Supporters of Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential bid are seizing on Democratic disarray at the national level to launch a wave of challenges to Democratic Party leaders in the states.
The goal is to replace party officials in states where Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton during the acrimonious Democratic primary with more progressive leadership. But the challenges also represent a reckoning for state party leaders who, in many cases, tacitly supported Clinton’s bid.
Semi-retired Wisconsin pig farmer John Lader does not think much of Donald Trump as a messenger, but voted for what he described as the Republican president-elect’s message of change and economic hope for America.
“The last few years, there hasn’t been much optimism and hope among working people in rural areas in this country,” said Lader, 65, who lives in the farmland outside the southern Wisconsin city of Janesville.
Around 65 miles (105 km) to the northeast in the state’s biggest city of Milwaukee, Jose Boni, who cleans offices at a local university and rents out several homes, heard a different message: Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and vow to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally, most of whom are Hispanic.
“He doesn’t care about our community or working people, he only cares about himself,” said Boni, 57, an Ecuador-born U.S. citizen.
The different worlds of Lader and Boni help illustrate the rural-urban divide that was critical to the outcome of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election.
Source: In rural-urban divide, U.S. voters are worlds apart | Reuters
With Democrats reeling from the election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was one of the leading Trump-blasters of her party, vowed on Thursday to continue battling the president-elect—while adding that she would be delighted to collaborate with him on some of the populist issues he raised during the campaign.
Speaking at the Washington, DC, offices of the AFL-CIO union federation on Thursday, in an event shown on Facebook Live, Warren declared, “If Trump is ready to go on rebuilding economic security for millions of Americans, so am I, and so are a lot of other people—Democrats and Republicans.” She noted that on the campaign trail, Trump had criticized Wall Street’s power in Washington and promised not to cut Social Security benefits—areas of common ground. But Warren, whom Trump derided as “Pocahontas” during the election, warned that if Trump tries to tear down the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law—which overhauled the financial industry after the 2008 meltdown—or to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she would fight him “every step of the way.”
Source: Elizabeth Warren Gears Up to Battle Donald Trump | Mother Jones
In 2016, the polls got it wrong. They failed to predict that Donald Trump was winning key battleground states. But a startup in San Francisco says it spotted it well in advance, not because of the “enthusiasm gap” — Republicans turning out and Democrats staying at home. Instead, the startup Brigade’s data pointed to a big crossover effect: Democrats voting for Trump in droves.
The company built an app that asks a simple question: Which candidate are you going to vote for?
It’s like what boots-on-the-ground organizers do. Though there is one big difference. In the physical world, most people aren’t wearing their candidate button for the 18 months leading up to the election.
Source: An App Called Brigade Saw Trump Winning Swing States When Polls Didn’t : All Tech Considered : NPR
A friend shared this blog post from a Republican college student, who wrote about what it is like to be a Republican college student.
I have reminded my liberal friends of the mistake of dismissing Trump supporters simply as racists (I will be writing more about this when I come up for air from all the stuff going on). The author here is right in reminding everyone of this.
I don’t think Ms. Hewlett is racist. This doesn’t mean she isn’t a little naive.
This paragraph stands out (emphases mine):
Well, I was not sad. While I understand that many people found the result disheartening, I am happy that the Republican party is in office for the next four years. I am happy that trade and markets will once again be free. I am happy that jobs will be brought back into the United States. I am happy that small business owners will finally be able to reap the benefits of hard work and dedication. I am happy that I voted in my first presidential election as a Republican.
Let’s take these one by one.
Continue reading
Yep.
ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith gave Colin Kaepernick a brutal verbal beatdown Wednesday after he learned the San Francisco 49ers quarterback decided not to vote at all in the 2016 presidential election.
In a fiery and lengthy rant, Smith argued Kaepernick has delegitimized everything he tried to accomplish by first sitting then taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of “oppression” in America.
“As far as I am concerned, Colin Kaepernick is absolutely irrelevant,” Smith said. “I don’t want to see him again; I don’t want to hear from him again; I don’t wanna hear a damn word about anything he has to say about our nation — the issues that we have, racial injustices, needing change, etcetera, etcetera. He comes across as a flaming hypocrite.”
Source: When ESPN Anchor Finds Out Kaepernick Didn’t Even Vote, He Teaches QB a Lesson He’ll Never Forget
I’ll have more election thoughts soon.
The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.
A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.
One of the big reasons for this increased death rate has been increased use of opiods and other drugs, leading to overdoses, along with liver disease from drinking too much alcohol and increased suicide rates. The problems were especially acute among working class and rural whites with only high school or less, and later studies found that they extended to younger members of this social class in their 20s and 30s. Loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs was clearly a primary reason for this despair.
More truth. I believe if Bernie Sanders had run against Trump we’d be saying “President-elect Sanders” today.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
Some unexpectedly good political advice from Cracked.Com’s David Wong.
The truth is, most of Trump’s voters voted for him despite the fact that he said/believes awful things, not because of it. That in no way excuses it, but I have to admit I’ve spent eight years quietly tuning out news stories about drone strikes blowing up weddings in Afghanistan. I still couldn’t point to Yemen on a map. We form blind spots for our side, because there’s something larger at stake. In their case, it’s a belief that the system is fundamentally broken and that Hillary Clinton would have been more of the same. Trump rode a wave of support from people who’ve spent the last eight years watching terrifying nightly news reports about ISIS and mass shootings and riots. They look out their front door and see painkiller addicts and closed factories. They believe that nobody in Washington gives a shit about them, mainly because that’s 100-percent correct.
Source: Don’t Panic
