow us despite the fact we ignore and mistreat you too!”
Good point. Maybe The Q is one of those bots we’ve been hearing so much about, or running a false flag operation of some sort.
Granted, he’s likely just another *old man shouting at the clouds,* but your observation is spot on.
Just nutha ignint cracker, nah, Q is just an old man yelling at the clouds and has been for about as long as I’ve been here (over a decade now, jesus I’m getting old too). Whenever he gets the chance he bellyaches about boomers and yells at millinials to get off his metaphorical lawn.
As far as he’s concerned social justice is just a plot to steal social welfare programs from poor uneducated white men that are the back bone of this country dog dammit!
@Grewgills: Scott Lemieux of the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog tweeted yesterday something like, “Sorry to tell you that your suburban real estate agent mom is more likely to help you get the social welfare state you want than a welder in Ohio.”
No surprises here. Trump is stupid. It’s not a coincidence that one of the most reliable indicators of Trump support is lack of education. Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical. Trump is four of those things.
This reminds me of those Diane Sawyer news specials where she’d be interviewing some down and out person, prostitute, drug addict, petty criminal etc, where she shames them into bumbling, dissembling rationals for what they are doing. But here Swan is not doing any shaming and Trump comes off sounding like a crack addict.
Are we sure this isn’t a Lincoln Project presentation????
The demographics I saw from Pew I think said Trumpers were unusually white, male, poor, no college, evangelical, and old. The big problem for America is that group votes way more than everybody else.
@Michael Reynolds:
It should be trivially easy to beat a group of poorly educated old people, you simply outsmart them at every step. Unfortunately, some of his supporters are very well educated — you forgot to include the smart, well-educated cynical and greedy people who see personal advantages in promoting idiots like Trump. And those well-educated cynics are much harder to beat. Which is how Trump got elected in the first place, how’s he’s kept power despite doing several impeachable things, and why its important not to underestimate his chances. Many of his followers are as you describe. Some definitely aren’t. Assuming your opponents are idiots has led to a lot of avoidable losses in war, business, and politics.
@Michael Reynolds:
Trump was more popular in 2016 among the wealthy than among the poor.
It’s very close to how Wikipedia defines the term weasel words as it applies to Wikipedia editing. The term can have broader meaning in other contexts, but on Wikipedia it’s something people editing it are warned against doing–surrounding statements with phrases like “Some people say…” or “It has been noted that…” instead of coming up with actual, you know, sources.
@Northerner: Agreed. And how smart are we, that we keep having to struggle to generate turnout among Democrats, with so many supporters convinced that their vote doesn’t count, and potential supporters convinced that Democrats and Republicans are all the same?
I think my favorite exchange from the portion of the interview dealing with Covid-19 (I have not watched the rest) was this:
TRUMP: You know, there are those that say you can test too much. You do know that?
SWAN: Who says that?
TRUMP: Oh, just read the manuals, read the books.
SWAN: Manuals?
TRUMP: Read the books.
SWAN: What books?
@drj: but there’s way more poor white people than rich white people. So the absolute number is many more poor people supporting Trump than rich.
And it’s no surprise that rich white people supported Trump, the one thing you can count on Republican presidents to do is cut taxes on rich people. Reagan did it, George W. Bush did it, and Trump did it.
@drj:
Wealthy voters aren’t a major voting bloc. They’re important for their financial contributions, not their votes.
@Northerner:
Of course. Any movement has some cynical prick making bank.
@Kylopod: Trump reads all the books. Just as Palin reads all the newspapers.
@Monala: I can totally understand that, there have been political science studies that concluded that there was, on average, almost no correlation between what the public wants and what politicians do, the strongest correlation was with what do rich people want.
Again…
The discussion should be around his mental acuity, and how much his obvious mental and physical decline have affected his capacity for the office.
This is ~38 minutes of a man who is clearly not up to the task.
Focusing on specifics is beyond the point. The entirety of the thing shows he should not be President.
@Kylopod: You know, the COVID-19 manuals!! People say they have all the information. Strong and powerful information.
Which Jonathan Swan are you today?
Just remember the generation of “Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical, working class rubes” that so many smug neoliberal boomers condescend to were the ones who put in Social Security, recognition of trade unions, anti trust laws they actually enforced, Glass Steagall, iron clad regulation of Wall Street finance capital, 90% top marginal rates, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the EPA, OSHA, SEC, ICC, FCC, the interstate highway system, virtually free public college tuition, the FHA and vastly expanded opportunities for minorities and a doubling of real wages in 25 years for the middle class (current boomer pace of real incomes doubling? 350 years) .
California and New York were red up till 1988. The New Deal and Great Society were made possible not by college educated whites (they were solidly GOP till the new millennium) but by the very rubes the Dems have decided are now repugnant. The giant progressive strides of the New Deal that the GOP has spent 80 years now trying to destroy were built on the backs, sweat and labor of the poor, stupid, ignorant, white, male, Christian, high school graduates who voted for FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ….a map of red/blue from 1932 – 1964 would have the colors reversed.
It’s amazing that if a party like the GOP says, “we don’t need the vote of uneducated, poor, old, male African American Baptists?”…they would be rightfully scorned as racist elitists.
Yet, we can smear with impunity about 50% of the country who happen to be white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters.
And we wonder why we can’t obliterate the GOP from the face of the earth????? Those rubes you hate kept the GOP out of power in the House for 56 out of 60 years, kept the Senate Dem for 48 out of 60 years and lead the biggest middle class boom ever. That all ended in 1992 and the neolib election of Bill Clinton and the era of big government officially moribund.
But keep shitting on the gal that brung ya…..and then wonder why Trump pulls out another EC victory because we failed to appeal to at least some of these voters again.
Obama got that white dipschite vote in the upper midwest states and that sealed his two victories.
@Teve: That made my day. Thank you.
@Northerner: I’ve read variations on this argument that Dems are being elitist by saying out loud that most of the Trump voters are stupid (I like KingDaddy’s term “aggressively stupid”). They conclude that we underrate them at our peril or that we are “writing them off.” Nope. The flaw is the premise that we speak the same language as the Trumpbots. We at least attempt to use reason, logic, evidence in making important decisions. We also believe that the scientific method is an essential tool in trying to understand our world. Trumpbots don’t. If you want a painful experience, watch some of them try to explain why they support Trump. It is genuinely aggressively stupid. We are NOT going to reach them. Trump has a floor of about 40% support. These folks are operating from their amygdalae not their pre-frontal lobes. We need to out vote them (assuming that we will be allowed to).
Q, you got the timeline wrong. We lost those voters because of LBJ and his support of civil rights legislation. All of those poor and less educated white folk supported social safety nets as long as they were for the poor white folk, but not when non white folk were allowed the same protections as them. It was civil rights that drove them out of the tent, not Clinton.
@The Q :
When they are doing what they’re doing? Yes.
On the other thread there was an anecdote about a “good guy” who just happened to be buying all the Trump gaslighting. Seemingly objects to all the terrible things that Trump does but is perfectly fine with him and the current party line. The question becomes “when do you stop being a ‘good guy’ when you can’t or won’t break away from evil”? Well guess what – they are acting like deplorables so that’s what they get tagged as. To even remotely consider voting for Trump at this point means there’s something wrong with you. It’s no longer a political disagreement – they are choosing to vote for a hot mess that is destroying our nation and getting us killed. There’s no fence anymore and you can’t claim to be a decent person while pulling the lever for this demented idiot.
White, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters side with Trump for a reason. No, it’s not economics because he’s done more to ruin them in 4 years then Obama could ever dream of doing. No, it’s not religion because whatever BS they’re calling “faith” needs to twist itself into theological knots to justify letting the Walking 7 Sins be God’s Champion.
You can’t rest on your laurels. Whatever good this voting bloc achieved, they’ve wasted it chasing after con men who pandered to their darker impulses. They flipped NY blue? Have you looked at a map lately – NY would still be bright red if not for NYC and to a lesser extent Buffalo, Rochester, et al. NY is Alabama North in a lot of rural areas and would happily revert back to its old Republican ways…. although granted a NY Repub is not the same as their Southern cousins. Remember the first Congresscritter to publicly kiss Trump ass and go full sycophant came from WNY.
Making deals with the devil is EXACTLY how we got into this mess in the first place. Appease the lunatics who willing chose Trump but turn into Trump Lite and they’ll think about it? Disregard the will of millions of voters for a few thousand who just happen to be in the right place… only to have them turn on you and accept the worst choice because he lets them indulge in their inner hater? How much of our soul do we have to sell for them to make it more then 50/50 chance leaning GOP?
If this were a relationship, it would have gone past toxic and straight into abusive. Give me what I want or I’ll vote to destroy it all isn’t a healthy stance. Do what I say or else is how abusers think. If white, male, old, evangelical, high school educated voters need to force their will on America by picking Trump to hurt the rest of us….. well, maybe they’re getting shit on by the rest of society for a good reason.
@The Q:
And for a big bulk of that time Congress was dominated by a conservative coalition. It was majority Dem, but a lot of those Dems were extremely conservative–they were instrumental in the passage of Taft-Hartley and the collapse of the push for universal health care, among other things. Your implication that conservative Dems first arose in the 1990s is pure nonsense.
You are pushing a mythical history here. Whites–particularly in the formerly “Solid South”–began leaving the Democratic Party in droves during the 1960s, leading to near-absolute Republican domination of the White House for the next few decades. Dems ran a strong liberal–McGovern–and got absolutely destroyed. The only times they won during this period were when they nominated a Southern moderate, Carter, who managed to reconstruct the Solid South for one cycle and just barely eke out victory against a party damaged from Watergate. As for Clinton, in trying to cast him as the cause of the Democrats’ loss of uneducated whites, you’re forgetting that he was the last Democrat to win those voters. “Bubba” was winning poor states like West Virginia and Louisiana, and all over the country in rural and blue-collar counties, that have not voted Democrat since. The exodus of those voters from the Democratic Party and the increase in urban and college-educated support happened after Clinton left office.
What’s missing from your analysis is a recognition of how crucially racism played a role in the realignment you decry. What enabled FDR to achieve his massive landslides was that the Depression opened a temporary window in which white supremacists and liberals found a way to coexist within the same party. After FDR died, that almost immediately began falling apart.
Your belief that adopting a left-populist economics would cause these voters to come back to the Dems en masse is pure fantasy. It’s simply not what animates these voters.
@Michael Reynolds:
He claimed to be an Evangelical back in 2016, because he attended the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
@Kylopod:
How many of them whole-heartedly believe “socialism” is evil and universal healthcare is the devil’s work? How many are anti-union and against safety nets?
Even if we were to implement an economic paradise where everyone was paid a living wage, no one ever worried about medical bills and jobs thrived like they did under unions, these folks would still be angry and vote GOP. They’d complain their taxes were too high and the wrong people were benefiting from *their* money / hard work. Entitlements are for the*, not those people.
There isn’t enough money in the world to make a bitter person happy. Addressing why they’re bitter is the best way of helping but that means admitting that there’s a deep seated problem with this voter bloc economic booms won’t cure.
@Teve: the issue is, the only way to really change this, is for each and every election, come out and vote. My daughter told me that Bernie Sanders would win the Dem nomination this year because he has so much support among young people. I said that would happen if and only if they came out and voted in large numbers. They didn’t.
Republicans get it. Democrats, progressives and liberals do not.
@The Q: enough people (in the US, not just here at OTB) have shared stories of those old, white, Christian high school educated men who changed into raging rightwingers after being exposed long-term to Fox News or rightwing radio. A lot of the people you describe are no longer of the same mindset that created the New Deal and other progressive policies.
@The Q:
Dude, the Baby Boomer generation began with births in 1944. So unless they (we) time-traveled, we did not create Social Security. FDR’s programs were run by well-educated, well-heeled liberals of the Greatest Generation.
What the Boomers did was rock and roll. That’s us, though initially the black ‘us.’ Also recreational drugs and long hair. But we did not create the pre or post-war liberal order. No Boomer even reached Congress earlier than the 70’s. Our political muscle didn’t really manifest until the 80’s which gave us what? Ronald Reagan, not FDR. Reagan’s lies about government, his race-baiting, his simple-mindedness, and his authoritarianism laid the groundwork for the modern GOP.
The rest of your nonsense has been dealt with upstream, but to re-iterate what everyone who knows anything about politics can tell you, the pivot came with the Southern Strategy. That’s when the GOP took over the job of race-baiting previously managed by southern Democrats. Reagan, Carter, Clinton, the Bushes and Trump. That’s the Boomer political legacy and I’m not impressed.
ETA: Misread your boomer reference.
yeah when Social Security was initially set up jobs that were primarily done by black people were excluded from qualification.
So thanks for helping make my point.
@The Q: What I don’t understand, continue to not understand, and will probably NEVER…EVER [h.t. to Chris Jericho] understand is 1) how it is that those “Old, white, male, poorly-educated, Evangelical, working class rubes” came to the realization that voting against their own interests was the key to political success for them, and 2) how it is that you’re not getting that’s what happened. It’s all well and good to be nostalgic about the glory days of the progressives, but get a grip!
@Teve:
It’s even more insidious than that. I recall hearing that Social Security had been premised on Black people not living long enough to collect it.
@Monala: The system is rigged against Democrats voting any number of ways. You’re not gonna find many Karens holding lattes waiting in line for seven hours to vote. And Dems still won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
@Teve: that’s true for presidential elections. But Democrats are far more likely to drop off in turnout (or drop off in larger degrees) than Republicans for midterm and local elections.
Depressingly (since this applies to more family members than I care to think about) I’m starting to think that whoever noted that real change doesn’t happen until generations die off is right. Between their sheer size and medical advances the Boomers are hanging on past the point previous generations became less relevant. I’m not even sure I’d call it wrong, just…sheer, absolute, total resistance to change.
Are the Boomers really such a hidebound drag? Wasn’t this the generation that gave us hippies; free love; sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll; massive protests; Black Power; power to the people; the Chicago 7; flower power; turn on, tune in, drop out; the youthquake; the Weather Underground…
@CSK:
Yes, but that cohort was a subsection of the generation, plus a good portion of the ex members of the counter culture only owned the individualism and signed on to Reagan.
Do you’re own thing baby!
@The Q:
I question your math.
Males are about 50% of the country — a little less I believe. And many of them are non-white, young, more or less than high school educated and not evangelical.
He wasn’t my choice either, but I don’t think we were going to win with Jerry Brown. Just as we hadn’t won with Dukakis, Mondale or Carter’s second run. Democrats were reacting to the rise of hard Conservatism from Nixon onward, and voter attitudes for Democrats were slow — the powers of incumbency.
Clinton slowed the right-wing lurch. And he helped stop genocide in Europe. That’s not super exciting left-wing programs, but it’s not nothing.
Throughout America’s history, we have been divided roughly one third liberal, one third conservative, and one third racist, and whoever courts the racists has gotten the ball. But, the Democrats aren’t going to be making common ground with the racists for the foreseeable future — so you can either get on board trying to build a broader coalition (which means making the racists uncomfortable, so others are comfortable), or consign yourself to losing.
It’s the only path forward. Outreach to the racists would lose us more votes than it would gain.
@dmichael:
That’s not what I was arguing about — you’ll notice that nowhere do I say anything about trying to convert his supporters to vote for Biden. I don’t think its possible, there’s a much better chance trying to get a few of the 40% who don’t bother voting to vote than to change the vote of someone who has already picked a team (something like 95% of people vote for the same party every election throughout their lives).
I’m arguing against assuming all of Trump’s supporters are stupid and uneducated. It’d be nice if it were true, because stupid and uneducated people who are led by stupid and uneducated people are easy to beat in almost everything (even in sport they don’t do well), because they can be outsmarted every step of the way.
But some of Trump’s supporters (or perhaps better put, some of the people using Trump to further their own ends) are very intelligent and educated (obviously I’m not talking about Trump himself at this point). They’re also cynical, greedy and self-serving enough to not care of the overall destruction someone like Trump brings, so long as their personal stock rises. Assuming they’re going to be easy to beat is a mistake. Assuming your opponents are all idiots rarely turns out well.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Most of them simply vote for their team, and don’t spend 10 minutes thinking about politics even before an election. Its not a question of voting for or against interests for most people (actually 40% don’t bother voting at all), because most can’t tell you what anyone running stands for except in terms of very general platitudes. They vote for who they always vote for.
All the political discussion (online and everywhere else) comes from a few million people interested in politics. That sounds like a lot, until you remember that there’s about 120 million people who bother to vote. Most think its their duty to vote, but don’t consider taking time to actually listen to politicians as part of that duty.
@Northerner:
I have several educated Trumpsters on my facebook feed. They aren’t stupid but they gobble up the GOP bullshit all the time. When floyd was killed some of them broke free for a tiny bit then went back to blaming Floyd for his death because OMG RIOTS VIOLENCE THE LEFT IS EVIL AND THE DEMONCRATS ARE KEEPING TRUMP FROM DOING MORE GOOD AND ARE DESTROYING AMERICA CAUSE THEY HATE IT AND RELIGION!!! The one consistency is that they all feel the need to be publicly religious on facebook. They also tend to refuse to believe that left wingers can be religious. So they get highly upset when you quote scripture at them. Pointing out fallacies in their logic also triggers them. Even if you try to do it in the nicest non confrontational way possible.
These are college educated people with up to a bachelor’s degree.
Not even remotely correct. In the US, about a quarter of people are evangelical, about 30% of people are over 55, less than half of elderly people are men, and 75% of people are white, so if we define Old as 55+, based on a back of the envelope calculation this demographic is probably around 10% of the population.
The Q, you should have known your number was wrong because males aren’t even 50% of the population. For your number to be close to right, literally every man in America would have to be an old white evangelical. Obviously that’s nonsense.
One more thing about @Q’s post: It’s an incredibly Republican way of looking at this situation. It’s straight up “the Forgotten Man” BS they’ve peddled to the poor schmucks for decades. It’s grievance identity politics at its finest – “the Dems aren’t treating you like you deserve. Punish them and follow us despite the fact we ignore and mistreat you too!” Demanding Dems change their political identity to conform to a specific group’s decidedly not-Dem political leanings sounds remarkably like Never-Trumpers demanding Dems run someone they can vote for…. you know, instead of the nice female candidate already out there instead of Dumpster Fire Donald who they ultimately picked?
Dems have reached out to this demographic repeatedly and routinely get their hands slapped because it’s not *exactly* what they want. Offering job training to coal miners comes to mind – Hillary got lambasted for correctly pointing out coal jobs are dying and we need to transform places like Appalachia if they want to survive. Guess who cussed her out and voted for Trump for *daring* to suggest they go back to school and learn a new way of earning a living? We could have gotten the drop on a ton of technology and brought manufacturing home to our shores. Hell, even if it was just making PPE or medical equipment, we’d have had a HUGE leg up on COVID and not be in the mess we’re in. Are they mad at Trump for not delivering and ruining their lives even further? Nope – guess who’s voting Trump again because he’s still peddling the lie they don’t have to change; it’s the world that needs to accommodate them.
@Matt:
I suspect some of them don’t believe the bullshit either, but they find it convenient that other people do and are quite willing to promote it. I know quite a few people like that, the “never give a sucker an even break” crowd. They tend to see life as a zero-sum game, so if they can get you to believe BS that hurts you and helps them then its your fault for believing them rather than their fault for spreading what they know is BS.
@Northerner: Oh they are true believers even when I talk to them in person. I do know the type of people you’re talking about though and I excluded them for that reason.
@KM:
Good point. Maybe The Q is one of those bots we’ve been hearing so much about, or running a false flag operation of some sort.
Granted, he’s likely just another *old man shouting at the clouds,* but your observation is spot on.
Just nutha ignint cracker, nah, Q is just an old man yelling at the clouds and has been for about as long as I’ve been here (over a decade now, jesus I’m getting old too). Whenever he gets the chance he bellyaches about boomers and yells at millinials to get off his metaphorical lawn.
As far as he’s concerned social justice is just a plot to steal social welfare programs from poor uneducated white men that are the back bone of this country dog dammit!
@Grewgills: Scott Lemieux of the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog tweeted yesterday something like, “Sorry to tell you that your suburban real estate agent mom is more likely to help you get the social welfare state you want than a welder in Ohio.”