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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHope Is What Separates Trump Voters From Clinton Voters
The Atlantic, by Andrew McGill
Its pretty clear who Donald Trump wants to help, because he names them at every rally. Miners. Steelworkers. Guys on the assembly line, whose jobs are either being stolen by the Chinese or strangled to death by Obamas regulations. If globalization has put your livelihood in jeopardy, Trump wants you on his side. And given his sky-high popularity among white men without a college degree, Id argue this pitch is gaining traction.
Id argue the real dividing line is optimism. Consider this: Two-thirds of Hillary Clintons supporters think the next generation will be in better shape than we are today, or least the same, according to Pew Research. The reverse is true for Trumps camp. Sixty-eight percent of his supporters think the next generation will be worse off. Whats more, the vast majority of Trump voters say life is worse today for people like them than it was 50 years ago. Only two percent two! think life is better now and that their children will also see improvement.
What were seeing is a hope gap. And it turns out that hope isnt necessarily linked to a persons current circumstances. Folks living in a poor community can still believe their childrens lives will be better, and people working in a reasonably secure local economy can still despair for the future. Rothwells work suggests its the communities that have seen the least societal change that are most likely to support the New York billionaireby and large, they have fewer immigrants, fewer lost jobs, fewer impacts from global trade. People who have lost something arent voting for Trump, at least not uniformly. Its the people who think theyre about to lose something.
What were seeing is a hope gap. And it turns out that hope isnt necessarily linked to a persons current circumstances. Folks living in a poor community can still believe their childrens lives will be better, and people working in a reasonably secure local economy can still despair for the future. Rothwells work suggests its the communities that have seen the least societal change that are most likely to support the New York billionaireby and large, they have fewer immigrants, fewer lost jobs, fewer impacts from global trade. People who have lost something arent voting for Trump, at least not uniformly. Its the people who think theyre about to lose something.
So maybe it isnt about education, or poverty, or jobs. A voters choice may instead be more closely linked to how optimistic they feel about the future. Trumps supporters view the global economic policies of the modern world as a Pandoras Box: bright and shiny on the outside, disastrous when uncorked. But Clintons voters might better remember the end of the Greek myth. Once all the demons had escaped into the sky, the story goes, only one thing remained behind. It was hope, fluttering and fragile.
Read it at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-manufacturing-jobs-hope/496541/
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Hope Is What Separates Trump Voters From Clinton Voters (Original Post)
yallerdawg
Aug 2016
OP
Happyhippychick
(8,379 posts)1. And intelligence
mothra1orbit
(231 posts)2. I was going to say
delusional thinking, but I guess that's just the other side of the coin.
JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)3. Or sanity.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)4. From the link:
"As it happens, high school graduates are the least hopeful Americans out there. Only a fifth think the next generation of Americans will have better lives, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to Pew. Theyre also the most likely to think that theyd be better off living 50 years ago, when low-skill jobs in manufacturing were plentiful. And the picture for white high school graduates is probably even gloomier than Pews numbers show; their figures include black Americans, who are far more optimistic about the future and less nostalgic for the past. Could hope be the missing link between education and Trump?"