"It's the economy, stupid" is how James Carville described Bill Clinton's election strategy back in 1992. However apt it may have been at the time, it is senseless today.
Those pundits who claim that blue collar Americans flocked to Trump because of economic woes are wrong. For the economy is doing very well--better than any time in recent history, with record low unemployment, interest rates, and poverty.
Some Democrats argue that Trump is weak on healthcare or the environment. I suggest that these topics will move the electorate not at all--people have already made up their minds. Nor is income inequality a compelling issue--people don't care how much money somebody in Mountain View, CA, earns. The fact is that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, and that some boats are fancy yachts really doesn't matter very much.
Trump didn't win in 2016 on economic issues. Any promises to his blue collar audience about better health care or fancier pensions were brief, pro forma and without detail. Mr. Trump obviously knows nothing and cares less about health care in this country.
Instead, he won the election by flattering and entertaining his audience. He paid attention to people who typically sit in politics' back row. As Michael Moore eloquently puts it "Trump's election is going to be the biggest fuck you in human history. And it. will. feel. good."
Why did it feel so good? Because Trump's election, not about economics, was instead about status. While a rising economic tide lifts all boats, that is definitely not true about status. Status games are inevitably zero-sum--if my status goes up, then yours must relatively go down. Trump rewarded his listeners just by spending hours with them at his rallies, telling them how they were going to Make America Great Again, in contrast to the evil, dishonest media in the back of the room.
He put low-status people at the top of his list and won their undying affection as a result.
Democrats also play status games, but unlike Trump they're not strategic in their choices. The top dogs in their universe are upper middle class white women, and gay men. The leading Democratic issues are #MeToo and Gay/transgender Rights.
Of course there is nothing intrinsically wrong with those issues. Women should be treated respectfully in the workplace, and gays do deserve civil rights. That's really incontrovertible, though opinions will vary on what respectful and civil rights specifically mean. The argument isn't about issues--instead it's about the enhanced status that accrues to those groups.
But if somebody's status goes up, then who goes down? The Dems seem to have forgotten the downside, and that is their Achilles heel. For people who lose status far outnumber the population of upper middle class women and gays, and they will feel their loss acutely.
Trump understands this. 62% of white men voted for Trump. More ominously, 14% of Black men voted for Trump, as compared to barely 2% of Black women. Obviously men see themselves as losers in the Democrat's status sweepstakes. And there are a lot more men than there are upper-middle class women and gays.
A couple weeks ago I heard an interview with Brad Parscale on Fox News. I don't have a transcript, but the gist was the campaign will recruit a million volunteers to pay personal visits to 20 million undecided, persuadable voters.
Undecided voters? That sounds like people on knife's edge: Are higher taxes a good trade-off for better medical care? Or Should student loans be forgiven for everybody, or just for poor people? Of course that's not how this group thinks. These instead are people who don't really care about politics--left to their own devices they might not vote at all. They don't listen to either FOX News or MSNBC.
If they do vote, they'll vote on emotion. And among those, the strongest political emotion is fear. So (and Mr. Parscale did not say this) the goal of all these visits is to make these people afraid--very, very afraid.
Obviously the undecideds do not include me--the only message I'll get from the Trump campaign is a fundraising letter. As readers of this blog, they don't include you, either. We're committed ideologues--unpersuadable by either camp. The folks we're talking about are precisely NOT part of Trump's base, and indeed, may even not have voted in 2016.
I surmise that Black men are a significant number of these undecideds, for they have a lot to lose from the Democrat's program. They are threatened with nothing less than abject servility, doomed to serve at the whim of upper middle class white women. In a word, they face emasculation. For men who historically have been lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way, the #MeToo movement is a dire threat. Or at least that's how the Trump campaign will portray it.
Then there is affirmative action, which Black men see as their victory achieved during the civil rights movement. Yet today--with Democratic party connivance--the principle beneficiaries of affirmative action are upper middle class white women, who preferentially get jobs in academe or in the corporate suite. A less deserving population is hard to imagine.
Speaking of civil rights, the hijacking of the civil rights agenda by the LGBTQ community is, in the eyes of Black men, a complete travesty. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday: "Pink is the New Black." While I'm not sure what the driver actually intends, as a political statement it encapsulates the feelings of Black men--they're less important than gay people. Despite having fought and won the civil rights struggle, they're supposed to yield status to a bunch of spoiled sissies.
In 2016 Trump won his fraction of the Black male vote mostly by accident. That won't be true this time around--he will aggressively go after those people. The groundwork is laid--criminal justice reform, a thriving economy, Kanye West, the "what have you got to lose?" message, etc. He can't lose support from Black women, so playing the gender card has only upside for him. If he can increase his fraction from 14% to 20%, that likely puts Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan out of reach for the Democrats.
Trump has the advantage of being a very masculine, bad-ass, man. He's a great role model. Especially if the Dems nominate a woman, expect this strategy to work big time.
For different reasons Trump has an advantage among Hispanic voters (28% of whom voted for Trump in 2016), especially Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans are American citizens who are now being forced to share their communities and jobs with a marauding horde of illiterate illegals from Central America. They are likely to throw more support to Trump in 2020. That will make a difference in Florida, where it is speculated that Puerto Ricans cost the Dems the election in 2018. (Unfortunately it won't matter much in New York or New Jersey, which are safe Democratic redoubts regardless of how Puerto Ricans vote.)
The immigration issue may also redound to Trump's advantage in Texas and Arizona, where other Hispanic communities are on the front lines.
In summary, Trump may lose votes among "suburban women," aka upper middle class white women, but he'll more that make up for it with additional male, Black and Hispanic support. The gender gap will work in his favor.
Further Reading:
Gay men are “spoiled sissies”? I enjoy most your posts, and agree with much, but this is just obnoxious.
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