What Some Voters Think and Why

 

Trump at Day 1374

Some black voters who did not vote in 2016 but will vote in 2020

Jason Hooper of Greensboro, N.C., says that in 2016, 

“I didn’t like either of the candidates” --

He will reluctantly vote in 2020 for Biden

Louis Johnson, New Orleans 

“Even though I have been a registered Democrat my entire life, I am also a conservative Catholic, and I don’t see the Democratic Party as very moralistic. President Barack Obama sank the party when he allowed same-sex marriage. Trump has protected us from that; he has some strong religious views and is protecting the church as we know it. Anyone with Christian values has to vote for Trump, as I will, in person on Nov. 3. Joe Biden is like the Titanic iceberg: I see the tip. I don’t want to see any more.”

Gloria J. Young, Woodbridge, Va. 

“Come hell or high water, I was going to vote this year”

“Come hell or high water, I was going to vote this year: President Trump is incompetent, ignorant, insensitive, racist and disgusting. I feel responsible for not voting in 2016 — like my vote might have made the difference. And I know that by voting this year, I’m honoring my mother, who volunteered for many years as a poll worker in Gary, Ind., before she died in 2013. I haven’t always been focused on the importance of every citizen exercising their rights, even though she always was. But Mom, I don’t plan to make that mistake again.”

Tamicka Lowe, Mableton, Ga.: I don’t like the way Trump addresses people: He says a lot of crass stuff. The simplest way to put it is that he’s politically incorrect. I do customer service, and you have to be inclusive of everybody. You can’t put some people below others.

But, ugh, Biden. It’s a double-edged sword: Who is the worst — him or Trump? But I really don’t want Trump to be reelected. The comments he has made about Kim Jong Un and other countries that threaten the U.S.? Not that I care that they don’t like us, but sometimes you have to be diplomatic. He could cause World War III.

Why some people will vote for Trump in 2020: Jobs & Immigration 

The New York Times writes: 

“I spent 35 years in the steel business and I can tell you unfair trade deals were done by Republicans and Democrats,” Mr. Haines [Bruce Haines, Bethlehem PA] said. Both parties, he complained, had given up on manufacturing — once a wellspring of stable middle-class jobs. “Trump has been the savior of American industry. He got it. He’s the only one.”

Still, despite one of the worst years in recent American history, the issue on which Mr. Trump gets his highest approval ratings remains the economy. It points to the resilience of his reputation as a savvy businessman and hard-nosed negotiator. And it is evidence that his most enduring economic legacy may not rest in any statistical almanac, but in how much he has shifted the conversation around the economy.  

In the process, he scrambled party positions on key issues like immigration and globalization, and helped topple sacred verities about government debt. He took a Republican Party that preached free trade, low spending and debt reduction and transformed it into one that picked trade wars even with allies, ran up record-level peacetime deficits and shielded critical social programs from cuts. 

“He completely moved the Republican Party away from reducing Social Security and Medicare spending,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.   

The Democrats changed in turn. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has positioned himself as the champion of immigrants, pledging to reverse Mr. Trump’s most restrictive policies, while rejecting more radical proposals like eliminating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

He has also been pushed to finesse his position on fracking and the oil industry, promising not to ban the controversial drilling method on private lands, and trying — with mixed success — to walk back comments he had made during the presidential debate about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Shifts on trade were more momentous. Mr. Biden and other party leaders who had once promoted the benefits of globalization found themselves playing defense against a Republican who outflanked them on issues like industrial flight and foreign competition. They responded by embracing elements of protectionism that they had previously abandoned.

The reshuffling is clear to Charles Jefferson, the managing owner of Montage Mountain Ski Resort near Scranton, Pa. “Those were not conversations we were having five years ago,” he said. “The exodus of manufacturing jobs, that was considered a fait accompli.” 

Mr. Jefferson, who said he voted for Mr. Obama, supported Mr. Trump in 2016. He plans to do so again. 

As a result, in this election, unlike the last, the significance of manufacturing and the need for a more skeptical approach to free trade are not contested.

Mr. Biden, after decades of supporting trade pacts, is now running on a “made in all of America” program that promises to “use full power of the federal government to bolster American industrial and technological strength.” He has also vowed to use the tax code to encourage businesses to keep or create jobs on American soil.

Even voters who don’t particularly like Mr. Trump credit him with re-energizing the U.S. economy.

What does all of that mean?

Some research after the 2016 election indicated that white voter unease with the impending rise of minorities to majority status and accompanying social changes was the most important factor in the president's electoral college win. I suspect it will be the first or second most important factor in 2020. If that is true, Biden is making a huge mistake, possibly a lethal one, by not clearly and repeatedly telling people that (i) he will not tolerate illegal immigration, but (ii) he will humanely deal with the issue. There is plenty of room to deal with the problem of illegal employers and illegal immigration without the shocking cruelty that the president has embraced.

The other big issue seems to be jobs and how to protect US manufacturing. I am not an economist, but from what I think I understand, that will be impossible without massive economic changes that will take years to implement. It will also cause huge increases in the cost of almost everything Americans buy. At the same time, the GOP is rigidly opposed to increasing wages, so the American standard of living will probably have to decrease for most workers.

And there is the federal debt time bomb. The GOP has completely abandoned meaningful concern for the debt. They increase it when they are in power, even in good economic times, but complain vehemently about it when the dems are in power. Sooner or later American debt will come back to haunt us. When investors lose faith in American debt, the mindset change will cause the American standard of living to significantly decrease for most workers. 

The other puzzle is whether free trade has been a net positive or negative for the American economy and standard of living. Some argue that it has been a net benefit, but that policies to deal with job losses have not been effective in the US. GOP anti-domestic spending policies tend to limit or completely block government efforts to support workers who have lost jobs to foreign competition.  

HAPPINESS IS THE WEEKEND

 PUT ASIDE THE GLOOM AND DOOM

Too much Trump, election news and Covid getting you down?

Try discussing something different, like maybe, what is your favorite escape on the weekend?

MUSIC?

A BOOK?

FRIENDS?

OR JUST

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

Another anomalous “perfect storm” or an orchestrated, coordinated “rigged storm”?

Consider this: 

Trump and his supporters like to say that if he loses, it’s because the election was rigged.  In light of the latest national polling numbers (and especially the more important individual state polling numbers), I’d submit that if Biden loses, then the election was definitely rigged… but rigged for Trump and against Biden.  How so?  

My evidence:

My evidence is NOT some conspiracy theory made up of surreptitious, under the table, covert tactics. No. I’m talking about right out loud, in your face, takes some major balls of steel, tactics. I’m talking about: 

1. Hacked state/local election systems and “intercepted” ballots by Russia and other foreign actors who favor a Trump presidency 

2. Voter suppression laws

3. USPS antics perpetrated by Trump supporter and contributor, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

4. Limiting of polling places, especially in “blue” areas

5. Fake / limited / set ablaze / other ballot drop-off boxes 

6. Super long voting lines in non-white areas leading to hours of waiting time

7. The threat of militia-type gun-toting Trump supporters at polling places, intimidating prospective voters

8. The status quo of a country now in shambles and disarray (pandemic, economy, political, climate)

Therefore my conclusion:

The current evidence, some 11 days before the election, points to the conclusion that Biden *should* win.  Barring a Trump “ace up his sleeve” in an act of political desperation, how can Biden NOT win?

If all my evidence is wrong, and if Biden doesn’t win, what can account for the polling discrepancy?  A bipolar electorate? A dishonest polling electorate?  Last minute voter apathy? Incompetent and/or biased pollsters? Can the polling numbers really lie/be skewed to such a degree?

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Am I seeing things incorrectly?  Explain it to me.  What am I missing?

(links below)

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8. (personal opinion)

The Radical Right's Plan for Public Education

Context

In the last year or so, I've started using the labels such as 'radical right' or 'radical libertarian right' to describe the ideology of what GOP conservative ideology has morphed into in recent years. The change has been ongoing at least since a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that made public school segregation illegal and required desegregation in an attempt to equalize the quality of public education across the entire nation. 

That Supreme Court decision enraged some conservatives who strongly opposed civil liberties and federal government mandated federal or state spending on domestic issues, including public education. That ideology envisioned strong state governments and a weak central government focused on the military and not much else, including civil rights and voting rights.[1] Over the decades since then, that ideology has come to displace the existing conservative ideology. Various events, such as Barry Goldwater's 1964 crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, spurred the movement and kept it alive. The radical right slowly built influence and power in the GOP over the decades. The final push for power in the GOP was crystallized by the election of Barak Obama in in November of 2008. 

I first became aware of this historical narrative from historian Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America (discussed here), and Jane Mayer's 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (discussed here).[2] MacLean described the origins of the radical right movement based on a trove of forgotten papers on a university campus in Virginia. She was given access to those papers without people understanding their content. Mayer's book includes a detailed discussion of how Obama's 2008 election, once again drove the radical right into a rage and finally crystallized GOP radical right resistance to Obama and more generally the democratic party. Among some other very bad things, that uncompromising opposition remains the basis of (i) America's broken gridlocked state of federal governance today, and (ii) America's state of extreme polarization, and its distrust of government, the mainstream media and political opposition.

The public education plan

A long article at Wall Street on Parade, Charles Koch Should Be on the Presidential Debate Stage Tonight, Not Donald Trump, describes the radical right plan like this:

"Koch Industries and Charles Koch have used nonprofit front groups to further their agenda for at least four decades.

And finally, there is billionaire Betsy DeVos who heads the U.S. Department of Education. Sourcewatch reports that the DeVos family fortune, which comes from Amway household and beauty products, funds school privatization projects, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups. ....

One of the seminal books on the Koch agenda is the 700-page tome by Christopher Leonard: “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Leonard was interviewed about the Koch’s view of public education on the Podcast, “Have You Heard.” (We highly recommend listening to it.) Leonard explained the Koch view as follows:

"Know what the blueprint is. Koch’s influence machine is multi-faceted and complex and I am just telling you, in a very honest way, there is a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity and the actual behind-the-scenes political philosophy. There’ a huge difference. And here’s the actual political philosophy:

Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.

So, the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe, in a sincere way, is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not is the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though, the network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different."

Thus, if the president gets re-elected, it is quite possible that he will try to set in motion a plan to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools. That is not to say that the president buys into the radical right agenda. But, being a transactional "what's in it for me" kind of guy, he can be conned and manipulated or bribed into going along with it. Trump does not care about education. Trump only cares about Trump.

Footnotes:

1. My read of the situation is that the radical right wants power shifted from the federal government to state governments because it is easier to subvert, corrupt, and then capture state governments than it is to do that with a federal government. Some states strongly oppose the radical right agenda and those states cannot be so easily bought and captured by this kind of radicalism. In essence, the elites in the radical right movement are multi-millionaires and billionaires. They want to re-establish authoritarian autocratic power in the states they can control. They want to be the aristocrats who control the states just like elites who controlled the states and public education before the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.

2. Conservatives have heavily criticized the books that MacLean and Mayer wrote. The reasons are self-evident. Also, there are some principled, non-political criticisms, but they do not mostly negate the basic story that MacLean and Mayer tell in their books.