SocraticGadfly: A heartland left-liberal vs Clintonista elites

November 21, 2016

A heartland left-liberal vs Clintonista elites

There are six women in my office, here in red state heartlands.

Not one mentioned it when Trump's "pussy grab" comments came up. And I'm quite sure all of them, if they voted in the presidential election, voted Trump.

I should have pondered that more at the time. I wouldn't have needed to later postulate a reverse Bradley effect for Trump winning, and I would have recognized at the time that he had a better chance than thought, per the L.A. Times poll that said so regularly.

As for other issues?

Is Trump some sort of racist? I think so. The decades-old suit for redlining blacks in rentals is good proof. And, don't claim that an out-of-court settlement with no admission of guilt is a point in his favor; that's the way the feds roll in general against rich defendants. Proof in his favor would have been Trump fighting the suit and winning. Don't claim a Jewish son-in-law is proof in his favor, either. A person can be racist toward one group and not toward another.

Back to the heartland. If not racist, there's still plenty of Project Implicit type unconscious bias running around the heartland. Or, there's the old "I have black friends," or "I have black friends and even they say...." This doesn't mean that every Trump voter is racist, or even if so, that that was a major voting factor.

Fact is, we don't know how many pro-Trump alt-right types even showed up to vote, and how many just turned out to protest.

Trump's victory was kind of complicated. Clinton's loss probably less so. Lower turnout, lower percentage of minority votes, bad strategic decisions made worse by running them all through a computer algorithm? That's obvious. I'm not a Millennial, but, I am a left-liberal, not a liberal, and her campaign simply had no appeal.

No comments: