Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers on an otherwise partly cloudy day with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 36m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 16.9% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred ninety-second day.
On this day in 1868, Secretary of State William Seward certifies the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Recommended for reading in full:
Toluse Olorunnipa and Ashley Parker report Trump campaign sees political advantage in a divisive appeal to working-class white voters:
President Trump launched another broadside Saturday on a Democratic political opponent, calling a prominent black congressman’s Baltimore district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and saying “no human being would want to live there.”
That Twitter attack on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) plunged the nation into yet another anguished debate over the president’s divisive rhetoric. And it came just two weeks after Trump called out four minority congresswomen with a racist go-back-to-your-country taunt.
….
But Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.
This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen.
Ronald Brownstein writes Will Trump’s Racist Attacks Help Him? Ask Blue-Collar White Women (‘His strategy rests on a bet: that these voters will respond just as enthusiastically to his belligerence as working-class white men’):
Donald Trump’s turn toward more overt racism in his “go back” attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color rests on an unspoken bet: that the women who are part of his core constituencies will respond to his acrimony as enthusiastically as the men.
But polling throughout Trump’s presidency has indicated that his belligerent and divisive style raises more concern among women voters than men in one of his most important cohorts: the white working class. And a new set of focus groups in small-town and rural communities offers fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.
….
Trump must maximize his margins—and turnout—among the groups that have been most receptive to his exclusionary racist and cultural messages: older, nonurban, evangelical-Christian, and non-college-educated white voters.
….
But Trump’s strategy faces a huge obstacle if working-class women don’t buy in to his message as much as working-class men. That’s for a simple reason: Every data source—from the exit polls to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of voter files to studies by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm—shows that these women reliably cast slightly more than half of all the votes from the white working class.
(Quite the bet, but then Trump has nowhere else to turn.)
The Birdman of Idaho Has Built Homes for Over 40,000 Bluebirds:
“Blue collar white working class voter” is code for “Trump’s most reliable racist base”. They are not his base because they are Blue Collar, or Workers, but rather that they are implacably racist. Trump isn’t playing for their votes. He already has them. He is working on his post-election strategy, when he will need them heavily armed and in the streets. There can’t be any other rational reason why he is making no attempt to convince anyone who isn’t already voting for him to support him. He can read polls, too, and knows he isn’t going to win this one legitimately.
That is also why Yertle is greasing every skid for election interference. McConnell is the most loathsome creature in politics, and his legacy will be with us for decades after I’m dead. There has to something extraordinarily sinister behind Yertle’s treason…
The Democrats need to stop chasing the unicorn and realize that Trump voters are not his voters because of some sort of economic reason, but solely because of his racial animus. Trump voters may well be under economic stress, but that isn’t why they love Trump. For Democrats to woo these voters is futile. The only way to convert them is to out-racist Trump, and that is a Sisyphian task.
Voting for Biden because he appeals to Blue-collar voters is not a productive way to use votes. Biden is not enough of a racist to win any Trump voters, although he has dipped a toe in those waters in the past. The Democrats have plenty of voters to elect anyone they want, assuming that Democrats get off their asses and actually vote in enough numbers to swamp out the inevitable meddling. Their recent embrace of weed legalization is a positive step toward getting a lot of otherwise lethargic young voters to the polls.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the devil weed saved democracy??
Lots of agreement here.
1. As a normative matter, of values, many of our fellow citizens are lost to us. Working-class voters – as a press term – are often a euphemism for deplorable voters (around half of Trump’s total ’16 vote, as Clinton accurately predicted before 11.8.16). The deplorables are implacably racist – they’re now unacculturated from the liberal democratic tradition, and they’re not – as calling them implacable implies – coming back into that tradition.
2. As a positive matter, of numbers, I think Trump and his team are kidding themselves about how many non-college whites are deplorables. That’s why I think Brownstein (citing Greenberg) has the right take: the Trump campaign will find that they will excite the deplorables, but only to learn that some women they expect to be deplorables won’t turn out that way (when they vote).
Brownstein is right that no one outside Trump’s target demographic will ever vote for him (“In both parties, most strategists I’ve spoken with agree that Trump’s bellicose attacks on the congresswomen will harden the opposition he faces among the groups most accepting of America’s changing identity: young people, minorities, and college-educated white voters, especially women”).
3. That leaves us with why Trump is trying so hard when, in the end, he won’t have enough deplorables for a winning margin. He no doubt feels the way he speaks, and that’s part of it. Regardless of the electoral consequences, he does feel about people of color the way he speaks about them. He may also (as noted above) over-estimate the audience for his attacks.
4. Yet, we can see now that – as you observe – a truly fanatical horde, amounting even to half his total vote, would foment chaos and disorder across the country after a Trump defeat, spreading lies that he won, disrupting vote certifications, trying to persuade red states on the losing side to refuse to accept the result, etc. No autocrat wants to leave power, for fear at last coming to justice for the consequences of his autocracy.
Trump knows this, close up – he’s reviled even in his home city and state. (Especially reviled, truly, as they’ve known him for so long, and to know him is to hold him in contempt.)
5. It would be ironic, but welcome, if weed saved this democracy. If along comes a referendum that by consequence preserves American liberty, it’s a welcome referendum.
6. I’d readily support Biden against Trump, but he is not my first choice. Democrats, of whom I am not one, often worry too much about electability. Their nominee will be formidable in the fall. America will see a strong person fighting to preserve and improve what’s best in our country.
I’m a Harris supporter and donor, and in her case especially, I believe that she is right for America. (Policy disagreements with libertarians mean far less in this time than agreement on fundamental rights.)
One may also be confident that she would be seen rightly by a majority of our fellow citizens as both good for America and also as Trump’s better in every discernible way.