Just in case there are some people here who are still clinging to the totally illusory notion that the U.S. is now anything but an almost completely right-wing society…geographically if in no other way.
From NPR, that (former?) bastion of center/left propaganda.
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The moral of this story for those leftinesses who might still believe that they live in the real America and that the flyover bunch are just some afterthought? Not geographically they aren’t, because the old “location, location, location” meme holds true on any number of levels. Those that populate sheer square mileage have power, too, no matter what the actual population densities may be. They have the real estate, and without that real estate, blue U.S. is just a few fairly isolated urban areas surrounded by…bet on it…masses of armed and mostly hostile citizens.
Hostile to you.
Personally.
For me, the “Counties that voted more Republican” part of the third map is the real story here. The dark grey areas. “Counties that voted more Republican than in 2012.” That’s where the switch got flipped.
Careful where you travel and how you act, my little leftiness friends.
You been rejected.
I am reminded of the section in the Peter and the Wolf story where the duck is sheltered from the cat because the cat doesn’t like to swim. But…as winter comes, encroaching ice is gradually making the duck’s safety boundaries smaller and smaller.
Look at the blue “safety” areas in the first and second maps. Red-ice winter is fast approaching.
Where’s our Peter when we most need him?
And who is he/she going to be?
Stay tuned.
It’s just gonna get more….Interesting.
May you be born into interesting times.” – An ancient Chinese curse.
And here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
“Interested” like a motherfucker!!!
Interested in simple survival.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
was going to win back as early as March of this year?
It was simple.
I went for a week-long, relatively slow-driving trip through a series of areas that were going to flip Republican or vote more Republican. (Rural central NJ, rural eastern PA, Rural southern/western tier NY right on up to Rochester, etc.) I didn’t consciously know it at the time, but you could smell the red in the air if you had a good nose. It was everywhere…a sullen red haze rising from the beings of almost everybody I met who wasn’t either a minority member and/or an educated class/middle class/upper middle class member.
We’ve lost ’em, leftinesses. They’re sick of being flown over, sick of being dissed (“Those poor, poor deplorables!!! Why don’t they just…go extinct!!!”), really sick of scuffling for a living and (quite accurately) they blame the bipartisan, multinational-controlled Permanent Government for their problems.
Of course…they probably got out of the frying pan only to land in the fire, but that’s how things go sometimes. When it gets too hot to stay, you jump on the first passing breeze. Too late, they’ll realize it was Trump passing wind, but meanwhile it’s gonna be a hot, smelly time in the old town this next couple or few years.
Watch.
AG
P.S. And…please don’t try to pass off the old neoliberal left as anything other than a broken relic of a failed idea.
Please!!!
Let ’em open a museum or something.
Anything other than remain in power.
PLEASE!!!
Yea – you didn’t know shit.
You got lucky – unless you knew Comey would send a letter 10 days out from the general election.
I have little tolerance for those who claim certainty.
Because its nothing but ignorance and hubris.
100K votes in WI, MI and Pa and she wins.
So yea – you still don’t know what you are talking about.
Bullshit.
I treated Trump as an active and serious threat from the very first Republican debate and I opposed HRC all the way down the line as a very flawed candidate. Meanwhile, you and the other DNC stooges were busy jerking off to the tune of “Happy days are here again, we’e gonna take the Senate and the presidency!!!”
I wasn’t lucky, I was just observant.
I posted something here about the early reports from Sanders supporters that they were being hustled by HRC/DNC Dems and got mocking replies in return.
“OH yeah!!! That guy’s making vids from his car!!! What does he know”
Blind as bats you were.
Go hustle somebody else.
I called it.
AG
P.S. It’s attitudes like this that brought us an entirely Trumped federal government, and here y’all are, running the same stupid line.
The best definition of insanity? Repeating the same actions even when they don’t work.
Wake the fuck up.
If i cared about you AG i would go back and pointed out all the “predictions” you made that you choose to ignore.
Your “prediction” wasnt as clear as you like to think it was, and you werent very sure about it either.
Ofcourse its useless, you are a blowhard, and you wont care about when you were wrong, just like trump. Anyone with their eyes open knows that already.
Your significance is equal to the predicting squid.
Lets instead listen to the people with actual insights how to proceed, instead of perving to some guy wanking in his pink mirror.
Yes, HRC is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Let’s listen to her.
Whats with hillary?
She is insignificant now, like bernie was insignificant after hillary was the nominee.
But somehow in your mind, and a lot of people, there was this voice, hillary is evil, hillary is evil, hillary is evil.Where did that voice come from, and why was it loud enough, louder than the voice talking to you about the alternative to hillary? Was the disappointment that our preferred nominee, yes i wanted bernie too, was chosen? Was it a concious decision to reject hillary, and let donald win? i doubt it.
Whats with people and their clinging to their feelings, rather than to consider the changed situation?
Like i predicted, the left will lose because it lacks coherence, and it looks like there will be much more of that coming.
And whats with the butthurt Voice?
I wasnt talking about you. Is it to you so tribal? Is it either you are with us, or you are against?
Did i insult your tribe and you need to defend against the evil hillary lovers? they are bad, because you know, hillary is bad.
I dont like hillary, i preferred bernie. But i am not US, so i am nor democrat, i am not republican, i am not independent. I am an outsider. So fuck your tribe, and fuck all other tribes, i dont care for them, unless it has some significance to a point you are trying to make, at which you fail so often.
So, pull hour head out of your ass, thats what painful, jamming it up there further wont relieve the pain.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
I’m in between the two of you on this spat. AG consistently over-rated Trump’s appeal. To have been correct, Trump would have had to garnered far more votes than Mitt did and more than GWB in ’04 due to inflation (the EV population in ’16 being larger by more than 20 million than it was in ’04.) Considering EV population inflation, Trump didn’t even do as well as McCain/Palin. Hardly a demonstration of Trump’s awesomeness.
OTOH, you projected a Hillary win by 10 points. Which I read in real time as an underestimate of Trump’s appeal and mostly an overestimate of Hillary’s. In the abstract, the handicap of a white woman in comparison with a black man should be a wash. But in the context of this particular white woman v. this particular black man there was a confounding variable.
At a basic level, an ordinary person could view Obama as having made his name and reputation on his own and Hillary was coasting on her legacy from Bill. And even if one had peered behind the veil of money and power that catapulted both candidates to the national stage and nomination, there was still a disparity. The big money and power in ’08 was evenly split between the two, but Obama bested her on money from little people and she lost that round. This time, Hillary had it all and more. The entire institutional DP with her and it was used to put a big thumb through many devious means on the scale in her favor. The media, the allegedly non-partisan non-profits (on the PP mission and at best, HRC and Bernie were equally solid and under that scenario that’s should have been the official stance of PP), and celebrity culture.
It may come as a shock to “New Democrats” that “up by one’s own bootstraps” is more than a rightwing slogan for most ordinary people. They may be wrong to believe that personal merit is how people succeed in this country, but they do see just enough of that to reinforce that belief and have higher regard for those that appear to exemplify that. It’s not the only criteria that people use in deciding between two candidates, but when elections are won and lost by such narrow margins, the whole “It’s my turn” schtick cost the DP voters. People could relate to Bernie because he did have to make his own way in the world and did sell out in any measurable way to those with power and money. People respect that even when they disagree with everything else about a person.
Be careful with those maps, Arthur. You know how data can lie. Those maps aren’t weighted for population, only for the percentage that they went R. If they were truly representative, they’d all be a shade of purple, reflecting the actual percentage of how many D, R, or Other votes were cast.
This is a relatively simplified version of what I’m talking about.
The more that people realize that, i.e. how much we’re all interconnected and not as polarized as media outlets on all sides would have us believe, is when we can have real conversations about what to do next.
Did you read my post?
Location, location, location!!!
Geography matters!!
You write:
“The more that people realize that, i.e. how much we’re all interconnected and not as polarized as media outlets on all sides would have us believe, is when we can have real conversations about what to do next.”
“We” are as polarized as media outlets on all sides would have us believe. Polarized racially, polarized culturally and polarized economically. Cross</u- polarized. Until a party arises that can <U>depolarize this country to some effective extent, this polarization will continue. If instead of running that lame “deplorables” game that I saw…and still see…here, instead of ceding the white rural/white suburban vote to the RatPublicans, someone needs to make the point that all of us…every one of us who are not part of the .01%.…are being ripped off.
You want to unite the country?
That’s how to do it.
I see no other possible way.
If the Dems don’t do it, what’s left?
RatPub divisiveness.
We see where that goes now, don’t we?
I sincerely hope so…
AG
I read your post. I saw what you said about population density and square mileage, and I call baloney. The US is NOT a geographically right-wing society. Neither is it demographically so. When you say that, you’re perpetuating the myth that this country is hopelessly polarized and there’s absolutely nothing to agree upon.
If those maps you cited bothered to consider population density, then they’d be less in thrall to that narrative and its follow-up: the myth that’s still being pushed which demands we forget our differences and unite for America or some silliness like that.
Extreme polarization is only one interpretation of what some of the election data shows us–and since there’s more rolling in every day that disproves the “mandate” and “polarization” and “landslide” story we’re being fed, I think that interpretation is lazy and unhelpful.
A more responsible representation would be this, distorted for population:
Or, since you’re hung up on location, this one–a map of people instead of counties or states:
Like dat.
I thought Long Island would go to Trump. I was half right. Suffolk County did, but Nassau County didn’t.
Thanks for sparing me the trouble of having to look that up.
If there is one person responsible for this disaster, it is Obama. How he thought that the American people wouldn’t take their revenge for his giving us Obamacare instead of single payer I’ll never know. I have no doubt that if he gave us Medicare for All, Trump would have lost.
And I don’t want to hear any stories about how the Republicans wouldn’t let him do it. The Repubs didn’t want Obamacare either, but couldn’t stop it.
There’s a practical hurdle to Medicare for all. Employer and employee paid health insurance premiums aren’t counted as income for employee payroll taxes or income taxes.
A legacy of WWII wage controls that unions later used to in benefit negotiations.
The employer and employee (no income cap) paid Medicare tax only covers about a third of the cost of the program. The remainder is paid from beneficiary premiums and general tax revenues. Medicaid is wholly paid from general tax revenues — federal and state.
Why is that a hurdle?
Because nobody has made a proposal on how Medicare for All would be funded.
Dedicated employer/employee payroll tax? Is the employee tax included as income as OASDI-HI is?
Employers that provide excellent health insurance benefits could see a reduction in this employee cost item, but employers that don’t would have a steep new cost.
Imagine the furor from people that currently enjoy excellent health insurance benefit from their employers suddenly being told they’re like all the other schmucks and now have Medicare. (And their total tax employee payroll and income tax will cost them more than what they currently pay.) And that they will no longer have priority for top rated medical care facilities that they use unless those currently using low-cost facilities decide not to switch to the higher priced spread.
Not saying it can’t be done (or that it shouldn’t be done), but it’s only an easy sell for those with minimal coverage and unable to afford the deductibles/co-pays, etc.
Why not simply have those under 65 (and I prefer 62) pay the cost as premiums and the retrees continue as before? Surely the premiums would be less than the for-profit premiums and we could allow employers to pay them as negotiated or as the employer wants a sweetener. If the employer pays them then let the employer continue to deduct the premiums.
It’s really a choice between private for-profit insurance and public non-profit insurance. That has to be cheaper unless you are a Republican and think everything government does , business can do cheaper.
It’s getting from here to there that isn’t anywhere close to as easy as you suggest.
It’s both a supply and cost issue. An example. The charge (and actual cost for the provider) for procedure A isn’t the same when it’s performed at county clinic or hospital and when it’s performed at the most desirable local clinic or hospital. Cutting out the 20% that goes to the insurers for those with insurance that allows them to access the “most desirable” doesn’t cover the difference in provider billing/costs. But that’s a smaller problem in comparison to much larger psychological problem for ordinary people that enjoy good employer health insurance benefits. There’s psychic status for those that know they are entitled to the “most desirable” and that they earned that status. For some, it might be the only status they have.
It’s one thing for government to supply a new good or service that people didn’t previously have and in that provision make it for all and an entirely different matter you’re getting nothing and you’re paying some price for “all.” For example, in the south (and it probably wasn’t exclusive to the south) the introduction of Medicare brought needed dollars to providers and needed and previously unaffordable care for seniors. The caveat was that white people only providers couldn’t have any dollars. So, provides and white beneficiaries has a choice — get used to “for all” or pass on the dollars and care. They got used to it.
Health care should be like a government operated utility. Does the job and is affordable for all. Local and state governments operate a public transit and public school option. Some would like to get rid of both, but they’ve operated concurrently with for so long and add so little extra costs for those that exclusively use the private option (because they can afford to and it’s nice and more convenient) that it’s a hard sell. What would you say to a proposal that eliminates public transit by having the government cover all the capital costs and most of the operating costs to give public transit riders a vehicle of their own? Oh, and those that don’t use public transit have to pay more in taxes to provide a means of transport for those that do, there will be more vehicles on their roadways, and some of the former public transit riders could then cruise those nice neighborhoods in the suburbs. The proposal would make automakers, oil companies, auto insurance companies, and the car-less happy. Everyone else, not so much.
Everyone deserves the most desirable and those of us on Medicare with supplements have it available. Why should shlock hospitals and doctors even exist?
They aren’t schlock hospitals and doctors. They service people that can’t afford the co-insurance cost on $10,000/per year health insurance policy and the deductibles and co-pay costs to access the “more desirable” medical facilities. Much of which is cosmetic — newer/more attractive, pleasant waiting rooms with framed pictures on the walls and plants in the room, no lines, etc.
Students at Sidwell Friends School get nutritious, well prepared from high quality ingredients, and tasty lunches. All children would benefit from such a healthy lunch, but the public isn’t going pay for that either. However, that is no excuse for schools dishing out pre-packaged junk food and calling it lunch.
Agree about the lunches and if they were provided to every kid, the poor kids wouldn’t have to wear a scarlet A on their backs. Probably could have been paid for firing one assistant Superintendent. I don’t know where all the money goes, but I calculated once that for the current per pupil cost, we could pay a teacher $100,000 a year for 20 pupils, the teaching to be held in a brand new house that gets thrown away every year. Education costs are just nuts! $12,000+ a year for secondary school!
Well that’s sort of how the charter school profiteers figured it. Without replacing the house annually and assuming a 50 year useful life for it and hiring teachers that would work for $40 thousand a year, an with one school administrator that were be oodles left for stockholders and plenty to pay the administrator a mid-six figure salary.
They’ve managed to pull that “excess money” out of these school, but not as much as they expected, but for some reason, parents and the public aren’t as keen on this idea as they were a few years ago. The product isn’t as good and perhaps all those schools costs that aren’t so easy for the public to see/define are necessary for the product. Expenses that fifty and more years ago weren’t so necessary for a variety reasons.
Secondary school? Stadiums and basketball courts are expensive. If this is a Township district, I would also look at the layers of administration, which generally are proportional to the number of students in the district. And the grounds crew budget.
Schools in NC typically have cafeterias; providing free school lunch for everyone would just mean upping the amount of produce, groceries, meat purchased. If the schools here did both breakfast and lunch with the right diets and preparation, they could significantly reduce attention and behavior problems.
You’ve raised a an important matter that deserves discussion and consideration. But you’ve also introduced an assumption that gets in the way of a meaningful discussion and it’s the sort of assumption that all too often leads to poor public policy decisions that ends up costing more without producing a measurable improvement and then the public gets all riled up over the increased costs.
they could significantly reduce attention and behavior problems.
Perhaps but there isn’t any good and verifiable evidence of a causal link between what kids eat and attention and behavior problems. While I’d like to believe that better nutrition would reduce the problem, seriously doubt that it’s that simple and could easily be a minor one. So, making a case for trebling school lunch budgets on an unproven and unknown variable isn’t a good argument. A bit like a NCLB argument that if teachers were better able to track student’s performance through out the year, they would be better teachers and students would become better learners. So, let’s use standardized tests throughout the school year to track student learning. One of the dumber ideas to come out of think tanks and implemented by DC.
But to get to the important part of your comment, let’s stipulate that good school lunches = significant reductions in attention/behavioral problems. Would a reduction in those problems decrease the costs of operating the schools and/or improve the educational quality for all students? Keep in mind, that we’re talking about spending more public money in one area of schools and the public has a right to ask and deserves an answer as to how the additional funds will be at a minimum gross cost neutral or the aggregate benefit to the community is worth the additional cost.
Both require holistic thinking and we humans aren’t very good at that. Plus, we’re impatient and want to see quick results when we agree to pay more. Then are there alternative options to consider that may be as good or better than upgrading school lunches? *(Segue below on school lunches.)
What’s the additional cost and social price of behavioral issues for schools? Some of those costs are absorbed by health care and the legal system in general, from police department on through. None of those costs can be captured and transferred to school lunch programs. If it results in lower costs for those institutions, they will spend the saving on something else with no recognition that any savings materialized from spending more money on school lunch programs.
I applaud Michelle Obama’s efforts to improve the healthfulness of school lunches, but have to acknowledge that it fell far short of what was needed. First, the pictures I’ve seen of these “better lunch plates” don’t look appetizing. Second, they look like what a tech nutritionist (a discipline that as often gets it wrong as it does right) obsessed with fat and calories and lacking a satisfaction quality. If that is absent, kids will compensate for that reduced fat/calorie lunch by consuming more junk food they carry with them or after school. So, the net nutrition improvement is zero and the program pissed off kids and their parents. To do this right required a lot more money on the food and menus served and educating children on how to eat for health and satisfaction.
The medical community and a large percentage of the populace is alarmed at the increasing rate of Americans being overweight and obese. Yet, at the public policy level a solution that would garner overwhelming public support remains wanting. Labeling food packages and purchased meals with fat and calorie content is now being acknowledged as a bust. But at least that legislation hasn’t led to protests because people don’t experience those labels as intrusive or taking something away from them. They simply ignore them.
All somewhat strange for those old enough to recall that health and nutrition, particularly for children, were once viewed as in the national interest by almost everyone.
===*For example, should schools be charged with providing lunches at all? Doing so made a lot of sense way back when a high percentage families were too poor to provide a healthful brown-bag lunch for their children and SNAP didn’t exist and surplus government food commodities did exist.
Then as incomes increased and the ratio of very poor families declined (I’m speaking in the aggregate and not pockets where there was little change), schools charged for the lunches and kids ended up being sorted into the wealthier families that could afford to pay for school lunches, the poorest families qualified for free lunches, and those neither wealthy nor poor enough were the lunch “brown-bagger” kids that only purchased milk (or had a thermos in their lunchbox). Nutritionally this was okay, but there were social implications if the school wasn’t diligent in enforcing no judgement of others based on their lunch choice, we all eat at the same tables, and the kids had no way of knowing who was the free lunch kid.
Still, some brown-bag lunch kids out of necessity (they wanted that spaghetti and not the sandwich from home) felt inferior to their classmates that bought lunch. Once that is psychologically integrated that feeling never goes away. And government programs have a way of reinforcing that division — not wealthy enough to take advantage of public resources and not poor enough to get it for free. Fertile ground for those that flipped out over the ACA and public subsidies and public welfare programs in general. It’s not that they’re necessarily struggling low income today, but it’s true enough that they have gotten left out or left behind.
For purposes of public and election rhetoric, Bernie’s “free tuition at public colleges for all” resonated with average Jane and Joe because it included them. Clinton’s parsing it into income brackets, “I don’t want to pay for Donald Trump’s kids to go to college” revealed that she’s oriented to splitting up who gets by income bracket and history tells some people that would only be a matter of time before they would be neither be poor enough to get free tuition nor wealthy enough to afford it without incurring debt. They’re also smart enough not to worry about Trump’s kids getting a freebie because they recognize that rich kids go to private schools, and therefore, Clinton’s position felt manipulative.
At our High school they feed students junk that I didn’t let the kids eat at home. Like Pop-tarts for breakfast. And soda machines. Hostess desserts. Cheese Pizza with no veggies. We did have pizza on occasional but laced it with green peppers, onions, mushrooms and olives before baking.
Not that I follow any special diet and on hectic mornings, a quick 50 second microwave made sausage and pancake on a stick (a real product) a treat for adults (easy and quick) and kids as well (greasy and sweet!). Most mornings they had OJ, 2% milk, banana and nutritious cereal (not the crap advertised on TV).
My High school cafeteria was worse than Mess Hall #2 at Bunker Hill AFB (pretty bad!) but at least the ingredients were nutritious. And you weren’t allowed to buy dessert without an entree, vegetables and potatoes. Granted some threw out the required food. And my buddy across the alley (a picky eater) only bought 3 one third quart chocolate milks. Yes, they weren’t half pints, they were one third quarts. Illinois still had a big dairy industry in those days. But did it hurt us to get extra milk instead of Pepsi-Cola?
I saw a video or maybe it was a write up with pictures of kids protesting Michelle’s get healthy lunch guidelines because they claimed that they were starving. The kids were all overweight. But I had to remind myself of what I said to a friend as we watched the coverage of the aftermath of Katrina in NO. Men and women that that been trapped in the Convention Ctr and elsewhere complaining that they hadn’t had a hot meal in three days. My friend said, look at how fat all of them are. I pointed out that they were overweight mostly due to their poor diet. A traditional southern diet that made sense when food was scarce because the dishes were packed with calories that they needed.
Milk consumption on a per capita basis is way down since 1970 and iirc soft drink consumption peaked in 1990 and is somewhat down since then. But none of the other substitutes are really much better than soft drinks and that sector seems to be growing.
When I was a kid, chocolate milk as an occasional treat and not available in the cafeteria. But from Jr. High on there was a snack bar alternative to the cafeteria — hamburgers, fries, and malts (don’t think soft drinks were sold), but that was an expensive option. While I can’t be sure, I think kids by the age of nine or ten can learn something about the value of money through choosing days to buy and days to brown-bag (a healthful lunch and not the prepackage crap that people stick in lunch bags today). I known adults that would skip lunch (another unhealthy choice) rather than brown-bag. That viewed a brown-bag as evidence that they were too poor to buy lunch. Well, technically buying lunch meant they went without something else. The something else always seemed more attractive to me and lunch is mostly a fuel pit-stop.
No cafeteria in Elementary school. I mostly brown bagged. Most kids had baloney or PB&J. Somedays, I had PB&J, others it was bacon or cheese or olive loaf but always with lettuce, tomato in season, often with green pepper. When I went to a school two blocks from home (boundaries kept shifting) I walked home and Dad (he worked the night shift) would cook homemade Italian sausage and peppers and eggs, high-protein Ambrosia! The high fat high protein low sugar diet is scorned now but I was always skinny as a rail. Maybe walking everywhere and later biking for miles had something to do with that. no cell phones, just expensive AT&T land lines, B&W TV with 4 channels only three of which came in good, but a world of books at the library and quarter double features at the movies, some in Technicolor! The wonderful about the suburbs was that a kid could go anywhere without fear of some moron grabbing them, although it did happen sometimes. Today, parents would be arrested for leaving kids home alone or wandering the streets. But it taught us independence, not like the 24 hour structured life of kids today.
Re attention and behavior, I suspect lead poisoning is more to blame than diet.
Possible. But attention/behavior issues aren’t absent in locations where lead poisoning isn’t a factor. Lead poisoning does significant damage to a developing brain. Cognitive impairments that can never be corrected and one way those deficits are expressed is in attention/behavior issues. Those poor children in Flint that were exposed to high concentrations of lead in the water because of asshole politicians.
Balanced out by Orange County, CA going Dem for the first time in many decades.
Well gee.
He won re-election.
His approval rating is well over 50.
So I doubt he worried about your prediction.
Yeah sure, he’s not worried. That’s why he stumped for Hillary with the plea for folks to “protect my legacy.” Not difficult to see that the GOP plans to put chainsaw to use on “his legacy.” Which won’t take long because there’s not much there that Republicans really object to.
That second map looks like the Wall Street journal map that I referred to in http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2016/11/10/17638/856/25#25
Blue California and blue Vermont really are. Blue Illinois is Chicago.
No, outside the coast, CA is still quite red. Less so than it used to be, but that’s a function of how dreadful local and state GOP politicians proved to be and Democrats have been more responsible and better managers.
On that last point, it was what re-elected Obama. However, simply better managing a pile of dung isn’t enough in the long run if the manager refrains from any attempt to clear out the dung an opponent rises up with a promise to do that.
Fascinating maps, AG.
So the majority of the property in the US voted for Donald J. Trump. And the people who voted accounted for more than 900,0000 votes for Hillary Clinton. Or do cattle get 3/5 of a vote now.
Your narrative might be true but not the slam dunk you think.
And I find the map of the GOP flipped counties to be very interesting.
If you look at both the 2012 and 2016 maps, there are arcs of blue across the former Confederate states. These are primarily rural minority-majority counties. What struck me about the GOP flip map is that some of the counties nearby this years blue arc were flipped. If I were investigating voter suppression, I would look first at those counties. There were in fact complaints before the election of voter purges of registration rolls in Beaufort County NC, one that left a 102-year-old frequent voter unable to vote. So rural, yes, but maybe not as slamdunk as you think. But this is not where you took your jaunt.
There is a surprising reduction of blue in the counties of the Rio Grande although none actually flipped.
And that in an election in which there were really few flips. What happened appears to be intensification of existing county political identities.
Here’s an interesting exercise. Identify the Republican majority major cities. Can you find them? Oklahoma City is one of them. But in most states, the cities are Democratic and the empty spaces are very Republican. The more isolated the population for cities, the more intensely the vote for Trump. There are lots of suburban and exurban bedroom city exceptions but the intensity increases as the population density decreases.
That’s why a victory for Hillary Clinton in the popular vote looks like a massive defeat in the property vote. And if it is a property vote, subtracting out the federal land would be a helpful corrective.
You have troubles traveling only when you act like a “typical arrogant librul”, even if you have a Hillary or Bernie sticker on your car. There are a very few jerks who will make comments or key your car or some other form of aggression. Not much different from big cities in my experience or even my suburban grocery store parking lot in the big blue island of North Carolina.
I would encourage folks to get out more so that those who don’t often see liberal and especially lefty city folk can realize that it is the media images that are a delusion.
You write:
“There is a surprising reduction of blue in the counties of the Rio Grande although none actually flipped.”
Where is the surprise? Upwardly mobile Central Americans do not trust this government as it has stood for 50 years or more. That’s why Latino neighborhoods in general…right across the country…are more prosperous and in better shape than are African-American neighborhoods. They understand that Big Gov/Big Welfare in general is a crock of shit that has been offered to them as a free lunch. Their common language/culture(s) also insulates them from much of the propaganda disguised as “education/U.S. culture” here. And…they see the distinct possibility that they will be able to become the next fully “American” subculture, following in the footsteps of other immigrant cultures…Irish, Italian, Jewish etc…in a rise to general middle-class status. Why wouldn’t they flip away from the welfare Dems?
You alsowrite:
“…a victory for Hillary Clinton in the popular vote looks like a massive defeat in the property vote. And if it is a property vote, subtracting out the federal land would be a helpful corrective.”
“Subtracting out the federal land” is apparently what Trump plans to do. Sarah Palin will be the sub(
con)tractor.Also:
“You have troubles traveling only when you act like a “typical arrogant librul”, even if you have a Hillary or Bernie sticker on your car.”
Not so sure about that one, myself. I drive a VW GTI…an identifiably urban/suburban ride in Red country…and I have been vibed numerous times at gas stations in rural areras by pickup-type people. They haven’t taken any action…yet..mostly because I neither look or act the part…but an HRC or Sanders bumper sticker might be he turning point., just as a Trump bumper sticker might attract some attention is say ghetto Philadelphia or some of the black-ish suburbs where riots have broken out over police brutality. This country is a bunch of tinder piles, each waiting for the proper match to burst into flames.
“…it is the media images that are a delusion.”
They are not a delusion. They are really (at least partially) self-fulfilling prophecies. You cannot “fan the flames” if there is no available fuel, and .01% economics has produced the fuel.
AG
There were 46.9% of registered voters who did not vote or were not counted in the totals. A map of this statistic by counties would be especially interesting in this election year in which “none of the above” reputedly won.
Consistently pushing the same narrative is understandable AG. But the map is not so dominatingly red when deformed by the population density into an infogram by population. Looking at land area and being overwhelmed is succumbing to propaganda of the red state/blue state variety. In fact, states are deemed red or blue by the winner-take-all electoral vote. The red state-blue state meme was a brilliant piece of propaganda that furthered the notion that the US is a center-right nation.
Do you have any evidence at all that more affluent Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley did indeed behave as you described and flipped Democratic to Republican. Given the number of Latino Republican Congressmen from Texas, those likely would have been entrenched instead of flipped. If they were to flip, it would have been the other way and as a result of Trump’s anti-Latino rhetoric. Yes, class plays a role, but it has been factored in for decades.
It is an illusion created by the way colors code voting results.
And in the worst cases, Clinton still pulled around 20% of the vote in a rural county.
The people in flyover country are angry because they have been left behind economically, looked down upon by the for-profit popular culture for a half century, and unable to position themselves on the traditional class scale anymore. Their children want to get away from them, get an education, and make money. Those that can’t feel trapped and eventually settle. And the corporate decimation of these areas has intensified over the past three decade. Lefties and Democrats generally have become scapegoats; most who travel in these areas are our polite normal selves not our online personas. The same cannot be said for a very small group of alpha-male-wannabe angry guys in flyover country. But they’ve just politicized behavior that was common years ago and are targeting their in-your-face attitudes at outsiders, especially identifiable non-conservatives and minorities, instead of just randomly at their neighbors.
The anger has been politicized, but just in a way that does not deal with the issues they feel in any meaningful way; that intensifies the anger. The idea that the GOP under Trump is actually going to have any policies that will make rural lives better is an delusion. It is Republican policies that have made their lives worse. And Democrats with me-too policies.
It is up to blue state legislatures to figure out a way to improve the rural economies of their states and to provide dignity for those who live in them. Same for the working class increasingly in service industries and low level information-industry jobs. Will pot cultivation alone do that? I don’t think so.
There are some substantial rural issues on the Pacific coast as global climate change unfolds. And Nevada outside of the mining and casino cities depends on federal subsidies and increasingly problematic federally provided water and cheap leases.
In most of the other blue states, price supports have given way to the free market and the domination of agribusiness and chemical companies. Soil stabilization, detoxifying farmland for organic crops, and restoring a sustainable supply chain for agriculture are immediate requirements. They are difficult and uncertain in terms of profit, but they will restore a higher population density to agricultural areas. Grain production will be threatened by findings that current strains of wheat contribute to development of Type 2 diabetes and to Alzheimers disease. None of these changes that would improve rural economies are likely to come from GOP administrations. The US political system is caught in a double-bind situation.
Something not to forget – NYMag February 5, 2016, Jonathan Chait Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination
MI, NH, PA, WI
Right now in those four states, Trump is currently ahead by a total of 40,000 (9,000 in MI).
Are all those states certified yet?