I understand why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump. Those are not the people this letter is addressed to. It is addressed to a specific group of people who voted for Trump. With this group I frankly and freely admit I do not understand why they voted for him. I'll lay out the reasons why I'm confused below. But before I do that I want to be clear about exactly what group I am talking about.
Hillary Clinton lost a number of "rust belt" states. The margins were extremely thin. As of late yesterday (Thursday, November 10), the combined Trump lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan was just over a hundred thousand votes. If Clinton had carried those three states she would now be the President elect. Instead she is behind in all three and two of them have been called for Trump. Mr.Trump did very well in these states with white men without college degrees, the classic "blue collar" demographic.
It is clear, at lest if you can trust reporting on the subject, that these people switched their votes because they felt abandoned by Clinton and that they decided Trump was their guy. That's the part I don't understand. The rest of this post is about the sources of my confusion.
If you have read my posts you know I often start with a historical perspective. I'm going to run true to form once more. From the '30s through the '70s blue collar workers in what is now nicknamed the "rust belt" were solidly in the Democratic camp. In the '60s and '70s you could point to a large number of Democratic politicians who styled themselves as champions of the blue collar cause.
A typical example was Hubert Humphrey, who ran for President and was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1968. In spite of the loss Humphrey continued to champion the cause of "labor". He included blue collar workers in his "labor" category but also extended it to include the lower echelons of the white collar workforce. And the thinking was that what was good for blue collar workers would also benefit white collar workers so the primary focus was on blue collar workers.
This played out as strong support for the labor union movement and for worker's rights. Democrats championed a forty hour work week, paid sick leave, a minimum wage, and many other initiatives designed to improve the lot of the ordinary working man. Labor returned the favor by voting for Democrats and labor unions provided a lot of the money and manpower necessary to run an effective campaign. But something big happened in 1980.
A large number of these people voted for Ronald Reagan, the Republican. He basically said "you are being taken for a ride and I will take better care of you". They bought that argument. But the first thing Reagan did was destroy the Air Traffic Controller's Union. This was not an isolated incident. His administration was uniformly on the side of management and firmly opposed to labor, organized or otherwise. In short, he did the opposite of taking care of blue collar workers. But substantial numbers stuck with him and have stuck with the Republican party since.
At one level the situation couldn't be simpler. You either empower labor or you empower management. If you empower labor they will see improved wages, benefits, working conditions, etc. If you empower management you will see depressed wages (or wages growing more slowly than they otherwise would), downward pressure on benefits, poorer working conditions, etc. Republicans have consistently sided with management and the results are now obvious. The standard of living and the general plight of working men is much diminished compared to what it was in the '60s and '70s. And this is just what you would expect.
And if we examine the period that followed the '80 election we see Democrat after Democrat who had been a traditional champion of labor lose elections to Republicans. The Democratic party abandoned their aggressively pro labor stance because being pro labor did not win elections. Instead we got Bill Clinton and "triangulation".
Clinton was a southerner and southerners have historically not been pro labor. But what triangulation was all about was to try to find a common ground between traditional Democratic positions and traditional Republican positions and see if something that would do some good could get enacted into law. So we saw welfare reform and criminal justice reform and NAFTA and "Don't ask - Don't tell". All of these programs were a mix of Democratic and Republican ideas. People now have a lot of bad things to say about all of these. But what they are mostly unhappy about are the Republican components. Clinton argued at the time that "he got the best deal he could under the circumstances" and there is plenty of evidence to support this position.
So why did he get such poor deals? Because Republicans kept winning elections. Clinton faced both a Republican House and a Republican Senate for much of the time he was in office. And one reason Republicans won elections then and now is that they were able to pick up significant support from blue collar workers. But Republicans never advanced a single piece of pro labor legislation or implemented a single pro labor policy during this entire time. Instead they systematically championed the side of management. And it is not surprising that as a result the economic prospects of the middle class, and particularly the blue collar component of the middle class, has stagnated.
Bill Clinton saw record numbers of jobs created and substantial increases in the take home pay of blue collar workers. In spite of this, Al Gore, his vice president and a fellow southerner, and someone who would be much more pro labor than Bush, lost in 2000. If blue collar workers had been solidly behind him then he would have won easily.
I won't re-litigate the Bush administration, except to note that he maintained the Republican tradition of being pro management and anti labor. And this stance was not enough to cost him the election in '04. Republicans became unpopular shortly thereafter but for other reasons. And Obama was able to bring enough blue collar voters back into the fold to win in '08 and 12. But Democrats did badly in '10 and '14 and an important reason for their losses can be traced to lackluster at best support from blue collar workers.
And, if anything, Republicans have amped up their attack on labor during the Obama years. They have successfully blocked efforts to increase the minimum wage at the federal level. They have blocked efforts to reign in health care costs. Not a single Republican voted for the "stimulus" in spite of the fact that a lot of money went into the pockets of blue collar workers in Republican districts. In fact, they engaged in a systematic deception. They held dozens of public events where they took credit for bringing Federal money into their districts. In fact, they had done the exact opposite. The money was from the "stimulus" bill that they had voted against but they were successful in hiding that fact.
Meanwhile they attacked spending initiatives that benefit blue collar workers and protected tax loop holes that advantaged large corporations and wealthy individuals. The most egregious example of this was the bailout of the auto industry. It garnered no Republican support. And, while it certainly helped a lot of senior executives, investors, etc., it also meant a lot of blue collar jobs in the rust belt were preserved. They also attacked efforts to strengthen the hand of labor when it was dealing with management. And there was certainly no outcry from the Republican side of the aisle to lock up fat cat bankers after the crash.
Now let me move from the general to the specific. And the "specific" in this case is Flint Michigan, a classic rust belt city that has been hit hard. A Republican governor single handedly caused the lead poisoning crisis in Flint Michigan. Yet for the most part he was successful in deflecting blame to nearly everywhere else. Neither the governor nor the Republican controlled state legislature has stepped up to make good the damage the governor caused. Instead, they have consistently obstructed efforts to make permanent fixes. Flint is still being hung out to dry. And there are things the Federal Government could do. But the Republicans have consistently obstructed and, in many cases, completely blocked efforts there too.
And the "fix" in Flint would create lots of "shovel ready" jobs for blue collar workers. No high tech solution is necessary. The work can not be outsourced. So something that should be done, something that is a good thing, something that would improve the lot of blue collar workers and is strongly supported by Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular, is being blocked by Republicans.
And the Flint situation is the specific example that illustrates the general problem. It is common knowledge that our infrastructure is in bad shape. The Flint problem is an infrastructure problem. President Obama has made proposal after proposal to invest in repairing and modernizing our infrastructure. These proposals have broad and enthusiastic support from Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular. They are very popular with the public in general and blue collar workers in particular. And moving ahead aggressively would create large numbers of good blue collar jobs. And all of them have been blocked over and over by Republicans.
This is the disconnect I see and which I just can't understand.
Hillary got involved with the Flint crisis and devoted significant effort to trying to improve things. Trump did one "drive by" appearance and that was that. More broadly, Hillary started her campaign with an extensive listening tour. And she listened. And based on what she heard she developed specific plans to help. Trump made vague promises and left it at that. And then there's Trumps business record with blue collar workers. He repeatedly stiffed them as he did with small businesses. And he was happy to buy his suits and other "Trump" merchandise from around the world. He certainly made no effort to understand what was going on in the lives of these people so his plans were little more than slogans.
And what were the slogans? He promised to reopen the factories and coal mines. Basically he promised to roll the clock back many decades to the good old days. But what if he actually tries to make good on these promises? The big rust belt job killer has not been trade policy. It has been a combination of a tilt toward management, allowing them to cut salaries and benefits, and automation.
Fifty years ago it took a lot of man hours to make a car. So making a million cars produced a lot of jobs. Now manufacturing is heavily automated and it takes far fewer man hours to make a car. And so making the same million cars produces far fewer jobs. And those jobs have much poorer wages and benefits associated with them than they did in the good old days. Domestic industrial production has actually grown substantially in the last decade and looks to continue growing. But automation means it will not employ people in the numbers it used to.
The same is true of coal. The big killer of coal jobs has been fracking. Fracked natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than coal. Is Trump going to reduce the production of fracked natural gas? Well, actually no. Instead he plans to increase production. So his promises to coal miners are every bit as empty as the ones he has made to blue collar workers in the rust belt. Yet these promises have been enough to convince blue collar workers that Trump is their man.
Finally, there is a wide spread belief that blue collar workers are forgotten and invisible when it comes to Democrats in general and Clinton in particular. Based on their behavior blue collar workers want empty promises repeated frequently in stump speeches. Democrats, on the other hand, have made proposal after proposal that shows that they have thought hard about the plight of these people and are willing to roll their sleeves up and dig in. But that has not resulted in many of these people coming home to the Democratic party and abandoning Republicans. This has deprived Democrats of the clout necessary to get their proposals enacted into law. That's extremely frustrating. But is it really the fault of Democrats?
What have Republicans offered up in the Obama era? Gridlock. They decided that they would oppose everything Obama approved of, even if they originally proposed it. The classic example is Obamacare. It started out as a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation. It then morphed into Romney-care under the sponsorship of the 2012 Republican candidate for President while he was the governor of Massachusetts. Whatever flaws it has, many of them can be traced to its Republican roots. Obamacare differs little from Romney-care. It was a good idea when Romney, a Republican, implemented it. It was a bad idea when Obama, a Democrat, implemented it. But it is the same program.
I bring Obamacare up solely to explain how Republicans operate. It looks like something similar is about to play out. Trump has proposed a massive infrastructure program. Obama has routinely proposed this sort of thing each year. Republicans have made sure it goes nowhere. Both Clinton and Trump have made it part of their agenda. Trump's plan may go through. Why? Because it is a Republican initiative. And then again it may not. There is significant resistance from factions within the Republican party. They may end up being successful in blocking it and we have no idea at this time how serious Trump is about the whole thing in the first place.
Obama was fairly successful in his first two years in office when Democrats controlled both chambers of the legislature. But the Republicans' "just say no" strategy was successful enough that he was only able to get a few things done. Then voters rewarded Republican obstructionism by tossing many Democrats out of office in the 2010 election. The Republicans then shut down the government, put the full faith and credit of the government into question, and generally behaved irresponsibly. Were they punished for this irresponsibility at the polls? No!
The results of this election allow us to make some calls. Divisiveness won. Irresponsibility won. Ignorance won. Bad behavior won. Macho won. Secrecy won. White privilege won. Republicans who publicly opposed Trump and were up for re-election lost. So the Republican party now owns the campaign that Trump ran. And Trump owns the Republican party. It is generally believed that a lot of Republicans would have lost without the boost they got from the Trump's win.
There are many people who believe that Trump is going to pivot and behave quite differently now that he will soon be President. There are many people that believe that what Trump said on the campaign trail was standard political rhetoric and he will govern responsibly and effectively. We'll see. If he can actually deliver increased employment and increased income to blue collar workers I and many others of his fiercest opponents will be impressed. Certainly that's what the blue collar workers who voted for him expect to see happen.
And he has made many promises to many others on foreign policy, law and order, immigration, etc. It will help that, if we go by the experience of the George W. Bush administration, he will get the active co-operation of Republicans in congress. Campaigns, especially campaigns in which so many promises have been made, generate mandates and expectations. I and many people like me believe that the agenda Trump laid out in his campaign is a bad one. We also frankly do not believe he can actually deliver on most of it.
He will be able to wipe out most of Obama's achievements. Executive orders can be reversed. Republicans have railed against numerous Obama initiatives for years. In January they will have all the power and control they need to do what they have so frequently and vociferously promised to do. It looks like the Democrats are in no position to stop them. At best they can slow them down. I think doing this is a bad idea but my side lost. And I think that many of the blue collar workers who voted for Trump will find that they are hurt badly by the absence of the very programs Republicans have been so successful at demonizing. We'll see.
And then there is the agenda that is uniquely Trump's, the agenda that goes beyond just "roll this or that Obama initiative back". We'll all get to see how that works out too. Given the behavior of Republicans during the Obama administration and the dramatic differences between the agendas of the two candidates the Democrats are under no obligation to provide any assistance at all. Trump and his Republican colleagues are on their own when it comes to delivering results. The blue collar workers who voted for Trump think they will end up better off or at least no worse off than they are now. I think they will quickly find themselves far worse off. Maybe I'm wrong and they're right. Either way, we'll see.
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