27 Million Americans Have Already Voted-- But 5% Of Us Haven't Decided If We Want Trump To Have 4 More Years To Wreck The Country Entirely

 

Wrapped In His Flag... by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for CounterPunch on Friday, Zen Economics author Rob Urie asked the straight-forward question Who Elected Donald Trump? Personally, I don't know anyone intelligent who voted for him-- but I feel certain that isn't a useful way of trying to figure out the answer to who did-- and who will in 2 weeks. Urie wrote that Trump's 2016 upset victory "produced a torrent of head scratching, finger-pointing and outrage by pundits, the politically oriented commentariat, and the vast food chain of professional politicians, consultants and advisors whose livelihoods depend on selling plausible explanations of unexpected outcomes to political donors. Right up to election eve, 2016, the overwhelming consensus was that Donald Trump would lose and that capitalist democracy would proceed apace with corporate bailouts, gratuitous wars, and trade agreements that benefit corporate executives and the already rich."

The predominant storyline in the press going into the election was that Donald Trump’s appeal was to a dispossessed ‘white working class’ which was receptive to xenophobic scapegoating, of which Mr. Trump provided particularly crude examples. Interviews were featured with former workers in the industrial economies of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, who shared tales of lives lived ‘playing by the rules’ laid out by liberal politicians, but who nevertheless were cast aside when trade agreements like NAFTA sent their livelihoods overseas in pursuit of low-wage labor. The result: widespread disenfranchisement, executive bonuses and stock market gains.

Left unsaid going into the 2016 election was that voters had been abandoning the establishment political parties since George W. Bush’s war with Iraq headed south around 2005. First it was Republicans who bailed on the Republican Party. Then, following the implementation of Barack Obama’s political program, came the Democrats. Party affiliation held steady going into the 2008 election, after which it declined precipitously as Mr. Obama implemented his neoliberal political program. In contrast to the racial ‘backlash’ theory, those leaving the Democratic Party became Independents. They could have joined the Republican Party had doing so been their inclination, but they didn’t.

With respect to those who voted in 2016-- Donald Trump’s constituency was richer, in terms of both average and median income, than were Hillary Clinton’s voters. This point was used by the establishment press to ditch the ‘white working class’ meme and shift focus to the explanations being offered by political marketers for the Democrats. As far as it goes, the comparative incomes explanation fits the facts provided. And it is much truer than the explanations that establishment Democrats invented to explain their loss. But in terms of descriptive political reporting, it excludes more than it illuminates. In fact, core constituencies for the Democrats either stayed home (blacks) or voted for Donald Trump after twice voting for Barack Obama. Treating these constituencies like they either don’t exist or don’t matter is, in fact, The Problem.

The establishment Democrat’s explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory, conceived by campaign consultants to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was 1) racist backlash against Barack Obama’s tenure as the first Black President of the U.S., 2) endorsement of Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic statements by white nationalist and anti-immigrant groups looking for a leader to lead their movement, and 3) a campaign to sow social divisions in the U.S. led by Russia, in particular by Vladimir Putin. The only reference made to the consequences of four decades of planned deindustrialization was ‘economic anxiety’ as a psychological malady unrelated to economic dispossession.

In fact, as the graphs from the Census Bureau above illustrate, there was no influx of white voters anxious to support Mr. Trump and his racialized nationalism. The percentage of white voters who voted in 2016 rose only 1.2% from 2012, and was down by a like amount from 2008. However, after rising steadily from 1996 through 2012, it was black and Hispanic voters who stayed away from the polls in droves. Assuming that the Census Bureau data is correct, the percentage of blacks who voted in 2016 fell by 7% from 2012. The identitarian explanation, that blacks voted for ‘one of their own’ with Mr. Obama and then stayed home when his name wasn’t on the ballot, is insightful-lite in that black voters went to the polls to vote for white candidates in prior elections.

...From a political marketing perspective, once it was known that people of color partially boycotted the 2016 election, the obvious marketing strategy became to create racial appeals that boosted the Democrat’s ‘brand’ (forgive me) and diminished their competitor’s. In fact, leading Democratic strategists who had spent storied careers crafting cynical dog whistle campaigns, began shouting racist! to shut down any challenge to their campaign. Donald Trump helped their cause with his insipid slanders of mostly powerless people. But the disenchantment expressed by black voters in 2016 illustrates the power of people to make up their own minds regarding political issues.

The NAFTA / working class / deindustrialization thesis of political realignment is limited in scope. But it is useful shorthand for the impact that neoliberal economic policies have had since the 1970s. NAFTA went into effect in 1994. The real exodus of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. began after China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization) in 2001. However, working class wages began stagnating in the 1970s, aligned with the neoliberal coup that was underway. Fed Chair Paul Volcker engineered what at the time was the worst recession since the Great Depression with the express purpose of crushing the power of labor. Mr. Volcker was appointed by Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Additionally, the ‘white’ in white working class is politically and culturally loaded. While the overall population of the American working-class skews white in absolute numbers, a larger percentage of blacks are working class and poor. Industrialization facilitated the Great Migration of Southern Blacks from the rural South to the industrialized North. What the use of the term (‘white’) appears to reference is the social breakdown in Rust Belt communities subjected to the twin curses of deindustrialization and neoliberal creep into every aspect of modern life. Why this was considered a ‘white’ problem is a bit of a mystery unless tragedies aren’t considered tragedies by the national press until they affect whites.

According to the polling organization Gallup, by election eve 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the two most reviled candidates for President in polling history. Both of the establishment political parties experienced plummeting memberships during periods of profound policy failures. There are plausible reasons why treating the 2016 election in terms of comparative incomes is less than illuminating. In terms of class analysis, blacks, who skew towards working class, and whites-- many of whom had twice voted for Barack Obama, but nevertheless voted for Donald Trump in 2016, suggests that class antagonism was central to the outcome of the 2016 election.

As reported in the book Shattered, by election eve 2016, Clinton campaign officials had decided on the ‘Russia stole the election’ storyline. Additionally, Democratic strategists were most certainly aware that blacks stayed home en masse in 2016. This made Donald Trump, with his nativist chatter and typical Republican deference to repressive authority, the perfect foil to retroactively portray the election as about race and foreign intrigue. When the Democratic-leaning press began (falsely) reporting on rising hate and racial backlash, and the CEOs of large banks and tech companies began stating publicly that white supremacy is the only problem in need of solving, the havoc that neoliberal policies have wrought quickly disappeared as a topic of polite conversation.

...The establishment commenters who framed the 2016 election in terms of comparative incomes-- Clinton voters versus Trump voters, made a narrow argument to the detriment of broader political understanding. If all that matters are the demographic profiles of those who voted, then certainly the material refusal of Black and Hispanic voters to participate in the 2016 election was, and is, without political importance or consequence. And assertions that the large number of voters who voted for Barack Obama twice, but who then voted for Donald Trump in 2016, did so because they are racists, defies basic political logic.

Vox tried to frame the down ballot exiling of Democrats during the Obama years-- with the loss of over a thousand congressional seats and state and local elected positions, as the natural ebb and flow of American politics. This was the pitch that Nancy Pelosi offered in 2016, the ‘fashion’ view of politics, that voters like to change which party governs every few years. To buy it, one must ignore the history of Democrats and Republicans working together to create institutional impediments that make third-party challenges well nigh impossible. Facilitating the will of the people does not correlate with excluding viable candidates because they lack party affiliation.

Through passage and implementation of the New Deal, FDR secured the loyalty of the polity for Democrats, if not his own oligarch class, from the 1930s through the neoliberal revolution in the 1970s. And this wasn’t just a matter of winning elections, which his party didn’t always do. Through suppressing the power of capital, a social democratic weltanschauung (worldview) grew deep roots within the political class. This isn’t to overstate the case-- there are serious and valid criticisms of official policies during this era. But as for politics as fashion, the party of FDR held substantive control of domestic political economy for a half century.

To the issue at hand, the question of who elected Donald Trump in 2016, the comparative incomes approach is reactionary in the sense that it affirms the establishment view that low relative and / or absolute voter participation is due to personal and cultural factors rather than political disaffection. Circumstantial evidence, such as the steep drop in voter affiliation with the establishment parties, the correlation of this drop with identifiable policy failures, vibrant and enthusiastic political participation outside of official channels, and the widespread and historic loathing of the duopoly Party scions put forward for elected office, suggests that there is more to the story. With their livelihoods and power tied to perpetuating the existing system, it is folly to wait for the political leadership to understand this. They never will.

OK, so what about 2 weeks from tomorrow? First of all, as of Saturday evening, 27,643,633 ballots had already been cast-- and only 24.3% of them were cast by registered Republicans. People haven't just made up their minds; they have acted on it in greater numbers than anyone has ever seen before. Democrats are banking big numbers in states Trump and his enablers have to win-- like Texas and Florida. Trump is still trying to win back defectors from broad cohorts of voters who have abandoned his 2016 eelctoral coalition-- seniors, independents and suburban women being the three most apparent.

Writing for USA Today on Sunday, Joey Garrison reported that "the vast majority of voters-- 95% or higher in most polls-- say they have already decided who they're backing and can't be persuaded.

With fewer undecided voters in this year's election and not as many considering voting for a third-party candidate, Biden has eclipsed an important mark. He is consistently polling with support from more than 50% of voters, while Clinton typically polled in the high- or even mid-40s in October before the 2016 election.

Strong opinions about Trump after his four years in the White House have proven challenging for the president. And Biden, lacking the high negative marks that Clinton did, has turned into an elusive target for the Trump campaign. It has made for a remarkably stable race with little tightening in polls compared to past elections.

...An NPR/Maristy University Poll released Thursday found Biden ahead of Trump 54%-43% among likely voters. Only 2% said they are unsure who they will vote for and just 1% said they are backing a third-party candidate. Only 5% of voters said they could be persuaded to change their opinions.

...Despite seeing his support among seniors, in particular, nosedive during the coronavirus pandemic-- Biden leads senior voters by around 20 percentage points in some battleground states-- Trump has not altered his approach to appeal to voters who could still be persuadable.

A combative Trump was on display during Thursday's town hall in Miami hosted by NBC News that featured uncommitted voters. Trump refused to denounce the group QAnon, falsely said 85% of people who wear masks get the coronavirus and said he couldn't remember whether he tested negative for coronavirus before the first presidential debate. "So cute," he said at one point to moderator Savannah Guthrie, as she pressed him on QAnon conspiracy theories.

One voter at the town hall, Paulette Dale, a registered Republican who said she's leaning toward voting for Biden, fawned over the president, telling him: "I have to say, you have a great smile. You're so handsome when you smile."

And yet even she's made her mind up. The Miami New Times reported Friday Dale is sticking with her plans to vote for Biden on Monday when early voting in Florida kicks off. "I wish he would smile more and talk less," Dale, a retired professor at Miami Dade College, told the newspaper.