13-01-2017, 22:26
(13-01-2017, 20:49)0762 Wrote: Yep! There's a strong reference from US political analysts to a significant proportion of the Trump vote comprising 'angry white American men'! Are there really so many of these kinda people around in the USA who have rendered true values and reason useless in the face of such crass political campaigning??? It's an absolute travesty of the common good that really should've won through esp v this kinda individual who can't even present himself properly without uttering some kinda controversial or unthinking remark - lacking proper articulation and humility!Obama's persona alone places Trump so far down the scale of reputation that any comparison is a total 'walkover' for the outgoing president and DT aint gonna change it any time soon - he's not bright enough and 'what you see is what you'll sadly get'!
The short answer to your question is yes, there are certainly enough of them!!
I do think the voting habits of Americans is a very complex subject but its not dissimilar in some ways to the UK. For starters, there are millions of Americans who strongly identify as Republicans, and Republicans only!! Their party could put up anyone, and as long as they are running with the byline Republican under their name that is where the vote goes. The same exists in equal number of the Democrat side as well. This is so similar in the UK, Labor win the inner city vote not because of any particualr policy or strong leader but because those constituents would never dream of voting for anyone else, as a lot of Conservative or even SNP supporters do for their party as well.
Therefore like in the UK, most elections are won and lost in key battleground constituencies or states, and this is where Trump over achieved. This election was not won in California, New York or Texas, the three biggest states with the biggest Electoral College votes, those states went exactly the way predicted and were never going to be any different. You can add to that about 40 other states where the result is almost pre-ordained because of the paragraph above. So we were left with some very tight states that ultimately Trump won to reach the 270 mark he needed. And this is where we go back to your question - these states, virtually all of them, are blue collar, working class, traditional industries and predominantly white states. We are talking here about Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, states who have thrived in the past on big industries such as steel, mining and cars, all industries that have suffered not due to US policies necessarily but due to the globalization of those industries and the influx of cheap imports of the products these states produced. This has seen these states really suffer for a while now, and they have seen many politicians come through there every 4 years promising to make it better when in reality there isn't a whole lot that can be done to resurrect those manufacturing jobs!! We saw it ourselves first hand, I worked in the steel industry in Sheffield in the 80s, Scotland has seen the same, those jobs do not come back!!
So we get to 2016 and along comes Donald Trump, a successful billionaire businessman who is shouting about the need for American to be great again, for the jobs in manufacturing to come back but he is also telling people what he will do to actually make this happen (something the Democrats didn't do). He will rip up NAFTA to stop companies moving to Mexico, he will get tough on China to stop the cheap imports, he will impose tariffs on companies that move jobs, he will build a wall, he will stop immigrants coming in to take some of our jobs or killing us etc etc etc. And lets be right, he's a self made billionaire, he didn't rip us off as a politician to make his money, he made it the hard way by grafting!!! Now imagine the scene in these states, unemployed workers or manufacturing employees reassigned to crap jobs in McDonalds or WalMart, house prices that have slumped, population shrinking and the sight of other states apparently booming such as liberal California or Illinois or New York and as we saw it was enough for them to say "This guy is different, he is not a politician, he is not the establishment and he knows how to fix things and make money, he might be able to get some good jobs for us, this is our man!!" and hey presto, Trump won all these states and this is what carried the election!!
These people are not stupid, they are not even Republicans in a lot of cases, but they are disenfranchised by both mainstream parties, they are living from check to check in run down areas, they are struggling financially and as you say they are definitely angry that they have been left behind while others are doing so well. So while we may see that Trump is an idiot, they see him as at this moment in time the best choice to maybe, just maybe, deliver on his promises when others haven't and he may just make their life great again!!! I don't blame them for thinking that, they don't like the man anymore than we do in a lot of cases but the democrats, and particularly Hillary did not give them the attention they deserve, nor the solutions they wanted to hear even if she would have done better for them. She did not visit Wisconsin once during the whole process!!!! I am not advocating they are wrong or right, but if we put ourselves in their shoes for a second we can maybe have a bit of understanding where they are coming from.