[El Gallo]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/o...ught.html?_r=0

Look a unicorn and a pretty pony!

A few key passages....

A consistent theme is that the focus on white defections from the Democratic Party masks an even more threatening trend: declining turnout among key elements of the so-called Rising American Electorate — minority, young and single voters. Turnout among African-Americans, for example, fell by 7 points, from 66.6 percent in 2012 to 59.6 percent in 2016.

Priorities also studied Obama-to-Trump voters. Estimates of the number of such voters range from 6.7 to 9.2 million, far more than enough to provide Trump his Electoral College victory. The counties that switched from Obama to Trump were heavily concentrated in the Midwest and other Rust Belt states.

The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.

Past supporters pulled back because of the Democrats’ seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens’. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America’s dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

Or, as I have written elsewhere, Democrats cannot simply argue in favor of redistributive government on economic matters because defecting whites are deeply hostile to a government they see as coercive on matters of race. For decades, the perception that an intrusive federal government promotes policies favoring African-Americans and other minorities at the expense of whites has driven anti-government animosity.

The two scholars provide data showing that among white people without college degrees who voted for Trump, nearly 60 percent were in the top half of the income distribution and that white non-Hispanic voters without college degrees making below the median household income made up only 25 percent of Trump voters.

What I've been trying to put across here is that people thought the "rust belt" could not go vote Republican. They needed that federal help and being down and out meant that they would vote Democratic to bring that help.

I'm saying this because one of these big blue states is going to turn at some point. I live in one of them and so I can tell you what I've observed and what is happening. The threats of loss ring hollow because while the money was spent, the promised outcomes never arrived. Obama borrowed nearly $9 trillion supposedly to fix the country from the Bush wars and recession. That recovery never happened for those states and large swathes of the country.

In California we have the CSU and UC system. Instead of free tuition, the costs have doubled. Then we discover that nearly a fifth of the available slots are going to out of state and foreign students. You find out Janet Napolitano has a $175 million slush fund while students pay more. The roads are terrible. The taxes are high and the threat is that if you vote for someone other than a San Francisco/Northern California elite politician supported by tech and entertainment money then evil Republicans are going to make your life worse.

People realize at some point they can't make it worse. You don't have health care. You have a mandate to purchase terrible health plans. You don't have good roads or excellent state parks or fantastic government amenities for you kids. You have crumbling schools and roads while watching H1B visa holders take the jobs you were promised would be there if you got them through college in a STEM field.

This "hollowing out" isn't hard for me to see. It's like watching cable TV crumble or ESPN go from revenue generator to revenue anchor around the neck of Disney.

I can be crazy, delusional, argue poorly or mocked in whatever manner some prefer. I don't care about that.

I see what I see and I know what I know and right now the major blue pockets are all around media centers. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and some secondary markets are blue/pretty purple as well (San Francisco, Denver, Boston, etc.) The media is crumbling. Their ability to influence is waning and changes coming will be very large.

In some ways it won't matter. Student loan debt is at over a trillion dollars owed to the Federal Government and it is the only debt you cannot discharge via a bankruptcy. Let's see how many of these young debt slaves become lifelong Democratic voters as an example. That doesn't mean Republicans have the answer either but status quo isn't going to fix it and doubling down on the bad solutions isn't going to fix it. Change needs to happen.