Oh come on:
Do we really have to play this game? Trump's appeal to the working class isn't based on the economy. It's based on cultural hot buttons and resentment of elites. Is this even controversial? I doubt that even blue-collar workers themselves would disagree.
As president, Trump will:
- Raise tariffs, which hurt the working and middle classes.
- Appoint union busters to every possible position.
- Cut taxes on corporations and the rich.
- Try to repeal Obamacare, which primarily helps the poor and working classes.
- Try to repeal the IRA and CHIPS Acts, which provide lots of blue-collar jobs.
- Fail to follow through on his promise to eliminate income tax on tips, overtime, Social Security, etc.
- Do his best to roll back regulations on workplace safety, consumer protection, and financial ripoffs.
- Appoint conservative judges who routinely favor corporations over consumers.
I'm sure I'm missing some things, but it doesn't matter. The notion that Trump is on the side of workers is laughable. What's the point of pretending?
The sane washing by legacy media is INSANE
Maybe not insane, but maybe completely rationale – as at least key portions of it have received orders.
It is the departure from accepted norms that we label it insanity.
Eventually there will be enough people spouting the same stuff as Trump that us reality-based thinkers will be deemed the “insane” ones.
I was just going to comment that the MEDIA has helped Trump by hiding his terrible side and promoting the idea that he is for the working man.
They need to be taken down a couple of notches. When you support fascists, you should be treated like fascists.
There is not any sane-washing going on - the Trump economics and regulatory agenda is perfectly rational and not insane given his objectives.
Certainly not in the blue collar workers economic interests overall but perfectly sane (if largely wrong-headed from my perspective).
Now Trump's tariffs agenda is the one thing they probably actually do support economically - as popular perception and understanding of tariffs is utterly wrong, but overall the Democrats loss of support in working class is clearly largely due to the combination of inflation (and inflation impact denialism making them seem more tone deaf than usual) and cultural reaction.
"... rational and not insane given his objectives. "
But the media are not supposed to write based on his objectives.
Based on the objectives of the American people, Trump's economics is insanity, and that what an unbiased media would have said.
News media report on claims and to the extent they themselves understand (as reporters are generally innumerates in math and in economics)
Your pious assertions about People etc. are utterly besides the point.
Trump's ecomonomic agenda is not "insane" in the sense of insanity or incoherence. It may very well be wrong, but the sooner you Lefties stop your pining for having a Choir instead of a news media
The "American" people have many different apparent objectives - or rather they have many different components which have different objectives. Now if you want your partisan news, then you can turn to the Daily Kos for the typical cose of cheerleading etc from the PoV of your desired etc
That is bulshit and I am ignoring it.
Except there was no "inflation impact denialism.". It's possible to empathize with people that were disparately impacted while also acknowledging that inflation was not historically bad, and less bad in the US than everywhere else on earth. This is yet another example of rock ribbed, personally responsible, individually free republicans demanding a participation trophy. If you want capitalism, then you have to accept that there are winners and losers, and sometimes you might be the loser. Work harder and make more money if you don't have enough.
The only reason people voted for Republicans to address inflation is because there were Democrats in control when they started to feel the pain. That's it. None of these people care to understand what actually drove inflation, nor how Republicans plan to address it. The fantastic news for Republicans is that it's already over, so they can literally do nothing and wait for people to give them credit. Of course, they won't be satisfied to do that, and instead will flail around stuffing money in donors' pockets and probably make things a bit worse. No problem though, because they will just blame Democrats and their voters will believe them.
Ah the left denialism about their own denialism.
How very boring.
Until you lot learn that your intellectualised uni lounge modes of spinning are not effective, you are going to continue to lose, convincing only your own side - the literal signing to the choir
When you can win without Trump's name on the ballot let me know.
Please take the exit to X, okay? Or maybe Truth Social. Thank you. We're not here to engage with trolls or "likes-to-fight-guys" or any other MAGA scum-suckers (yes I called you scum. Deal with it) who are bored and want some action or are getting paid by the RNC to go on more "open" websites than the ones they habituate who would ban me in a minute if joined and offered a more left-of-center point of view. No! Go masturbate with yourselves, there is no point in talking with people like you. Be gone!
+1
Please tell us how Biden's policies drove inflation in U.K. and then we'll talk. Please explain how Trump will lower prices to 2020 levels and then we can take your pseudo-intellectual blatherings seriously.
If a headline has a question mark, the answer is "no."
The one thing you are missing is that Trump claims he will bring back good jobs with his tariffs and cutting regulations. While that didnt happen as a result of deregulation and tariffs in his first term some people really seem to believe it will happen this time. The problem is that Trump lies to people and they seem to want to believe him.
Steve
“If I buy this lottery ticket, surely I will win!” thinks every addicted gambler who has ever lived.
Yes, as a sales manouever it is evidently well done - although there is much to be said for regulatory rationalisation (which is not to say that Trump will undertake rationalisation at all)
Part of the 8 year marketing effort by the US media has been to pretend that maybe Trump really does want to help the people who his stated policies and preferences will harm. This will continue for 4 more years. Or more.
The most annoying part is that all these anti-working people actions just get interpreted by the average voter as "both parties are for the elites."
What's the primary difference (the 1000 foot view from above) between a conservative populist, aka a Fascist, and a progressive populist, aka Communist?
The Fascist uses nationalism to differentiate between us and them to appeal to workers, while the Communist cares only about empowering all workers.
What's amazing is that there so many things people want to believe it don't want to believe about Trump. It's part cultism but also part not wanting to admit what you really like about Trump to all that other stuff doesn't matter. The only way to beat this is by letting Trump be Trump, especially now with his whole administration. Yes people died the last time this happened and unfortunately more may do so over the next four years. But that's what the people wanted so they're entitled to enrich the funeral industry.
The problem is that he may destroy democracy, in which case it will not stop after 4 years. That is the main danger.
He will not do it by cancelling elections, but by scaring opposing candidates from running, and judges from ruling against him.
Everything bad can be blamed on "Sleepy Joe Biden", "Stupid KaMALa" and the Democrats. The shamestream media will repeat and amplify the message. The whole point is making the "snowflake cuck librulz" cry.
Democrats need to start learning how to work the media and get strategies working to coordinate their efforts, to the extent they can. Microtarget, like the Musk-funded disinfo ads to Democratic voters. Get smarter. Stop stabbing themselves in the back.
We don't coddle fascists. We won't cave to blackmailers. And, the media appear to be both.
Trump received approximately 75 million votes: I do not believe all Trump voters are ignorant, racist and misinformed.
Rather, people have multiple identities. For whatever reason, lots of working class people preferred Trump.
You do not believe that all Trump voters are ignorant, racist, and misinformed. What does that even mean?
I'll give you that not every Trump voter is all three at once. Some may be only one or two. You also left off xenophobic, misogynist, and evil from your list. There's a lot more variety involved.
The trouble is, there are very few people who are clear-eyed about Trump's stated policy goals who are not also racist. But who might those people be? Maybe a few bank executives, private prison owners, payday lenders, etc. Maybe there are some hard-core vegans who can't wait for meat processing plants to shut down when the workers get deported.
When you look at the likely consequences of Trump's plans, and the pain they are likely to cause, it's really hard to see any virtue anywhere in those positions. Lying to yourself about what mass deportations, tariffs, or the politicization of bureaucracy will do doesn't mean you are a good person. It means you are ignorant. Knowing what those things will mean and still liking them means you are a bad person. Doggedly insisting that Trump will never do them, and that it is okay to vote for someone who constantly tells huge lies about what they plan to do, makes you a fool.
+1
cephalopod - as a Harris voter, I don't need persuasion. Rather, where we differ, I refuse to put half of America into a 'basket of deplorables.'
When people tell you who they are, you should believe them.
But I do realize that blaming Hillary is more fun! Head firmly in the sand!
+1
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Ignore this asshole. Trolls gotta troll, and you just get stupider yourself every time you engage with them.
What the post-election surveys have shown is that it was anger over inflation. Full stop. That hit wage-earners particularly hard and most of them are not the kind of people who do deep dives into economic data and long-form analysis of what's causing the inflation. The president is supposed to make things good and the president wasn't doing that so I'll vote for the Trump guy because when he was president stuff was cheaper.
That's really the extent of their analysis. The hardcore MAGA base is a basket of deplorables or worse, but most of these working class swing voters just voted to throw the bums out without really understanding the implications of a second Trump term. Whether they'll notice him blowing everything up in time to vote in their actual interests next time around remains to be seen of course.
Yes and some cultural issue like trans in kids sports, loan forgiveness for liberal arts students and Obama phones for "illegals" made that calculus much easier.
Dems should have pressed Biden to push a middle class tax cut in 23/24. Instead they heard Harris talk about the child tax credit, 25K for new home purchasers and 50K to start a new business.
+1
What they preferred was a non-establishment option and Trump was the only viable option. What a lot of people want is change, they felt like the didn't get it from Obama, nor did they get it from Trump 1.0, or Biden.
Trump 2.0 said "give me another chance and this time I really will clean out the establishment" and they bought in.
He will give them a small tax reduction, do nothing about grocery prices, do nothing about rapacious private equity companies buying entire horizontal integrations.
In the end the voters will have gotten a bunch of government jobs eliminated, a recession from deporting agriculture and construction workers, and the kids will still be woke and questioning gender expression because annoying their elders is what kids do.
Will they be pissed off enough to look for a new change agent and will the Dems have one to offer?
When Hillary asked autoworkers why they'd voted for Trump instead of her when the Obama administration literally saved their jobs after the Bush's financial crisis, the response was "because he makes us feel proud".
Policies needed to help workers can come across as handouts, which can come across as demeaning. Hence the whole "I earned my benefits, they didn't earn theirs" and the mean "means testing" that ends up demeaning everyone.
The IRA and CHIPS acts need to be framed as investments in America and American workers because we are the best in the World! Too often they are billed as we can't compete with China and our workers need help.
+1
He makes us feel proud because he let's us feel like we are better than those ______
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Hot Breaking News!!!
Joe Sixpack does not give a shit that he will not help them economically. They want him to hurt the people they want hurt even if it hurts them. Sad
or at a minimum not help the people Joe hates
Use clickbait headlines? Yes.
The piece appears to be from the WSJ, but trying to ignore the influence of racism (in particular) on the "working class", that is lower-income whites, has always been standard in the "liberal" MSM. This particular piece is not an outlier - the NYT and WaPo regularly run pieces about Trump's supposedly "populist" appeal.
Why do people actually vote for Trump? I am not sure anyone has made a serious, scientific effort to find out. If there have been such efforts they don't show up in the MSM. Just asking in polls and interviews doesn't do it because people do not give honest answers and may be deceiving themselves about the real reasons. Many polls give a list of important issues but the choices omit anything related to bigotry; they may not even have "wokeism" as a choice. Such polls are certainly invalid, but few people now are going to admit to racism anyway. The subject has to be approached indirectly. Getting real evidence about the reasons that people vote for Trump is difficult but that is not an excuse for accepting the results of polls and interviews uncritically.
+1
I'm sure Nate Silver will come along some day and claim the polls were right after all. I don't buy it. The polls undercounted the support for Trump again. If it was the first election he ran in, you could understand. But this is the third time in a row, and pollsters go out of their way to correct for past misses. Three undercounts for the same party/candidate practically never happens. I believe the internal polls done by the Harris campaign showed the VP stronger than she actually was. Same for Trump, whose final week or two on the campaign trail looked like a guy who was sure he was going to lose.
I don't think the problem was pollsters' inability to reach Trump voters. As you say, the voters just lie. It's the Trumpian thing to do.
The national misses in the poll averages the last 3 presidential elections had a Dem lean of 2.5, 3.5, and 2.5%, respectively. Ironically the biggest miss was when Dems won. People like to gripe about the polling industry and there is certainly a lot wrong going on on what’s a difficult trade. However, their misses were not that far off, and especially this year, everybody knew it would be a tight race and indeed turned out to be a tight race, with the swing rust belt states being particularly contested.
Poll aggregators predicting Trump would win the vote:
None
Poll aggregators predicting a tie:
Decision Desk
Poll aggregators predicting Harris would win the vote:
270 to Win
538
Cook Political Report
Silver Bulletin
Real Clear Politics
5 of 6 picked Harris and none picked Trump. "Not far off" is not good enough. If you undercount Trump once, twice, and then a third time, something is wrong.
A better take on Trump voters and their delusions, from the NYT (gift link):
+1
The thing of it the Biden Administration did make a conscience effort to address their economic anxiety and support working people by being pro-union and such. That wasn't true with Hillary Clinton. Didn't matter.
I've seen stories about massive deportations putting dairy farmers out of business. I guarantee you every one of them voted for Trump. When it happens and there's no milk supply, let them run to Trump for help. See if he listens. After all, they voted for him.
All of this is true, but the solution for farmers is yet another bailout (like happened during Idiotic Tarrifs 1.0). They won't feel the shame of cashing those welfare checks because they're real Americans and by God deserve every penny. Stupid and sickening, but sadly predictable. I don't know how much more runway we have before this pitiful LARPing runs into unavoidable reality, but I'm pretty sure it's at least finite. At some point the bill will become due, and lots of people will decide that maybe Democrats can step in and clean up the mess.
Ahh, but getting a check because the Chinese retaliated against tariffs and you lost market access is one thing. Losing your entire workforce is something entirely different. You think 50-60 year old men are going milk a 1,000 head of dairy cows all by themselves? And no, there is no "white working class" that will come in and save the day. Not if you want to keep milk prices cheap and a lot people think they're expensive as is. They haven't seen anything yet!
Watch, Elon Musk will tell Trump "Hey, I've developed these robots than can milk cows!"
+1
a part of me is hoping T does everything he says he is. When prices go up because of tariffs and because we can't find people to pick veggies, process meat, do construction or take care of Grandma in the nursing home. I can say told you so. I'll be ok. And if I'm wrong, and everything is great, I'll still be ok
There in lies the big question.
1. Does he create an utter disaster that leaves voters running back to the Dems?
2. Does he eke out enough wins that Vance coasts to the Oval Office in 2028?
A lot of long term decisions ride on things tipping one way or the other.
This also assume that the D's can find a compelling message by 2026 to build on and a candidate that can sell it by 2028.
How stupid.
The big question is whether you will still have a free and fair elections in 2028.
I think we probably will because Trump himself won't be running. Unfortunately, when everyone was screaming about Trump ending democracy, a lot of people interpreted that to mean ending elections. I'm not saying he for sure won't, but that shouldn't be anyone's biggest concern. In reality, he kind of did already end elections - when one of two major parties simply doesn't accept election defeats and convinces their entire constituency that elections are all rigged, most of the work is already done. They haven't successfully overturned one yet, but eventually they will.
The much bigger concern is that a large portion of the electorate simply doesn't trust government of any kind anymore. It's fine to disagree with policies - and protest loudly and persistently about it. It's entirely another thing to start questioning the legitimacy of the concept of democratic governance. These folks have been taught that the way to bring about change is not to petition the government, but to destroy it. That's a real problem, and after this election, I don't see how to address it. Most of the damage is already done. We've all been watching this slow motion train wreck for a long time, and everyone seems to have assumed that either reason will prevail or the idiots will tire themselves out. It goes all the way back to Newt and the early days of Rush Limbaugh. All Trump did was realize there's a huge untapped base of idiocy that he could leverage - the US strategic moron reserve.
The talk about ending elections is not to the point, because dictators don't end elections(Putin, Maduro etc.). They end free and fair elections by harassing (all the way to killing) opposition politicans.
That what trump is planning to do, and I am quite stunned how blind the people on this blog about this issue.
John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner gave just one speech, over the radio, during the 1932 Presidential election even though he was on the Democratic ticket as the VP nominee. Someone asked him why and he said "All we have to do is sit down, kick-back and win the election." And that's exactly what happened, in a landslide! Herbert Hoover toured the country and gave many speeches. Didn't matter. He was President and the country was in a depression, cased closed. Not unlike Biden's age, it was just a block to his message with the voters. And remember if Trump fucks up, it's not him on the ballot in 2028, it's his hapless vice-president with all the charisma of a salamander having to defend the Administration's policies and no he won't be able to separate himself either. This isn't about micro-targeting, TV ads, door knocking or policy or anything because the reality is the swing voter doesn't give a shit. If that voter is in bad shape or I suppose "feels" that way, the GOP is sunk.
I think what Trump will do is: borrow. Cut costs? What for? Except when he enjoys the pain it causes, of course. Otherwise, pay for those tax cuts the usual way.
The press is still giving him the benefit of the doubt despite him being undeserving of it. Trump won't have to reconcile anything. His views on unions and workers rights are the same as the GOP. Blue collar workers, union members specifically, will find out the hard way what others learned when they trusted Trump. Trump is a con man. His promises are worthless. No taxes on overtime, being just one example.