In March, I was driving along a road that led from Dayton, Ohio, into its formerly middle-class, now decidedly working-class southwestern suburbs, when I came upon an arresting sight. I was looking for a professional sign-maker who had turned his West Carrollton ranch house into a distribution point for Trump yard signs, in high demand just days prior to the Ohio Republican primary. Instead of piling the signs in the driveway, he had arrayed them in his yard along the road. There they were, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in rows like the uniform gravestones in a military cemetery.
The sign man wasn’t home, but he had left a married couple in charge of the distribution. I got talking to the woman, Contessa Hammel. She was 43 and worked at the convenience store at a local Speedway gas station after four years in the military. And this was the first time she was voting in 25 years of eligibility.
I was startled to hear this — it’s rare to find voters entering the political process after decades of disconnection; in fact, I’d met a handyman in his 70s at a Trump rally on the other side of Dayton that same day who said he was voting for the first time, but I had dismissed it as a fluke.
I asked Hammel why she’d held back all those years. “I didn’t want to make an unintelligent decision,” she said, in a tone that suggested she was well aware of what an admission that was. But this year’s Republican nominee was different, she said. “He makes it simple for people like me,” she said. “He puts it clearly.”
Donald Trump’s stunning win Tuesday, defying all the prognosticators, suggested there were many more people like Hammel out there — people who were so disconnected from the political system that they were literally unaccounted for in the pollsters’ modeling, which relies on past voting behavior.
But Hammel was far from the only person I met in my reporting this year who made me think that Trump had spurred something very unusual. Some of them had never voted before; some had voted for Barack Obama. None were traditional Republican voters. Some were in dire economic straits; others were just a notch up from that and looking down with resentment at the growing dependency around them. What they shared were three things. They lived in places that were in decline, and had been for some time. They lacked strong attachment to either party at a time when, even within a single metro area like Dayton, the parties had sorted themselves into ideological, geographically disparate camps that left many voters unmoored. And they had profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their lives.
These newly energized voters helped Trump flip not only battlegrounds like Ohio and Iowa but long-blue Northern industrial states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — without which he would have lost to Hillary Clinton. Nationwide, his margin with the white working class soared to 40 points, up 15 points from Romney’s in 2012.
Two days after meeting Hammel, I tagged along with some Trump supporters, women who’d come all the way from Buffalo to go canvassing door-to-door in the adjacent Dayton suburb of Miamisburg. It was a rainy day, and few were answering their doors in this neighborhood of frayed frame houses and bungalows, but they persisted in their yellow ponchos; I couldn’t help but be reminded of the doggedness I’d observed among Obama volunteers in 2008.
At one small house, someone finally answered the door. Tracie St. Martin stepped out onto the porch, a 54-year-old woman with a sturdy, thick-muscled build and sun-weathered face, both of them products of her 26 years as a heavy-construction worker. St. Martin greeted the women warmly, and when they told her what they were there for she said, sure, she was considering Trump — even though she usually voted Democratic. And when they got talking, in the disjointed way of canvassers making a quick pitch, about how Trump was going to bring back the good jobs, St. Martin was visibly affected. She interrupted them, wanting to tell them about how she had, not long ago, worked a job that consisted of demolishing a big local GM plant. Her eyes welled up as she told the story and she had trouble continuing.
The canvassers gave her some materials and bade her farewell. But I doubled back a little later and visited with St. Martin in her kitchen, which she was in the midst of tidying up, with daytime TV playing in the background. Space in the kitchen was tight due to the treadmill she recently bought to help her get into better shape, which she hoped might make her less dependent on the painkillers for the severe aches she got from her physically demanding job, pills that had gotten a lot harder to obtain from her doctor amid the clampdown on prescription opioids.
St. Martin apologized, unnecessarily, for her emotions on the porch and expanded on what she had told the women from Buffalo: She was a proud member of Local 18 of the operating engineers’ union, which had been urging its members to support Hillary Clinton. The union provided her health insurance and decent pay levels, and trained her for demanding work, which, just months earlier, had required her to hang off of a Pennsylvania cliff face in her dozer as part of a gas pipeline project.
She came from a staunch Democratic family and had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, before not voting in 2012 because, she said, she was away on one of her long-term jobs. She was a single mother with three grown daughters. She had experienced all manner of sexual discrimination and harassment on very male-heavy worksites over the years.
She was, in other words, as tailor-made a supporter as one could find for Clinton, a self-professed fighter for the average Jane who was running to become the first woman president.
And yet St. Martin was leaning toward Trump.
Her explanation for this was halting but vehement, spoken with pauses and in bursts. She was disappointed in Obama after having voted for him. “I don’t like the Obama persona, his public appearance and demeanor,” she said. “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.” She regretted that she did not have a deeper grasp of public affairs. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”
When she addressed Clinton herself, it was in a stream that seemed to refer to, but not explicitly name, several of the charges thrown against Clinton by that point in time, including her handling of the deadly 2012 attack by Islamic militants on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya; the potential conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation; and her use of a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, mixing national security business with emails to her daughter, Chelsea.
“To have lives be sacrificed because of corporate greed and warmongering, it’s too much for me — and I realize I don’t have all the facts — that there’s just too much sidestepping on her. I don’t trust her. I don’t think that — I know there’s casualties of war in conflict, I’m a big girl, I know that. But I lived my life with no secrets. There’s no shame in the truth. There’s mistakes made. We all grow. She’s a mature woman and she should know that. You don’t email your fucking daughter when you’re a leader. Leaders need to make decisions, they need to be focused. You don’t hide stuff.
“That’s why I like Trump,” she continued. “He’s not perfect. He’s a human being. We all make mistakes. We can all change our mind. We get educated, but once you have the knowledge, you still have to go with your gut.”
Hand-wringing among Democrats about the party’s declining support among white working-class voters goes back a long time, to Lyndon Johnson’s declaration that signing the Civil Rights Act would sacrifice the allegiance of white Southerners. Then came the rest of the historical litany: the crime wave, riots and anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s, the consolidation of suburban white flight, Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, NAFTA, gun control, the War on Coal, and on and on. By this year, many liberals had gotten so fed up with hearing about these woebegone voters and all their political needs that they were openly declaring them a lost cause, motivated more by racial issues than economic anxiety, and declaring that the expanding Democratic coalition of racial and ethnic minorities and college-educated white voters obviated the need to cater to the white working class.
But this assessment suffered from a fatal overgeneralization. The “white working class” was a hugely broad category — as pollsters defined it, any white voter without a four-year college degree, roughly one-third of the electorate. Within that category were crucial distinctions, especially regional ones. Democrats in national elections had lost most white working-class voters in the Deep South — indeed, virtually all white voters there — a long time ago. They had in the past decade and a half seen much of Greater Appalachia, stretching from the Alleghenies to Arkansas, follow suit, to the point where West Virginia, one of just five states that Jimmy Carter won in 1980, went for Mitt Romney by 26 percentage points in 2012. It was hard to see how the Democrats were going to win back coal country like Logan County, W.V., which Bill Clinton won with 72 percent in 1996 but where Obama got only 29 percent in 2012.
But there was a whole subset of the white working class Obama was still winning: voters in northern states where unions, however diminished, still served to remind members of their Democratic roots (and build inter-racial solidarity). In these states, voters could still find national figures who represented them and their sort, people like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Vice President Joe Biden. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, centered on Biden’s hometown of Scranton, went for Obama with 63 percent of the vote in 2012. Rural Marquette County, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, went for him with 56 percent of the vote. In Ohio, there were a couple counties in the state’s Appalachian southeast that went stronger for Obama in 2012 than they had in 2008. In the opposite corner of the state, gratitude for Obama’s bailout of the auto industry helped win him 64 percent of the vote in Lucas County, around Toledo. Across the North, Obama ran even or ahead with John Kerry and Al Gore among white working class voters; their raw vote total for him nationwide exceeded his tallies of college-educated white voters and minority supporters.
On Election Day 2012, one voter I spoke with in Columbus, Ohio, encapsulated how well Obama had managed to frame the election as a “who’s on your side” choice between himself and the private equity titan Mitt Romney, and thereby hold onto enough white working-class voters in crucial swing states. Matt Bimberg, 50, was waiting by himself at a remote bus stop in a black neighborhood on the edge of town. He had in the past decade lost jobs as a telecom technician for Global Crossing (he still carried a Global Crossing tote bag) and at a factory making escape hatches for buses. But he had just landed a job at a nearby warehouse as a forklift operator, a success for which he credited a three-week training course paid for by the U.S. Department of Labor. And as gratitude for that, he was voting for Obama after voting for John McCain in 2008. “My line of thinking was that under Romney and [Paul] Ryan, it would be more of a trickle-down administration,” he said. “Their thinking is to give that money to corporations and the rich in tax breaks, and some will trickle down. But it didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Romney reminds me so much of Reagan’s theory of supply-side economics. It scares me.”
Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton would have seemed ideally suited to keep such northern white working-class voters in the fold. After all, she had trounced Obama among many of these very voters in the 2008 primaries, as she beat him in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania and at one point went so far as to declare herself, in a slip of the tongue, the champion of “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.”
But things had changed in the intervening years. For one thing, she was further removed from her stint representing downtrodden upstate New York as a senator — she had spent the years since 2008 in the rarefied realm of the State Department and then giving more than 80 paid speeches to banks, corporations and trade associations, for a total haul of $18 million. For another thing, cause for resentment and letdown had grown in many of those Rust Belt communities where Obama had held his own — they might be inching their way back from the Great Recession, but the progress was awfully slow, and they were lagging ever further behind booming coastal cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington, where the income gap compared with the rest of the country had grown far larger.
Most crucially, she was running not against Mitt Romney, the man from Bain Capital, but against Donald Trump. Yes, Trump was (or claimed to be) a billionaire himself, but he was not of Romney’s upper crust — they scorned him and his casinos and gold-plated jet, and were giving him virtually none of their campaign contributions. Trump attacked the trade deals that had helped hollow out these voters’ communities, he attacked the Mexicans who had heavily populated some of their towns and had driven much of the heroin trade in others, and, yes, he tapped into broader racial resentments as well. Faced with this populist opposition, Clinton fatefully opted against taking the “I’m on your side; he’s not” tack that Obama had used so well against Romney, and had instead gone about attacking Trump’s fitness for the presidency.
Back in Dayton, where Clinton never visited during the entire campaign, I had run into two more former Obama voters after Trump’s March rally there. Both Heath Bowling and Alex Jones admitted to having been swept up in the Obama wave, but had since grown somewhat disenchanted. Bowling, 36, a burly man with a big smile, managed a small siding and insulation business, and as he’d grown older he’d had gotten more bothered about the dependency on food stamps he saw around him, especially among members of his own generation, and demoralized by the many overdose deaths in his circle.
Jones, 30, who worked part-time at a pizza shop and delivering medicines to nursing homes, joked at first that his vote for Obama might have had to do with his having been doing a lot of drugs at the time. He grew serious when he talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him. Chicago was experiencing soaring homicide rates, he said — why weren’t more people talking about that? He was upset that when he went out on the town in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine bar district, he had to worry about getting jumped if he was on the street past a certain hour — and that he felt constrained against complaining against it. “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist,” he said. “I can’t stand that politically correct bullshit.” He had, he said, taken great solace in confiding recently in an older black man at a bar who had agreed with his musing on race and crime. “It was like a big burden lifted from me — here was this black man agreeing with me!”
Polls had consistently showed that Trump’s support was stronger with white working-class men than women, and in October came a revelation that seemed sure to weaken his standing among women of all classes, release of an 11-year-old tape in which Trump boasted of trying to commit adultery with a married woman and grabbing women “by the pussy.”
A few days after the release of the tape, which was followed by a string of accusations from women saying they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by Trump, I checked back in with Tracie St. Martin to see if she still supported him. She was working on a new gas plant in Middletown, a working-class town near Dayton that was the setting of the recent best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Here’s what she wrote back in a text message: “I still appreciate the honesty in some of his comments. Most of his comments. I still favor what he says he may be able to do. I am voting against Hillary, come what may with Trump. It’s important to me that ‘we the people’ actually have political power. And electing Trump will prove that. I am AMAZED at the number of people voting for him. The corruption is disgusting in the press. Yes, as of right now I am voting FOR Trump.” She was sure he would win, she said: “His support is crazy! The polls have to be wrong. Have to be fixed.”
And she shared an anecdote that reflected how differently Trump’s comments had been received in some places than others. “I’m setting steel for this new gas plant…I’m operating a rough terrain forklift,” she wrote. “So today, I kept thinking about the debate and the audio was released … And I got underneath a load of steel and was moving it…I was laughing and laughing and one of the iron workers asked ‘what are u laughing at.’ I said ‘I grabbed that load right by the pussy’ and laughed some more…And said ‘when you’re an operator you can do that ya know’, laughed all fucking day.”
Just last week, I was back in Ohio, in the southeastern Appalachian corner. I was at a graduation ceremony for opiate addicts who had gone through a recovery program, and sitting with four women, all around 30, who were still in the program. Someone mentioned the election, and all four of them piped up that they were voting for the first time ever. For whom? I asked. They looked at me as if I had asked the dumbest question in the world. All four were for Trump.
The most of the loquacious of the group, Tiffany Chesser, said she was voting for him because her boyfriend worked at a General Electric light-bulb plant nearby that was seeing more of its production lines being moved to Mexico. She saw voting for Trump as a straightforward transaction to save his job. “If he loses that job we’re screwed — I’ll lose my house,” she said. “There used to be a full parking lot there — now you go by, there are just three trucks in the lot.”
But Chesser also was viscerally opposed to Clinton who, the week prior, had endured a surprise announcement from FBI Director James Comey that a newly discovered cache of emails of hers was under scrutiny. “If she’s being investigated by the FBI, there’s a reason for it,” she said. I asked the women if they weren’t equally bothered by the many women’s accusations against Trump. They shrugged. “It’s locker-room talk,” Chesser said. “I know girls talk like that, and I know guys do.” But what about the accusations of assault? “Why are they just coming forward now?” she said. “If he did it to me before, I’d have come forward then. I wouldn’t wait until now.”
The next day, I met with Taylor Sappington, a native of Southeast Ohio who, after graduating from Ohio University, had decided to run for town council last year in Nelsonville, pop. 5,400, and won a seat. Sappington, who had been raised in a manufactured home by a single mother and whose brother works as a corrections officer, was a proud Democrat. He had volunteered for Obama’s 2012 campaign and took comfort in knowing that parts of Southeast Ohio had remained solid for the Democrats, unlike so much of the rest of Appalachia. But he knew that Clinton would not perform as well in the area as Obama had. “It’s a Democratic area. But Trump has blown a hole through it,” he said. “They feel like this is a forgotten area that’s suffering, that has been forgotten by Columbus and Washington and then they hear someone say, we can turn this place around, they feel it viscerally.”
And he feared that the national Democratic Party did not realize how little it could afford such a loss, or even realize how well it had those voters in the fold as recently as 2012. “I’m a believer in the Democratic coalition, but they’re writing off folks and it’s going to hurt them,” he said. “To write them off is reckless.”
A week later, on Election Day, I drove to a polling station in Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania, a small town south of York, just across the Maryland line. The polling station was inside an evangelical church housed inside a vast, mostly abandoned shopping plaza. It’s Republican country, where Romney outpolled Obama 2–1, but I was still startled by how long it was taking me to find a single Hillary Clinton voter.
But there was yet another woman voting for the first time in her life, at age 55, for Trump. “I didn’t have much interest in politics. But the older you get you realize more and more how important it is,” said Kelly Waldemire, who works in a local plastic-molding plant. “When it got to the point where the country is going in the wrong direction, I thought it was time.”
And there was yet another voter who had been for Obama in 2008 — Brian Osbourne, a 33-year-old Navy veteran who now drove all the way to Washington, D.C., every day to do commercial HVAC work because it paid double there what it would in Shrewsbury. The local economy had come back a little, he said, but “there’s a lot of people working jobs that they’re overqualified for.” That wasn’t all, he said. He hesitated, warning that what he was about to say wasn’t “politically correct,” and then said, “We’re really getting pussified as a country.”
I asked what he made of reports that Trump wrote off as much of a billion dollars on his taxes to avoid paying any at all. He shrugged it off just as every Trump voter I spoke with there did. “That doesn’t worry me all that much,” he said. “That’s what he does — that’s the loophole the government created. He takes advantage of what the system created. I’d do the same thing.”
As for Obama, his promise of racial reconciliation had been a “big letdown,” he said. “I thought it would help with race relations, but it’s getting way worse,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another civil war in this country.”
And there were yet more women willing to wave off Trump’s comment on the tape and the women’s accusations against him. “I don’t take that crap seriously,” said Tammy Nuth, 49, who cares for Alzheimer’s patients. “Men are men.” As for the women accusers: “I think they’re getting paid off.”
As I was preparing to leave, I glimpsed a young woman who I guessed might’ve voted for Clinton, and approached her to help balance my reporting. I was wrong. Stephanie Armetta, an 18-year-old working as a grocery store cashier before heading to community college, had cast her first-ever ballot, for Donald Trump. Her family had many members in the military, she said, and she thought Trump would “have more respect” for them. She thought it was wrong that if her brother got deployed, he got only two meals per day, while people in prison get three. And then of course there was Benghazi, “that she left [the four Americans] there, that they weren’t her priority.” She was bothered by Trump’s comments on the tape, for sure. But, she said, “I’m glad how he didn’t lie about it. They caught him and he said, yeah, I said an asshole thing.” Not to mention, she said, “Bill Clinton isn’t good either on that subject.” Her vote, she concluded, was “more against Hillary than for Trump.”
Trump won that one small precinct by 144 more votes than Romney had won it in 2012 — a 20 percent increase. And all across rural and small-town Pennsylvania, that pattern repeated itself. In Scranton’s Lackawanna County, where Obama had won 63 percent, Clinton won only 50 percent.
In Michigan’s rural Marquette County, where Obama had won 56 percent, Clinton got only 49 percent. Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win Pennsylvania or Michigan.
In Ohio’s Mahoning County, home of Youngstown, where Obama got 63 percent, Clinton got only 50 percent. In Hocking County, just adjacent to Nelsonville, Clinton fell even further, getting 30 percent, down from the 48 percent Obama had gotten, and realizing Taylor Sappington’s fears.
And at Tracie St. Martin’s working-class precinct in Miamisburg, where Obama had managed to get 43 percent in 2012, Clinton’s support plunged to 26 percent, giving Trump a margin of 293 votes just in that one precinct, triple Romney’s margin four years earlier. That helped provide Trump a historic claim: the first Republican majority in Dayton’s Montgomery County in 28 years. Statewide, Trump won by a whopping eight percentage points, a swing of 10 points from four years earlier. He had brought new voters out of the woodwork; he had converted some white working-class Obama voters while others had just stayed home.
St. Martin, who was still hard at work on the Middletown gas plant with a “great bunch of ironworkers,” was elated. “I just really needed to know that I was part of a majority that recognized we need these things that Trump spoke of,” she told me. “More importantly for me, to NOT have Hillary as Commander in Chief.”
–Alec MacGillis, ProPublica
Knightwatch says
American ignorance is broader and deeper than anyone thought. We thought logic, critical thinking, whatever, would prevail. But we found that love does not trump fear, hate and ignorance. The post-Obama America is a hellhole.
Anonymous says
You don’t email your F*cking daughter when you are in the middle of a campaign???” Trump paraded Ivanka every chance he got as though she was his wife, used her husband as his de facto campaign manager and is now thinking of putting his children in charge of some very sensitive government positions. The privileged White male class is not exactly a paragon when it comes to nepotism and they are not known for putting the concerns of the working class above their own. People explain away and justify their prejudices and the fears that lie beneath them in all kinds of ways. This election is just a legitimization of those prejudices, the same was it was when Richard Nixon was elected by his “Silent Majority.” And I would not be in the least bit surprised to see it end the same way. We seem to repeatedly and regularly swing from one extreme to another in our American political process.
cj vetere says
What a Beautiful Site!
TylerDurden says
NYT has decided to “rededicate” itself to honest reporting , rather than cheerleading. Guess we will see what happens, Who knows maybe even Flagler Live could try some more honesty someday too.
Justin says
Absolutely excellent piece. I’ll be sending this to all of my friends still in “shock” over Trump’s win – maybe they will understand what just happened now.
YankeeExPat says
Boris and Natasha Trump
Common Sense says
What are they going to do when the companies don’t come back? When the jobs don’t materialize? When their healthcare goes away and doesn’t come back? Who will they turn their anger on?
William Moya says
Interesting, the first interviewee Contessa, had not voted in 25 years afraid she would make “an unintelligent decision” but Trump spoke to her in simple terms, was she trying to compliment Trump?
Sherry says
@William Moya. . . my laugh of the day. . . thank you Sir! The next President. . . a representative of not only the worst characteristics of human beings, but the most poorly educated.
Many year ago, I remember reading that Rupert Murdoch (the head of FOX) bragged that he would build a media empire that would be so influential that he would be able to decide who the President of the USA should be. Thirty years+ of FOX and friends peddling fear and hate, and here we are. . . with a corrupt sexual predator, who pays no income taxes, dragging 75 law suits into the White House. Our country is now in the gutter!
Sherry says
By the way. . . well over 4 Million Citizens have signed a petition on change.org to the Electoral College asking them to give justice to ALL voters and confirm the election of Hillary Clinton who won the popular vote by over 2 million votes. . . and still counting.
The Electoral College is antiquated and must go!
ttps://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19
DaveT says
All I see in the news these days are complaining losers.
Pogo says
Lonesome Rhodes Trump will be much worse than 43. Winter is coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su3qmvCkvtE
The government; military high command and intelligence service of every major country in the world are already taking precautions to protect themselves from an American president who is a stooge for Putin. That new seismic activity you’re feeling is Reagan spinning in his grave at the speed of the big bang.
Again:
Anonymous says
@Common Sense Says–Blame the Mexicans. Or the Muslims. Or the Jews. Or Black people. Or anybody but themselves for their own stubborn stupidity.
Marlee says
I grew up in Dayton I know Dayton and the people who lived in the places that are mentioned here.
I’m not surprised that they voted for Trump.
He used them as stepping stones to help his climb to more power and eventfully more money.
They believed his promises which will soon be confirmed as lies.
D. Ploy says
As a DEPLOYABLE, I have but one thing to say to the progressives…” YOU LOSE “
Ben Hogarth says
The ultimate vanity.
It’s sad to think that the older generations of white middle-class men and women decided the Trump presidency considering the types of individuals about to take up key positions in government under a Trump. The reality for them will grow even worse when they soon realize that we are less safe from terror with complete fools at the helm.
We had simpletons elect simpletons for the sake of simpletons. It’s that simple.
You don’t pick your doctor because he/she is just like you… why would you pick a President for such a reason? It makes no rational sense.
But Trump sold these folks on a lie. He made them believe nobody owns Trump and that the system was rigged against him; thus they identified with his plight as it was a lifetime of their own – or so they believe.
But the definition of rational is one who adapts them self to the world while irrational is expecting the world to adapt to you. Trump supporters mostly fit into the latter category.
But as the last “hurrah” of a forgotten and aged crowd, how will they react once they realize they have been tricked by a false prophet? Where in their book of revelations does that narrative lead them?
Ironic considering how we have spent years listening to our white neighbors preaching the antichrist narrative of Obama. But so very sad to think these simple folk are about to be even greater victims and once again, because they fail to understand rationalism and actuality. Trump is not owned by anyone – why would they assume this would suddenly change to them?
GT says
Wake up! It is what it is Trump is the President why don’t you all stop bitching about it and get behind him and see what happens. He may fail or he may be the best thing that’s happened to our country in a long time only time will tell. We all need to remember one thing Hillary couldn’t do the Sec. of state job, people died under her watch and the head of the FBI said she could not be given a security clearance because of the emails she sent
so how could this person be president?
Makeitso1701 says
I agree with Commom Sense Says, what are these Chumpsters going to do when all that was promised is not materialized, well I say these white,poorly educated people voted mainly on the fact that they were so angry that a black man has been our president for the last almost 8 years and they want their white America back.
Trump was absolutely right when he said ” I could shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose a vote”.
The jobs are not coming back, the wall will not be built, the 11 million illegals will not be deported.
Let’s see where we are a couple of years from now, I am predicting that the Trumpster will be impeached.
Justin says
1) Rupert Murdoch hates Trump and Fox News vehemenently campaigned against him in the Primary.
2) If you actually read the article, it’s clear the vast majority of those interviewed voted against Hillary, not for Trump. They could’ve run a potato with a job-creation slogan and it’d be the next President. Oh, and they voted against what’s happening right now – spoiled, poorly educated (because there’s a shortage of STEM grads so the people protesting must have Liberal Arts degrees), mostly white children who’ve never had to live a full day away from Mommy’s watchful gaze.
Justin says
Yes, all the people who didn’t vote the same way you did must be poorly educated biggots – even the black people who voted for him. You should probably stop going to work and protest in the streets, smash some private property, send a couple cops to the ER. That’ll teach the world for not giving you what you want.
Rich Mikola says
Poor liberals, whine, whine, whine. You lost, get over it! God bless Donald Trump. Obama’s legacy is in ruins, a mere footnote in history.
Pogo says
@Ben Hogarth
Well said. Too bad Archie Bunker and Al Bundy voted when over half the electorate didn’t. Now the West Wing will be populated by the same book burners and their followers that crowd so many internet comment sections.
Ben Hogarth says
@GT – I keep hearing this argument to “get behind the new president-elect” and to at least “give him a chance.”
Is this not the same crowd that literally spent countless social media hours refuting Obama’s nation of origin as a means of defacing his legitimacy as a president-elect? I am pretty sure those folks had their minds made up long before he was even elected. The same folks who today, argue we should do as they say and not as they do.. clearly.
@Rich Mikola – As a historian I can safely say thankfully… we are the ones who will be writing that footnote – not you :)
Personally, I am proud of my liberal arts degree. I am proud to have been educated in the same statecraft that our founding fathers valued. I guess that is why I am so profoundly taken back by the level of ignorance on many online forums and comment sections like this one. We have reporters (albeit a few left) who actually do their due diligence in reporting as Pierre has so dedicated himself to, and all we hear is criticism and even bigotry at times. All the meanwhile, many Trump supporters, whether liberal or conservative, have failed to educate themselves at all and on anything factual.
All I have seen this election and several prior is a generation of Americans repeating their mistakes well into old age and now they want to take revenge by electing someone who will destroy the future of the younger generations.
Bravo. I can’t wait to write that footnote as well. “The Forgotten Generation: Not Forgotten Soon Enough”
As a “liberal” I can safely say that while I was once opposed to “no child left behind” – I am officially in support of it as of this election. We left an entire generation behind and look where it got us.
Sherry says
Steve Bannon. . . noted racist and xenophobe of Breitbart and the Alt Right. . . has now been named senior adviser. Take a moment to get educated on this guy: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/5-breitbart-conspiracy-theories-head-spin-article-1.2755173
Trump is speaking loud and clear!
Anonymous says
And now Pence is trying to get the court system to protect HIS emails from public scrutiny. The hypocrisy begins where the lying never ends.
Crystal says
I need to say this one part before I type. I am not a Trump supporter.
Now that’s out there, let me say that… I can see how he won. America is disenchanted as a whole. He represented what millions have wanted for the last 12 years… a change. The old school political families and connections that each candidate (except Obama in 08 and Trump 16) had were seen as a detriment.
Hilary was a horrible candidate. Horrible. When you have 90% of the media on your side, billions of dollars and an entire political party backing you and YOU cannot defeat someone like Trump??? That’s sad.
The entire race was a debacle from the minute that the DNC railroaded its delegates against Sandwrs. That, the email scandal, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, and Wikileaks exposed Clinton for who she was behind closed doors.
People say that the republicans created trump. That’s not true. The entire current political regime (Red and Blue) created a disillusioned American people (that they didn’t listen to) which is what created him.
That being said… Hes now been elected. He’s our future president. And for all of you screaming about a popular vote… You have to remember that it’s a popular vote which was counted. It doesn’t include the millions (yes millions) of absentee ballots that weren’t counted. They aren’t counted except in extreme measures. It’s estimated that the absentee ballots are majority of republican based (60%) due to them belonging to military or high income business people out of the country.
If you want to scream a popular vote, then scream for the absentee ballots to finally count.
Just be prepared to expect a vastly different outcome.
melinda says
In January 2015 a group of Haitians surrounded the New York offices of the Clinton Foundation. They chanted slogans, accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of having robbed them of “billions of dollars.” Two months later, the Haitians were at it again, accusing the Clintons of duplicity, malfeasance, and theft. And in May 2015, they were back, this time outside New York’s Cipriani, where Bill Clinton received an award and collected a $500,000 check for his foundation. “Clinton, where’s the money?” the Haitian signs read. “In whose pockets?” Said Dhoud Andre of the Commission Against Dictatorship, “We are telling the world of the crimes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for in Haiti.”
melinda says
The Haitian protesters noticed an interesting pattern involving the Clintons and the designation of how aid funds were used. They observed that a number of companies that received contracts in Haiti happened to be entities that made large donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Haitian contracts appeared less tailored to the needs of Haiti than to the needs of the companies that were performing the services. In sum, Haitian deals appeared to be a quid pro quo for filling the coffers of the Clintons.
footballen says
I listened to a guy yesterday who offered an explanation. He explained that because Hillary and her staunch supporters labeled Trump as a racist early on, when his supporters tried to converse as to why they actually support him they were immediately labeled racist and stupid. You cannot go on stereotyping people that way regardless of their skin color. You cannot continue telling all white males they should apologize for existing. You essentially took away THEIR freedom of speech and when that happened a silent movement began. Apparently there were a small portion of some completely ignorant hate groups that saw an opportunity to make it look as though they were some how responsible for that movement but make no mistake, it was Hillary and her most ignorant supporters who cornered that massive portion of this population.
Sherry says
I’m reading that Secretary Clinton’s popular vote lead is certainly increasing:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons-popular-vote-lead-will-grow-and-grow/507455/
To be perfectly clear. . . I’ve been calling for a complete END to the Electoral College, regardless of who wins. As posted a couple of days ago, there are several reforms needed to our political process:
Rather than focusing on the politicians (now including Trump) who often do NOT represent anyone but their own self interests and MONEY. . . we should rise up and demand political reform:
1. An END to accepting MONEY, beyond the salary for the position. Right now, we have the corruption of legal bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. We should fund each candidate with exactly the same amount of money and require that they account for their spending of every penny.
2. END the Electoral College. . . we certainly have the ability to have accurate, direct elections, nationwide.
3. END Gerrymandering!
4. Implement Term Limits for every political position
5. Implement a Mandatory Retirement age for every judge, including the Supreme Court
John says
Finally, a respite from all this liberal lunacy that’s turned our country into an immoral cesspool of corruption. Maybe average Americans can believe what they want without fear the liberal “thought police” thugs will be out to repress them.
Anonymous says
How long will it take Trump voter to realize they have been had and duped? The next question is will they be smart enough to realize it? My guess will be never and no they are not.
Anonymous says
The “Forgotten Class” will be forgotten more quickly (and silenced more efficiently) by Trump & Co. than by anyone else they could have voted for. “The Forgotten Class”, unfortunately, has conveniently forgotten relatively recent political history more thoroughly and enthusiastically than they have anything else.
Anonymous says
The Forgotten Class? It seems to me that what they forgot, first and foremost, was how to use their brains to THINK beyond the moment and the “shock and awe” of their easily inflamed prejudices and gut reactions. They may be gloating now but I am willing to bet that won’t last long. Of course, when the stuff hits the fan, they’ll resort to their usual (and comfortable) scapegoating and blame everybody but themselves and those they have empowered to exploit them.