Please stop saying Trump turnout is because of jobs or economy.

[emulatorloo]

69. Fact: Hillary won w voters concerned about economy. Trump won w voters on immigration,

Hillary won with voters making under 50k, and won even more with voters making under 30k

Trump won voters making 50K and up.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0

We're not going to learn anything about how to move forward if we work from false premises



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"The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class"

Mark Murray ?@mmurraypolitics 21m21 minutes ago
Via @DKThomp, impt corrective to idea that Hillary Clinton didn't talk about the working class or how to help them https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/ …

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

...After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.

The long-term future of the U.S. involves rising diversity, rising inequality, and rising redistribution. The combination of these forces makes for an unstable and unpredictable system. Income stagnation and inequality encourage policies to redistribute wealth from a rich few to the anxious multitudes. But when that multitude includes minorities who are seen as benefiting disproportionately from those redistribution policies, the white majority can turn resentful. (This may be one reason why the most successful social democracies, as in Scandinavia, were initially almost all white.) Nobody has really figured out how to be an effective messenger for pluralist social democracy, except, perhaps, for one of the few American adults who is legally barred from running for the U.S. presidency in the future...

read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

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The most common words in Hillary Clinton’s speeches, in one chart
They weren’t about “identity politics.”
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13972394/most-common-words-hillary-clinton-speech

<snip>

I gathered all her campaign speeches (from both the primary and general campaigns) into one document and did a simple word-frequency analysis.

The results are below. As you can see, I’ve been as generous as possible in filing things under “identity politics.” Anything about minorities or criminal justice or gay people or immigrants, I filed as identity politics. I even included mentions of climate and clean energy in that category, though in a sane world those would be top-tier economic issues.

So, without further ado, what did Hillary Clinton talk about?

<CHART>

Yeah. She talked about jobs, workers, and the economy — more than anything else. They were the central focus of her public speeches.

You can critique how she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Maybe she should have used different words, or framed things differently. Maybe, despite running on an agenda of worker-friendly policies, she should have chosen a clearer, simpler economic theme and hit it more often.

You can critique where she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Clearly, in retrospect, she should have spent more time and resources in those upper Midwestern swing states.

But you cannot say she didn’t talk about jobs, workers, and the economy. She talked about them all the time, more than anything else.

It’s just not what voters heard. Here’s what they heard in the two-month period of July 17 to September 18, according to Gallup polling:

<CHART, GALLUP polling 2 questions: "What have you heard or read about Donald Trump?" "What have you heard or read about Hillary Clinton?">

Virtually everything the media said about Clinton was about corruption, one way or another. None of it was about policy. None of it was about her actual priorities, as reflected in her speeches and her agenda.

You can critique the Clinton campaign in all sorts of ways, but excess rhetorical attention to identity politics simply isn’t one of them.