Over 70 million people voted for Trump. I’m not sure what makes you think that most of them have nothing to complain about. There is no doubt that the nature of manufacturing has changed massively. Immigration is the scapegoat for many; offshoring for others (used to be a more popular one among dems than repubs before Trumpism began eating into the free market emphasis of republicanism); technological changes are the true culprit, but that’s not a very interesting scapegoat. Coal is going to disappear as a primary energy source. Only question is when. That amounts to a disappearing culture for people from PA to WV to points further south and west.

Those things are all real, and such changes in how people earn and live have always been traumatic. Take it a little further, and you have the reality that Biden fared materially worse than Hillary with non-white voters in many parts of the country.

This is a link of a piece that attempted to survey and group the various sorts of Trump voters in ‘16, which didn’t remain static four years later. No doubt there is a cohort of Trump voters who fit your description. It’s an oversimplification to claim that voters generally fit into nice, neat, pat categories in the first place, and even trying to separate them into groups, there’s no offhanded, easy way to quantify them.

You described the kind of stereotypical Trump voter that tends to piss off anti-Trumpies the most, and so it’s tempting to make them all fit that generalization. Trumpies do it too - they like to make all policies they don’t like along with their supporters “socialist”, when even those describing themselves that way aren’t, using the dictionary definition. Or all teachers are teaching crt based on one objectionable lesson plan in Great Neck or someplace.

There’s too much generalizing and stereotyping going on in general. I don’t know where any of us thinks that’s going to lead, and I think there are some seriously frightening possibilities.



[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 11/21/2021 10:56AM]