I have been on KOS daily since election night. I have been one of the voices saying we must try to understand Trump voters in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan. Something happened in those states that drove people who voted for Obama twice to vote for Trump this cycle. We should try to figure out what this is, we should try to listen and empathize with them so we can a find a way to win them back.
I noted that, yes, it is a tragedy our democratic-republic has produced such a candidate, and that we must all protect each other, particularly our friends that have been targeted by Trump’s rhetoric.
But I also lamented that this election revealed an inability for too many of those Obama/Trump voters to understand the truth of a traditionally marginalized population’s fear and anxiety over the forces Trump has unleashed on his path to the presidency, but that there is a truth that we are failing to understand about the economic decline in, particularly, rural areas have been facing for decades upon decades now.
I expressed a need to reach out, listen and try to understand the pain they are feeling too.
it was only today I realized precisely why so many people have been rejecting this notion on its face. I mean yes, i get that a lot of these folks still have it better than black and brown populations overall have ever had it, that they do not face the same barriers on a daily basis. And that is massively unfair, but if we wanted to win elections in the future we needed to understand their situation, their view, so we could bring them back into the fold. I acknowledge that is not an easy thing to do. I am sorry it has come to this.
What I realized today, however, is many people were reading my comments and posts, and others sharing similar sentiments as if we were saying that we needed to acquiesce to Trump and hope nothing bad happens. That is not at all what we are saying, we are focused on what we need to do to win in 2020. It is going to take work to begin to attract more people in key states back to voting for Democratic Candidates.
WE MUST FIGHT TRUMP, EVERY SINGLE DAY. We must demand our representatives fight to stop every piece of legislation that does not serve our interests, that would deny our right to safety and freedom. We must protect press freedoms as well, even as broken as our MSM is, if Trump moves on them we must protect them too.
Take to the streets, protest, run for office in the midterms, fight, fight, fight. Do not tolerate hate. Support those that can protest, Do what you can to fight in other ways as well. There is not one reason not to resist his presidency. Redemption, of course, is available to him as it is with all humans, but I do not expect he will seek it, and I am not even certain what he could do to earn it, so we must keep the pressure on him in every single way possible. And again, protect each other as best we can each and every day.
While we fight Trump though we must try to figure out why so many voters in Wisconsin voted for a black man with the middle name of Hussein for President twice, an openly lesbian Democrat for Senate once and now….Trump...(credit to a tweet by Steve Kornaki for this last line).
Yes, we must stop Trump from inflicting more harm than he has, to minimize the damage he can do as much as possible, but we must understand the people that voted for Obama twice and switched to Trump as well and we can only to that by reaching out and listening to them.
Institutional racism must be rooted out, it must.
We will not be able to do anything about that unless we win elections, we will need at least some of these voters back to do it.
Here are links to a couple of my posts from the past few days
Looking Forward
The Failure of Truth: The Rural Urban Divide