The Twain quote about “liars, damned liars, and statistics” comes to mind.
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I don’t know that its even that, not entirely. I mean it is for a fuck load more of them then you’d hope, especially on the nationalism side. And the rest of them certainly do not give two fucks about anyone unlike themselves. I don’t think they are all actively antagonistic to minorities and foreigners. More like passively antagonistic. Like at least some of these people are not interested in fighting for an isolationist White Ethno-state. Even as they don’t think that becoming an isolationist White Ethno-state would be a bad thing. Because either way they’re entrenching their position in an Oligarchy. And hey this isolationist White Ethno-state thing sure is just working so good for that.
And that’s the thing. You’ve got a bunch of people who really truly believe what Trump does. But you’ve also got a bunch of people who don’t neccisarily. But they’re amenable to it. Close enough in their actual beliefs. That Trump looks like a pretty sweet ride to the top. And fuck the consequences.
Its gonna come down to proportion, and how well/long he can hang onto that second set.
IIRC the “white working class” switch to Trump was those few hundred thousand votes in a handful of counties in 3 states that we talk about as being the determining factor in the election.
It wasn’t neccisarily a wholesale shift of the working class. Or even just the white portion of the working class. It was a very small shift among a working class that still mostly voted DNC. In specific regions or cities. And often times among workers in a specific industry. It’s just that some of those specific places it happened, turned out to be absolutely critical for the election. Thanks to that whole electoral college thing.
And on the whole the average Trump voter was far wealthier than both the average Hillary voter. And the general population. They were also older, more likely to be male and white.
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Is there a list somewhere of all the DSA or DSA-endorsed candidates and how well they did? I’m curious as to whether the ones who won in primaries against mainstream candidates did better in the general than the mainstream democratic candidates who won against DSA candidates in the primaries. (I’m sure there are people in both the DNS and the DSA who are doing exactly this kind of postmortem analysis, but I don’t know if either will make the analysis public.)
Which is why the focus on the Trumpist WWC makes me think of this image:
A camel driver, standing next to a dead camel, ferociously berating a single piece of straw.
I don’t have stats for this, but I strongly suspect that most of that shift was not WWC Obama voters shifting to Trump, but was instead working class Obama voters of all races returning to non-voting.
Obama-Trump voters do exist, but I think they were a very minor factor. And, yes, small influences matter in close elections, but not as much as bigger influences.
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I dunno that there’s enough detail around to make that determination. But you’re very close from the numbers I’ve seen. The amount of clear Obama-Trump voters is apparently ridiculously small, they are apparently identifiable as individual voters who voted for Obama then voted for Trump. But again small, very regionally restricted and they were only a factor in some very specific circumstance. They’re a subset of a subset of a subset essentially. With the broader “working class shift” being more of a change in the make up of the voting block, than in individuals’ voting habits.
But the key thing there is that in the same places that these things became a factor. There were MUCH larger shortfalls in turnout for key demographics for Hillary (vs Obama). Especially African Americans and Latinos. And its not exactly a people didn’t like Hillary, or Hillary didn’t excite people issue either. Because she drove huge turn outs in other places. And ended up receiving more individual votes than any candidate ever. Its specific to these certain isolated districts, and particular states where it narrowly flipped.
Apparently the really key spots turn out was being handled by this borderline scam level online demographic and turn out company that was rolled out of the tech end of Obama’s campaign. And they fucked up entirely providing info that lead the Campaign to focus on the wrong states. Stop campaigning in places She really needed to keep an eye on. Or pushing turn out efforts into the wrong districts; where it wasn’t needed at the expense of districts that turned out to badly need those resources.
Taken together with voter suppression and a couple of other key fuck ups. More votes were “lost” to people not voting at all, than to people or groups switching.
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I’m pretty sure it goes race then gender.
If you mean what matters most to hateful bigots, gender is the (slightly) bigger factor IMO.
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I mean in terms of the driving force behind voting divisions - the biggest are between white and non-white, then between gender divisions, and then class. A Trump voter is a white man with a large personal income who is at the end of their career and is undereducated for their position.
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And living in a bubble world that is hard to reach with any contrary view or inconvenient facts.
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Yup, mea culpa.
-12 to +54pt swing by race. 66pts.
-4 to +19pt swing by gender. 23pts.
+21 to -1pts for income. 22pts.
+20 to +0pts for college. 20pts.
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As far as you are aware you don’t have a wife who is very frustrated at their heinously incompetent manager who is a white male Trump voter whose background is in welding running an department that is coding the sample management and inventory software (and who happens to be married to the daughter of a VP in the company). I get reminded of this demographic breakdown quite a bit.
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Exactly. I was replying to the idea Trump/Republican supporters might sing a different tune if cost of living and unemployment soared.
It’s less political support for a party and more an identity for them now. Hopefully the establishment/centerist Dems have finally got it through their skulls that chasing “moderate” Republican voters is a losing move, and they start working to inspire new and non-voters to as their support instead.
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I’m white, and it hasn’t fucking helped me in my life. Just sayin’.
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History seems to back that up. Non-white men got the vote before women, anti-discrimination laws based on race were enacted before the ones protecting gender, America was ready for a black president before a female one, etc.
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But, and this is the point, it probably has never hurt or hindered you.
OTOH, the (outgoing) Senate has 20+ women and only 3 African-Americans.
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You might want to ask some Australians if the Crown holds genuine power.
The Crown doesn’t appear to have any power right up until the point where it shows it. And what place does the House of Lords have in a modern democracy?
We still live with the vestiges of feudalism in the UK, even if you don’t see them in Canada.
They are here in Canada too. What we call our Senate is a lot more like the House of Lords than like the American Senate. Still, I think real power lies in the people’s expectations of how their government will run. While I think the Governor General of Canada could create a lot of chaos by attempting to dismiss the prime minister, I think the ultimate result wouldn’t affirm the power of the crown (unless it also reflected the opinion of a very sizable majority of the population).
At any rate, however I protest you (and others) are right. Canada, the UK, Australia and many other places are constitutional monarchies, not republics. But then I’d probably argue they aren’t really democracies. Having a vote every four years doesn’t mean much if the people who you vote for don’t actually get to run the country.
If we examine who has power practically it is a democracy and a republic because the monarch is an empty vessel. If we examine who has ultimate power legally it is not a republic but it is also a monarchy, not a democracy - even if it suits the monarch’s fancy to delegate authority to parliament.
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I entirely agree. I was making the point that my gender has, though. I’m well aware of the privilege that I have being white and am not seeking to at all deny that. I’m also well aware how my gender shapes my opportunities in this world, and that has shaped my life, too. It shapes how people here respond to me on a regular basis.
How all this functions and operates is complicated, and we can’t ignore one factor or the other. It’s not a hierarchy in and of itself, as much as it is intersections of institutional structures that work together in order to form those hierarchies, with white, rich, Christian men in America sitting at the top, with the rest of us in some sort of configuration below that. I’m aware that I’m somewhere in the middle of all that mess, with people who have far less privilege than I do. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle, too. I probably fail at times, but I work hard to acknowledge the struggles of others. I hope that people point out (kindly, preferable) when I do fail. I’d also like to think that people see me too, and understand that I struggle as well.
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Ah! Yeah, I missed that. Oops. 
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