Why Did We Lose And How Can We Win?

[regnaD kciN]

54. "Most Americans see trade as an economic opportunity..."

...but, as with the popular vote/electoral vote, is isn't so much the total percentages as where they occur. Much pro-trade sentiment is among upper-middle-class urban voters in the northeast and west coast, whose own jobs are in the "information society" rather than manufacturing. Those areas went reliably for the Democrats, but that was countered by just enough rust-belt voters (the total margin of which, remember, was just about enough to fit in a football stadium), to swing the results.

Also, I'm not sure exactly what Hillary, or any other realistic candidate, could do to talk about automation, unless they went full-on Luddite. The problem is that any candidate who operates in the real world, if they are being truthful, would have to admit that manufacturing jobs aren't coming back and, indeed, are going to decrease even more, and workers needed to come to terms with that and retrain for other areas or just reconcile themselves to a lower standard of living in the service sector. Sure, the government can offer to help them with that, but that's still going to be a pretty bitter pill to swallow -- particularly when you have the opposing candidate feeding them fantasyland promises on how he's going to bring all those jobs back with a wall and sanctions. Even if you suspect that won't work, are you surprised that many people in those demographics will cling to them rather than accepting a bleak future?