Posted on 12/13/2016 10:24:07 AM PST by Signalman
There is no simple answer about what happened last Tuesday. There are thousands of pieces of information needed by those of us who analyze politics before we can be more certain of the "why."
I have never analyzed a presidential election as much as I did the Trump-Clinton race of 2016.
Also, I have never been so wrong.
I'm not an outlier. Most, if not all, of the analysts from both parties and those nonaligned analysts I admire also got it wrong. So where did we go wrong? One or two trends are beginning to emerge.
The first hints came election night from North Carolina. I had followed North Carolina closely for months. Not only was it an important swing state, one I was quite familiar with — having done 15 campaigns in the Tar Heel State — but, like its neighbor, Virginia, it was poised to be the next southern state to go from red to blue.
President Obama carried North Carolina once and came very close to doing so in his re-election campaign. It's urban centers, specifically Raleigh, Charlotte and Durham, have grown dramatically. Its suburbs have attracted tens of thousands of northerners. And economic drivers like the Research Triangle have drawn high tech, pharmaceutical and medical research companies.
Once an agricultural state led by tobacco and a political machine headed by conservative icon Senator Jesse Helms, North Carolina has been changing, perhaps faster than any other state. Yes, it’s still a conservative, pro-military state with huge bases like Fort Bragg. But its urban centers and growing corporate muscle have propelled a growing and diverse economy.
When independent political surveys of a state like North Carolina, (with an average of 700 to 1,000 respondents) are analyzed there are enough respondents from the urban and suburban centers to draw fairly accurate political conclusions. Not so the small rural counties that formed the backbone of the Republican base in the state.
Back to election night 2016: voter turnout was not high. Turnout in North Carolina was 4.6 million in 2016, slightly more than 4.450 million in 2012 and the 4.35 million in 2008. Given the state’s population growth, 2016 turnout was comparatively low. Clinton did as well as President Obama in both his elections in the urban and suburban areas, beating Trump by as many votes as Obama beat McCain or Romney.
It does appear that there was a falloff in black voting but Clinton still beat Trump with over 90 percent of the black vote. That left the state's rural counties to explain why Clinton lost. Turnout in rural North Carolina, with a few exceptions, had not increased over 2004 or 2008, but Trump’s margins over Clinton in most rural counties were much higher than McCain’s or Romney’s over Obama.
The rural counties of the state showed little or no population growth over the past decade and in some cases rural counties lost population. Younger people, especially those who left home for college educations, did not return. Other young voters left for larger counties where good paying jobs were being created.
What rural voters remained were too old to leave home and did not possess the skills to compete for newly created jobs in, for example, the Research Triangle. Along came Donald Trump with his populist anti-trade/illegal immigrant message. It was not hard to convince these voters that trade deals cut by Democrats and establishment Republicans was a prime reason their jobs were going overseas.
What jobs remained, according to Trump, were being taken by low-wage illegal immigrants. This wasn't a tough sell. For Hillary Clinton, both arguments cost her dearly. Not only had her husband supported deals like NAFTA, but also she and her party were now leading the fight to let illegal workers stay in the U.S.
In this year’s political climate, the Democrats were at an extreme disadvantage. Not only were they part of the establishment that rural North Carolina voters detested, but it appeared that Clinton and the Democrats refused to even acknowledge the problem. Clinton had no plan to help these voters and Donald Trump did, or at least appeared to.
Alone, these rural counties were barely a blip on pollsters’ screens, but together, voting to give one candidate lopsided margins, they became an important voting bloc. The Democrats either missed them or considered them too few to matter.
Democrats, for years the champions of voters like those in rural North Carolina who needed some government help, were now getting huge contributions from Wall Street bankers who were the beneficiaries of trade deals, and in the process were getting obscenely rich.
In the 1990's The Democratic Party began to cozy up to their long-time enemies: Wall Street Bankers. They took their money and relaxed their regulations until the Great Recession forced the Democrats via Dodd-Frank to re-regulate the banks. By then it was too late. Rural voters believed the Democrats traded millions in campaign cash at their expense. Along came a guy named Trump to give these voters a political voice.
On Tuesday, that voice came back to haunt the Democrats.
Bob Beckel is a political analyst for CNN; he was campaign manager for Walter Mondale in 1984.
They also were wrong that siding with fraudulently documented foreigners against the citizens and the rule of law was popular.
Not so much forgot about Rural America as much as openly declared (political) war upon Rural America.
I always liked Beckel on Fox’s The Five. Better than Whining Juan.
Yup. They forgot the every day guy who works every day, raises his family and pays his taxes. Most of the people who do that are White.
More than that, Democrats forgot about COMMON SENSE.
“They also were wrong that siding with fraudulently documented foreigners against the citizens and the rule of law was popular.”
To be completely fair to the leftist freaks, it was VERY popular in November 2008.
If Beckel wrote this, which is not certain, then there are times he is not inebriated.
Or maybe he only gets drunk when he’s appearing on tv.
Beckel who said, on election day, there was a 1-2 percent chance of Trump winning the election admits he was wrong.
___________________________________________________________
Nope. He’s trying to invent excuses as to why he wasn’t right. Big difference.
The DNC is and has been wholly owned by an ideology hostile to the very existence of a sovereign US of A and that does everything possible to harm, diminish and eventually destroy us.
Unless and until the degenerate, thumb-sucking, mouth-breeding snot-gobblers can own up to that, they’ll be wrong in every call they make because they’ll have no clue as to what cause to attach the effect.
That was Frumpy, I mean Frum.
openly declared (political) war upon Rural America.
That they did....and they sneered at Rural America....and still do.
Andif the GOP forgts about stopping excessive and illegal immigration and dos notlive up ti its promise to end unfair trade agreements that give power to liberal elites and then just lowers taxes on the wealthy and just takes care of the Chamber of Commerce, then these rural voters are not going to be so eager to come out and vote for the Republican again.
That is how I described the election to some teenagers. The Hunger Games election, where they pit us against each other while they fix the contest so they always win. The kids got it. They started pointing out the money and freaks on the left. Now, I've reminded them about the CW that comes in sequels and to prepare for it.
Sometimes, I called it the Revenge of the Nerds election. All of us quiet people - tired of being looked down upon and bullied to fit into their world- voted in mass. To the Dems we say "You're jocks. Go live in the gym."
Actually, they did not forget about us they have a name for us “ a basket of deplorables” and they misunderestimated our numbers.
And with those two resume enhancers, especially the stellar performance of one Walter Mondale in 1984 who was soundly trounced in perhaps the largest landslide victory in American politics, why would anyone listen to him on election night and now?
Another benefit from Trump's election is to see these idiots grovel and try to twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain how they were so right before they were so wrong.
Beckel was a loser before and now he is even a bigger loser. My question is this. Why is this guy and all the other pundits and talking heads who got it so wrong, still on TV?
Beckel and other "experts" are the source for many of the "fake news" that the media spews out.
USDA Secretary Justifies Agenda 21, Says Rural America “Less and Less Relevant”
Last week Tom Vilsack, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), speaking at a forum sponsored by Farm Journal, claimed that rural America has become “less and less relevant.” Vilsack went on to say that “It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America. It’s time for a different thought process here, in my view.” Vilsack asserts that with more and more Americans moving into urbanized city-centers, the farming communities in rural areas are not necessary in order to supply the US with food and other necessities. He believes that these areas of land would be better served without having to direct energy and resources to them.
In fact, Vilsack stated that a farming policy that facilitated the reality of “rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it.”
Don't think the Nature Conservancy is done with america.
Too many well meaning oldsters are giving their land to the new world order for safe keeping - they don't know the truth - fake news reigns supreme.
https://www.occupycorporatism.com/usda-secretary-justifies-agenda-21-says-rural-america-less-and-less-relevant/
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