This Appalachia Life: My Mother Wasn't Trash

[WellDarn]

74. She did indeed

But the fact remains that, in places like Michigan, it wasn't just that a majority of upper middle class white voters voted for Trump, it's that 18% of upper middle class white female voters (and an even greater percentage upper middle class white males) who voted for Obama turned around and voted for Trump. That is a huge swing.

I'd like to mention one other thing. This has nothing to do with Hillary. Her campaign was better than Gore's and Kerry's by leaps and bounds. She, IMHO, was also a better candidate than both of them. I think the numbers you mentioned bear that out.

This is about the unbridled anger and blame being directed at working class voters (many of who are now lower class voters) EVEN THOUGH A MAJORITY OF THEM VOTED FOR HILLARY.

It's about working class voters being used as the "face" of the Deplorables, EVEN THOUGH A MAJORITY OF THEM VOTED FOR HILLARY.

It's about this mantra being pushed that we need to ignore working class voters because they can't be reached without sacrificing our values as a party, EVEN THOUGH A MAJORITY OF THEM VOTED FOR HILLARY.

It's about the absolute refusal to call out the white people in the suburbs OR to say out loud that it is in their gated enclaves, even more so than the hills of Harlan County Kentucky, where racism is the NUMBER ONE MOTIVATOR. The suburbs had everything under Obama. He saved their 401k's. He made their employer-provided health insurance better than ever. He gave them domestic security and kept them out of foreign wars. He gave them low inflation and low interest and, with that, nicer homes, cars, etc. He gave them a first family that exemplified their values.

So why did they leave him in 2012 and then flat out abandon our party in 2016?

Might I suggest that there is only one thing, and one thing only, that Obama did to disturb their precious little world . . . he said right out loud that race matters, that privilege matters, that the criminal laws are racist, and that the United States is founded on racism. That single act was all that mattered in the suburbs. That single act outweighed the benefits he had heaped on them. That single act transformed the Democratic Party into something that a huge percentage of suburban whites just couldn't stand, the party of black people. When you throw in how we eventually stood behind other oppressed groups, we were lost to them forever.

IMHO, (and not to minimize any of these factors) more than Comey, more than Russia, more than a lazy complicit MSM, more than voter suppression, THAT was what Hillary was up against . . . a huge swath of privileged upper middle class white voters toward whom our party had already bent over backwards and who STILL weren't going to vote for us. To do what she did against that (AND Comey, suppression, Russia, worthless MSM, and all the other shit) was nothing short of laudable. It was actually pretty amazing.

All of that, though, is in the past. The conversation we are having now is should be, given that we need some white demographic to vote with the rest of us (to overcome the shit), whether that demographic should be the working people who voted for us (even though they suffered), or the white suburbanites we've done so much for already and who still voted against us.