The correlates of Trumpism: early mortality, lack of education, unemployment, offshored jobs

[nemomen]

@galaxies

i thought defeating TPP was your prime objective? Is that not the case? Thinking rationally, which of the current candidates is most likely to accomplish this goal?

Thinking rationally and supporting Trump are mutually exclusive - he is the Republican id, the end result of decades of conservative anti-intellectualism.

If you were to try to think things through, the first goal is to find someone who would be able do all the things a president is supposed to do. After that the goal is to find someone whose policy positions are the least bad fit. Thinking rationally, you would consider all their policy positions and weigh them against one another. TPP is bad. Levying tariffs on China and starting a trade war, worse. Advocating being the war crime president, instant disqualification, and that’s but one out of a plethora of instant disqualifications. But those are policy matters. Before you worry about policy, you need to consider if it would be reasonable to put the candidate in a potion of great responsibility. Trump is an irresponsible, childish, delusional, narcissist totally unfit to serve in office ethically, emotionally, intellectually, temperamentally, in terms of practical experience, and in most other senses. This is the thing to worry about before hand-wringing about TPP.

For what it’s worth, if college educated voters support him, this is an indictment of the American university system’s sad descent into becoming glorified trade schools.

[milliefink]

@jsroberts

I’ll let them know.

Cool beans! And if you actually do know them, I’ll hope that if their response is, “But that would distract from the point it makes about classism and the growing wealth gap! (etc.)” you’ll set them straight about how exclusionarily white they’re being.

(exclusionarily is a word, isn’t it? sure, it is.)

@Max_Blancke

I do not see how wanting these things for everyone willing to make the effort is impossible. What could be possibly wrong with Black people having steady, permanent employment? Do Black parents not teach their kids about saving money? All of these things are reasonable middle class expectations.

Sure, but that’s not what your comment was about. It nostalgically described a society where nice things used to be true for ordinary people, without acknowledging that the ordinary people who enjoyed them were overwhelmingly middle-class white people.

@Max_Blancke

They are not racially exclusive. If you actually believe that there have never been opportunities for Black families to live middle class lives, I think you might be misinformed.

I never said there hasn’t been a (tiny) black middle class. What I’m pointing out (along with the common white assumption that “the norm” is actually a white middle-class norm) is how much more extremely difficult it’s always been for black people below it to climb into it.

@nojaboja

I am sure your figures are right on every account BUT we are talking about poor white Trump supporters here. My thesis was that people coming from similar social backgrounds to current Trump supporters, had benefited from investment in public education post WW2 and as a result rather than voting for someone like Trump, while sitting on their sofas watching TV, they went on civil rights marches and were generally more engaged in the democratic protest.

Okay. If you’d acknowledged in the first place that you were talking about white people, and not speaking about the GI Bill as if it applied equally across the races (let alone genders), I wouldn’t have corrected you.

[bobtato]

middle-aged white mortality has been increasing since the 1990s at a rate unseen in the developed world since the collapse of the Soviet Union

…

So, since the 1990s, it’s been increasing at a rate not seen since the 1990s started?

[Jim_Kirk]

Oh, come on, he’ll fix the system so fast it’ll make your head spin!
He knows people!

[milliefink]

And he’s a deal maker. He’ll make tons of fabulous deals!

(Actually, that reach-across-the-aisle approach sounds kind of like Obama…)

[AnonyMouse]

‘Their dignity’ is as defined by a system that screws them - that is, we’re back to square dumb again.

[AnonyMouse]

Every value you cite puts the cart before the horse.

[nojaboja]

The article is about white Trump voters

[gatto]

@galaxies

If anyone cares, Trump also wins the votes of the majority of ‘college educated’ and ‘postgraduate educated’ voters

incorrect.

you’re misinterpreting the statistics on the new hampshire primary you linked to.

in “which best describes your education” trump got 47% of the “highschool or less” demographic. that’s the largest percentage of votes from any education category he received. ( some college: 39% of that group; college grad: 33% of that group; post-grad 25% of that group. )

the more education a person had the less likely they were to support trump. ( same for cruz; the opposite is true of kasich and rubio. )

in no case did he win the majority – a majority is defined as 50% or more.

it’s quite possible he won because the vote was diluted among so many other candidates. ( the only way we’d know is if there was ranked choice voting, or polling. )

[JonS]

Sure, but look at the options.

[nemomen]

@nemomen

he also has the favored republican candidate of muslim voters

He has the support of most of the twelve Muslim Republicans in the US. I guess that’s notable, though if you are a Muslim and have a choice between an outspoken Christian theocrat who engages in vitriolic Muslim-bashing, and the other guy who seems to have become conveniently religious last year who’s also a vitriolic Muslim-basher, I can see why they might gauge the lesser of two evils as guy who isn’t the theocrat.

[gracchus]

If trying to fix the system is the goal, I’m curious why you wouldn’t recommend choosing Sanders over this life-long grifter. Sanders is also against the TPP and the general neoliberal economic agenda that’s resulted in all these angry people - without the xenophobia, the bullying, the overt appeals to racism, the encouragement of thuggery at his rallies, and the constant lying.

What makes you think he could accomplish anything, anyhow? The man lost money and went bankrupt running casinos because he didn’t do his due diligence and didn’t plan the business properly (hint: if your casino/money-printing machine can’t support the hotel and the restaurants and the rest of the business you and the zero-experience wife you made the manager are spending too much on making them the best and most luxurious - in Atlantic City).

[gracchus]

Yes, Education and age and length of unemployment are more about what determines the response to the system screwing everyone over. People angry with the system who are younger and have a college education who can still see the possibility of a job in the future are more likely to support Sanders. The uneducated and the elderly and those who have given up looking for work are, as always, prime bait for the right-wing populist huckster (who, of course, is himself a classic beneficiary of neoliberal globalist economics).

[Shuck]

@galaxies

Or just to point out the obvious fact that people who have lost the most are most willing to cast their vote for someone who might actually do what he says and fix the system?

Oh, he says he’ll fix everything - but if you look at his actual policy proposals, when he actually has a specific policy proposal, he either immediately contradicts the position, scapegoats some ethnic group (that is not, in any way, responsible for what’s happened to the economy), or spews general nonsense. It’s not even particularly subtle nonsense, either - it’s blatant nonsense. As Donald said of his supporters: “I Love the Poorly Educated!”
The idea that a president is in a position to “fix the system” is itself ignorance of how US politics work.

[hello_friends]

I didn’t get that Drumpf was the favored GOP candidate of Muslim voters when I read @galaxies miscited cite.

He’s mentioned, but as part of a different point entirely about growing Islamophobia.

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 3/2/16) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today released the results of a six-state “Super Tuesday” poll of almost 2000 Muslim voters indicating that almost half of those voters (46 percent) support Hillary Clinton, followed by Bernie Sanders at 25 percent and 11 percent support for Donald Trump.

CAIR’s poll also showed that growing Islamophobia is the top issue for Muslim voters.

[hello_friends]

These data point to the vulnerabilities of the GOP frontrunner in the general election if the GOP takes the plunge and nominates him.

John Cassidy wrote about the GOP’s general election challenge last week.

Trump would be relying heavily on white voters in a general election. Since they still represent close to three-quarters of the electorate, it appears to be mathematically possible for him to win a majority.

Potentially, he could win by increasing turnout in predominantly white areas, winning over Reagan Democrats, and bringing in enough new voters to overcome the unfavorable demographic trends facing the G.O.P.

Arguing along these lines, some analysts have raised the possibility that Trump could sweep the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and also flip a Democratic state in the Upper Midwest, either Wisconsin or Minnesota or both. …

“Don’t laugh,” Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, of the Huffington Post, wrote last month. “Donald Trump could actually win this thing.”

When I put this scenario to [political scientist, Ruy] Teixeira, he sounded dubious. “It is not crazy,” he said, citing the possibility that Trump could flip some blue states, such as Colorado, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. “But I think it would be very hard to pull off.” …

He pointed out that while there are large numbers of conservative, working-class white voters in key battleground states like Florida and Virginia, who could provide a fertile support base for Trump, there are also a lot of African-American, Hispanic, and college-educated white voters, who will have noticed the kinds of things he has been saying over the past eight months.

“I find it just so implausible that we could have this massive white nativist mobilization without also provoking a big mobilization among minority voters,” Teixeira said. “It is kind of magical thinking that you could do one thing and not have the other.”

[Shuck]

Christ, you don’t even need to Photoshop this shit:

[nemomen]

There was a guy dressed as the wall with the phrase “Mexico Will Pay” written on it

Tʜᴇ 86ᴛʜ Lᴇɢɪsʟᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ (86thLegislature)

[CarlMud]

Like many covers, Pink Floyd’s original version of the Wall is better than the Donald Trump version.

[Flossaluzitarin]

See now, Noam Chomsky saying people are being hard put by the ‘neoliberal policies’ of Obama, meaning the things Obama did that ring like something a Bush Administration planned, was hard enough. ‘I vote and I methoxycodone’ lent some credibility to 1/10 of the organic votes and purchased votes going to any D.C. Republican (that and party-run primaries.) You’re suggesting that suicidal behavior comfort zones (Uncle Ruckus et al, 2013) are the ploy at play here, but if that were so maybe I’d hear more about crab traps at Trump events. Which are events where the DA shows up and salespeople for uncredentialed academy split.

What I could really stick weights on bats thinking is that there are employment agreements on merged and acquired firms, with assets that would be mostly in transit holding (currency export control,) turfing things up. Nobody knows the new company name yet, just a little code smell. Then the push between icing my arms and exercise gets touchy and I have to switch to R instead of bats. Swinging my R is expected to be more productive.