Since the election, there’s been more than a few people on the left side of the political spectrum who have been calling for us to “go outside the bubble” and “listen to Trump voters.”
So we did. Many of us, myself included, have had the luxury of being surrounded by Trump voters the entire campaign, so we listened during the campaign too...and warned. It wasn’t the economy, it was racism, it was sexism, it was xenophobia, it was a war on political correctness, a war on equality, a white backlash.
And so far, they’re happy with what they see. Check out this piece on Iowa Trump voters from The New York Times.
www.nytimes.com/...
Washington may be veering from one Trump pre-inaugural controversy to another: unproved reports of Russia’s holding embarrassing information against him, possible ethical conflicts, the donors and billionaires of his cabinet, his pushback against intelligence findings on Russian hacking in the election. But there does not seem to be much angst in Iowa among those who voted for Mr. Trump, including some Democrats and independents.
Let’s hear it from the horses’ mouths
Mr. Ameling voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, sat out in 2012 and enthusiastically backed Mr. Trump. Nothing he has heard since Election Day has shaken his support, including reports this week that American intelligence agencies are investigating unverified accounts of meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials, as well as sex tapes purportedly made of Mr. Trump in Moscow. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the allegations completely false.
“The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it’s all a lie,” Mr. Ameling said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He added he was more concerned that government officials might have leaked the material to the news media. “I don’t know if it was classified, but if it was, whoever leaked it needs to go to jail,” he said. “We need law and order back in this country.”
Now, I don’t know what possess a “we need law and order” voter to vote for a black Democrat in 2008. The New York Times doesn’t ask, but I’m not sure Mr. Ameling is someone who can be won over with single payer healthcare.
It wasn’t free trade, as free trade doesn’t hurt agribusiness like it does manufacturing.
Mel Manternach, a retired farmer, said many farmers who had once voted for Mr. Obama switched to Mr. Trump, which he found perplexing. “Trump was against T.P.P., which would help exports of ag commodities,” he said, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade deal. “They voted against their own self-interests.”
Why would someone vote against their own self-interest?
Many were hazy on specific policy details about how, say, House Republicans were seeking to replace Medicare with a voucher system. These voters feared an outbreak of European-style terrorist attacks by Muslims in the United States, maybe in their own communities. And overwhelmingly, Trump supporters did not want their hard-earned money redistributed to people they regarded as undeserving.
This goes to one of the problems I notice when talking to people about politics. They are not aware of the specific policy positions regarding healthcare, the economy, jobs, or so on, but they do know what they hate and fear. You can talk about how Republicans are going to destroy Medicare all you want, but if they think ISIS is coming to shoot their kids in a theater, or some welfare woman is going to buy iPhone with tax money, they’ll take the chance. More on this later.
The story was the same in Des Moines County, in southeastern Iowa. The local Democratic Party chairwoman, Sandy Dockendorff, knew there was trouble when she saw a Trump sign in the yard of an electrician who had always supported Democrats.
“When I called him,” Ms. Dockendorff explained last month to a group of demoralized activists at a United Steelworkers union hall, “he said, ‘You stopped talking my language; you don’t care about jobs.’”
Oh jobs...
In an interview, Ms. Dockendorff, who is running for chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said rural Iowans were critical of Democrats for opposing job-creating projects like oil pipelines while running a presidential campaign focused narrowly on Mr. Trump’s shortcomings.
Oh, those jobs. Progressives have a real hard time speaking to rural voters about jobs, because oftentimes their jobs conflict with other progressive policies. If people are truly desperate for jobs, then they’re not going to care if the job they’re offered leads to pollution or makes climate change work. They have to feed families, right? It’s not surprise that Keystone goes through Iowa, or fracking is a big deal in Pennsylvania and we lost both states. It’s impossible to be the party of the working class and the party of cleaner environment when so much of our workforce relies on fossil fuel production.
What about the Obama voters who didn’t show up? Well, not all of them are friendly to progressives either.
At a Des Moines County diner in Burlington, a small city on the Mississippi River, Melissa Ell, a waitress, said she had voted for Mr. Obama in 2012. But this Election Day, she stayed home. “I didn’t want to vote for either one of them, to be honest,” she said.
Ms. Ell, 46, earns a base wage of $6.50 an hour at Jerry’s Main Lunch, a 14-seat restaurant across from the Burlington Northern Railroad tracks. As she bussed a table, Ms. Ell commiserated with Jackie Furman about those who take advantage of government aid.
“I think they should be drug-testing if they’re on welfare,” Ms. Ell said.
“The welfare system needs to be reorganized,” agreed Ms. Furman, a retired commercial bakery manager, complaining that “Chicago people” were moving to Burlington to receive higher benefits and bringing crime.
Ms. Furman, 70, said, “I’m ashamed to say we caucused for Obama” in 2008. “My view is he purposely got into the presidency so he could ruin America.”
Remind yourself of Jackie Furman, a woman concerned about “Chicago people” who voted for a black man from Chicago eight years earlier, the next time you say a racist couldn’t possibly vote for Obama.
But what about Trump’s cabinet appointments? Certainly no working class Trump voter could be happy with billionaires in the cabinet.
Don’t be so sure.
Mike Staudt, a retired farmer from Marble Rock, voted for Mr. Obama in 2012, but called the Affordable Care Act a form of socialism. He said he had no problem with a candidate who had run as the voice of the working people but was stocking his cabinet with the ultrawealthy.
“I know these guys are really rich,” he said. “They may have pulled off a few plays that weren’t exactly on the up-and-up, but they all had to be pretty smart to be billionaires. If they replace their own concerns with the concerns of the country, they can make things really move forward. That’s what I’m excited about.”
But I thought the problem was Obama and the Democrats were too friendly to the rich?
Just because people voted for Obama doesn’t mean they haven’t changed. A lot of LBJ voters in 1964 voted for Nixon, then voted for Nixon again in 1972, then voted for Ford, Reagan, Reagan and Bush. Something happened between 1965 and 1968 that caused them to leave the Democratic Party forever. We saw something similar in the late 1940s, and Republicans lost many voters for good between 1929 and 1933.
From every vantage point, it seems that some of Obama’s white rural voters weren’t all we thought they were. They were closest racists, they were culturally backwards, they were regressive. We may never know truly what drove them to vote for Obama twice. Was it Iraq? Terrible McCain/Romney campaigns? His personality? But we know whatever it was, it was specific to him, and doesn’t transfer to the rest of the Democratic Party. That truly they don’t share many of our values and never did.
It’s time to cut them loose and find another way to win.