I agree with Armando that Donald Trump preached a message of naked bigotry. I live in a deep red small town, so I can speak to how many voters behave.
Many people around here understand that Trump is a bigot and an asshole. They don’t care. Why? They feel that Hillary Clinton is worse. The following assessment is not fair, but it reflects how a lot of midwest and Rust Belt voters feel about her. Where I live, we care a lot about identity. If a post office or a school or a key business closes, it leads to a loss of identity. I submit that Donald Trump is much more politically savvy than his detractors give him credit for. The reason certain voters voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and voted for Trump in 2016 is because they never forgave the Clintons over NAFTA and other free trade agreements.
I know the reality is much more grey than that — NAFTA was a done deal by the time Bill took office in 1992. These agreements created jobs as well. Hillary is much more skeptical than her husband was of such agreements. But none of that matters. When you live in a small town and a key factory in town closes and moves to Mexico, the loss of identity that these people feel is much greater than any of the other factors I mention. I know it’s not fair to the Clintons or the merits of such agreements, but that is the reality that we have to deal with. Look at the DAPL protests — the Native Americans are doing what they are doing because tearing up that land creates a loss of identity for them. If you take away community’s identity, the virtues of Christian forgiveness do not apply, no matter how progressive your values are.
We are dealing with a new political reality. People don’t care if you have perverted sexual fantasies or make racist remarks or are filthy rich — as long as you protect their jobs from going overseas. We turned out the same number of people we did in 2012 — Hillary got 65 million votes, the same as Obama did. The problem is that Trump got more — because he ran against TPP, and promised to protect peoples’ jobs.
So, how do we deal with it politically, as Armando asks? Two things. First, 73% of Americans make $50,000 or less, and Hillary won those people by 11%. The problem is, they were only 36% of the electoral share. So, everything has to be framed as a struggle to lift people out of poverty and into the middle class. The problem is that Hillary Clinton made her campaign about Trump personally. Everyone knows that Trump is a dickhead, but that was not the key question in voters’ minds. The question was, who was going to protect my jobs? If we frame everything in terms of lifting people out of poverty, whether you are Black, white, Native American, Latino, or Asian, then people will listen. That is something that everyone wants to see happen regardless of political persuasion.
The second thing we do is outreach. Hillary Clinton bombarded people with millions of dollars worth of anti-Trump ads in battleground states. The problem is, I submit that these ads backfired. A lot of my friends and neighbors don’t take too kindly to excessive negative advertising, regardless of who is running the ads. When they see certain ads, they make up their minds that they don’t vote for people who run ads like that, even if they were open to voting for them before. They backfired for another reason — who were they directed at?
I make less than $50,000 a year, and I certainly don’t have either the time or the money to pay $70 a month for either Dish or Direct to watch network TV, even if there are some worthwhile programs on. People like myself are simply concerned with making ends meet. But if someone subscribes to Dish or DirectTV or Cablevision, they are more likely to have the money and the time to do so. And they are more likely to be the type who tithes to their fundie church every Sunday and buys guns. They are much more likely to care about the issues Trump campaigned on.
We lost this election because we were marketing to the wrong people — a disproportionate number of voters made over $50,000 a year. Winning in 2018 and 2020 means reaching out to people who are struggling to make ends meet and just trying to get by. The fact of the matter is that too many people were left behind despite economic conditions improving from 2009. Winning requires a new commitment from us to identify the causes and wipe out poverty.
That doesn’t mean we ignore issues like immigration, the DAPL protests, police brutality, efforts to make forced pregnancy the law of the land, or other such issues. But I’m not likely to attend a Black Lives Matter protest six hours away or the DAPL struggle nine hours away when I’m trying to make ends meet here even though I will provide as much moral support as I can. We need to start with where people are at, whether we live in Rural America, the suburbs, or the inner city. Then, we go from there. That is why the next DNC chair has to commit to creating active party committees in every county and every city in every state. Right now, I can’t find an active committee within 50 miles of here. People are much more likely to respond to their friends and neighbors than they are to saturated negative TV ads right before November.