Don’t even try to win it.
Matt L. Barron, Daily Yonder: Analysis: Democrats Turn Their Backs on Rural America
Candidates do rallies in the main city of television markets because it is convenient.
As the media scratched their heads at why Trump was holding rallies far off the beaten path in places like Lisbon, Maine, Atkinson, New Hampshire, Fletcher and Selma, North Carolina, Clinton never deviated from a schedule that looked like a rock band’s tour of major urban centers.
Campaigns do no realize that local media in those media cities cover events in their hinterlands to preserve audience share. They used to cover rural county county and city council meetings, but now it’s just the police blotter.
At any rate, this deprived Clinton of having rural people meet her (or was that considered a risk?). And it deprived her of more substantial free media. (Or was that too unpredictable?)
Selma is in the Raleigh-Durham market and Fletcher is in the Asheville market. Trump benefited from having his rural rally broadcast all over those market areas’ rural areas. This analysis said that that hurt badly in some formerly blue states. Especially when rural counties have been bypassed economically and culturally (thus the attacks on Hollywood, media, and intellectuals) by mainstream American society.
I fault Barron on his plugging for a rural class of consultants and media professionals (campaign infrastructure) who might have the same issues he describes just with certain twists.
Carville’s appeal in 1993 was his appearance of being in touch with Louisiana and the Southern rural areas. Whether real or contrived, even that has disappeared as the Carville-Matalins became just one more bipartisan power couple in the Village.
“The thinking among coastal elites is that with coming demographic changes in the years ahead, the “coalition of the ascendant” that powered Barack Obama to the White House will turn red states blue. This mindset is deeply flawed.”
No kidding. And harping on elimination of the EC is simply adding kindling to the issue of proportional EC voting. They have the formerly blue state houses to do it, too. Why the hell should the entire country be ruled by our Coasts? Sounds like the problem the EU is having, no?
Atkinson is a rich suburb of Boston. Not rural.
I keep coming back to this:
They are literally dying.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-fi
nds.html?_r=0
At about the same rate that AIDs patients did at the height of the storm.
WOW – do you have a source for that.
What a mind blowing number.
Not where I saw it the first time, but echo the findings…
On youth mortality…
This.
And This, too.…”The rise in death rates among middle-aged white Americans means half a million more people have died in the US since 1998 than if the previous trend had continued. The death toll is comparable to the 650,000 Americans who lost their lives during the Aids epidemic from 1981 to the middle of this year, the researchers said.”
WOW. WOW.
Not to dismiss the increase in early deaths in white America, it’s the deaths and not the rate that’s comparable. The numbers/percentage of white Americans is much larger than the population at risk for HIV/AIDS. So, the death rate from AIDS was a much larger population catastrophe.
Yes. sorry for my inexact term. Should have used clip or pace–as the numbers were similar, not %.
No problem. We all post imprecise information. This one too far overstated the comparison with the AIDS epidemic for me to let it go.
That’s a very small number 0.134 percent. As small as passbook interest.
Which is not a small number when talking about human lives. Upthread are cites that about 500,000 people have died as a result of this phenomenon over the past 20 years. That is a HUGE problem. And it’s still soaring, because while Obama’s prescription reforms have reversed the increases in new opiate addicts, the old ones are still mostly addicted and are switching to heroin, which raises the death rate compared to the legal opiates. The opiate prescription rates are still quite high and addicts are still probably being created at a good pace, just somewhat lower than a few years ago.
Brother, that guy has done his homework on those state issues that sank the Senatorial candidates in rural areas.
Two more:
Michael Auerback and Naked Capitalism – It’s Class, Stupid, Not Race
Raúl Ilargi Meijer at The Automatic Earth – No More Flyover Country
The first one and Barron’s directly focus on failings by Democrats in the 2014 and 2016 elections. Meijer tackles it from a longer and future time frame. Having a presidential candidate or two show up in some rural place every four years may make the people there momentarily feel good and might even get their votes that year, but neglected in policy and attention in between those visits only leaves the residents feeling hopeless and vulnerable to the words of the latest charlatan making big promises. The GOP does it a bit better because they leave some of their own behind in those rural areas to keep making the pitch and somehow they are still able to make the sale while their national leaders screw over their communities as much if not more than Democrats do.
An unfortunate reality today is that the coasts and cities don’t need the agricultural/natural resource industries of rural America as much as we once did. From a nation of small farmers, we’ve become a nation of highly mechanized, agro-biz and that doesn’t need so many people. People on the coasts care more about price than where they food comes from. And if all of could be shipped in from abroad, we might not even notice that rural America ceased to exist. We have no answers for these parts of the USA other than their primary traditional industries of foodstuffs and mineral extraction. And when in half-hearted ways something comes down the pike from DC, like bio-fuels, it’s not much of an answer.
In general Democrats and Republicans campaign where the most votes can be found for the cheapest price. The IA caucus and NH primary are extraordinarily expensive on a per vote basis, but candidates do get a bit further from the cities in those races.
One other point wrt Hillary not making campaign stops in rural communities (and I think the claims that Trump did is over-stated), Hillary entered the race with as near to 100% name recognition as a candidate not a sitting President can ever enjoy. But most of the people were also aware that when she hightailed it out of AR, she never looked back. Thus, the perception of rural voters preceded her latest run for office and that made her an even harder sell than someone not previously associated with “flyover country.” In WV, Obama received 35.5% of the vote in 2012. Hillary got 26.5%.
WV is not the same as VA, but I wonder if the thinking was “Obama is a N__, but Hillary is worse, she’s a New Yorker“. Remember the Pace Piquante Sauce commercial? “NEW YORK CITY!!! Get a rope.”. It’s hard (or impossible) for New Yorkers to believe that they are hated in rural areas especially in the South.
West Virginia was totally about the supposed war on coal. The urban areas of West Virginia were totally dependent on the coal tar chemical industry. The coal and chemical barons, having shaken unions, now operate extremely extractive (of profits) business models and think that EPA is their enemy even as they destroy their own state. Mountain top removal and unsafe mines are just one of the symptoms. Elsewhere there are communities with no economies at all and people get by with an informal economy that include heavy drug dealing, gun sale and resale, and what government assistance is left. By far, the anger of being reduced to government assistance is the most intense driver of rejecting government.
New Yorkers are not hated in the rural South. There are New Yorkers and New Yorkers. The ones most likely to be hated in the rural South never deign to visit it. The ones that visit it are tourists and most know how to behave and bring money. Perpetuating this myth perpetuates the refusal to understand each others’ real situation.
Conceded that maybe they are more hated in Chicago.
WV split from VA over slavery; WV was non-slaveowning. the Civil War history remains a factor in present day race relations.
correction -over secession. anyway, my point is Civil War history remains important
Oh yes! That’s why I said my first sentence.
yes, I wanted to reinforce that their differing histories – I’m of the school, on this blog, that maintains in many areas ppl didn’t vote for T because of his racist rhetoric, they voted for him for other reasons.
McClatchy: A road map Hillary Clinton did not follow to the White House
Did the Clinton team simply not read the memo, because it was sent the night before Thanksgiving? More likely, they were too heavily invested in the idea that the Dems have winning demographics to be open to what the memo had to say.
In their defense they had a problem. If they attack the current economy they are attacking in a way the President.
A central problem for Clinton is that she needed Obama too much, and was his Secretary of State. That might complicate their ability to carry this message.
Still..
I think the TPP was a big problem. It had one provision – the ISDS – which was a deal-breaker for Clinton although I think she’d have been OK with most of the rest of it. But she couldn’t come out against it too hard because Obama was all-in for it.
I think the TPP might have been the most important cause of the big shift in the Rust Belt, which saw a much larger shift to the Republicans than any other large area of the country. Obama had promised to renegotiate NAFTA, but in office he didn’t and instead pushed very hard for another big trade agreement. I think it’s telling that in 2012 – before the TPP was out – they still supported Obama, but in 2016 – after he’d aggressively supported it – they turned on his successor.
Then why did she call it “The Gold Standard”?
Have you ever held a job?
I was employed from 1967 to 2015 with two years of unemployment in there. I won’t recite the after school jobs in High School and College. About half of that time was employment by the Federal Government, Navy Department and Postal Service. The rest was private, from Fortune 500 companies to a small start up Tech company. They are all gone now. Bankrupt (International Harvester) or bought up by bigger fish. The Tech company was bought up by a multi-billion dollar company. They fired all the US citizens and turn it into a H1-B machine.
What’s YOUR work experience, Sonny.
So you never had to sell a piece of shit product or spin something for your boss or company? That was my point and sounds like you did.
I have worked in healthcare mostly and for a company that relied on gov’t contracts that was bought by a defense contractor.
Old coot
Luckily, No. Not that they didn’t want me to. It’s hard to fake stuff in Engineering and even harder when your job is making a broken piece of equipment work. I recognize that Sales and the front office are different.
Maybe she thought it was the gold standard and came out against it as a craven political act, I have no idea. However, I could see at that point in development it could end up being when negotiated, which I think is how she phrased it. Or she was selling it for her boss. I know the media has to make her out to be two faced, but it was years before the final negotiations. There are plenty of times a contract looks good at one point and falls apart 6 months later.
I did have to promote products or services, I thought were subpar. I left the contractor after they were sold because of it.
It would seem that the TPP plank was Sanders’ price for him to campaign for her. Supposedly he “pulled her Left”. It seems Bernie was beguiled by the days when the party platform actually meant anything. That was null and void at least as far back as when the Democratic Senate failed to pass EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act). BTW, my daughter informs me that Alabama voters have enshrined “Right to Work” in the state Constitution, so it’s not just a Right To Work Law anymore.
She came out against it earlier in the campaign, because she actually listens to people. I noticed how you used the word beguiled which implies that he was tricked. Bernie can never fail, he can only be failed by others. This where we are no better than the Right and their slavish devotion to Voodoo economics.
I know people that have worked with Bernie on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. He doesn’t work well with others, doesn’t take advice from institutional experts on issues where his knowledge is lacking, and too often gives cover to Republican stalking horse ideas like privatization of government functions.
During the VA “scandal” of 2014 neither Sanders nor Obama could be bothered to tell what really happened. Veterans in the Phoenix area were not seen in a timely manner. A “whistleblower” physician Dr. Sam Foote leaked the story to CNN and Phoenix media outlets. Dr. Foote was protected by government worker and labor union laws. I believe he was a member of AFGE. He was in the process of being fired for gross negligence and substance abuse issues. He eventually was forced out by resignation. He was responsible for some of the backlog himself in the Phoenix area, because he had only worked 20 weeks in the previous year.
There were similar issues in other VA regions as well, but it was mostly due to case loads and costs rising 30-120%, while staff and funding were only increased 8-15%. Obama made Shinseki the scapegoat. Sanders made the hardworking staff of the VA the villains and not the Republicans lack of funding the increased work load. He also made copious remarks of agreement with his Republican colleagues and his very good friend John McCain. Sanders should have gotten a room for JM so they could bipartisan the fuck out of destroying the VA.
“The Congress commissioned a study of VA by the RAND Corporation, which was published early in 2016. Among the study’s findings were: that the care provided by the VA was generally as good as, or better than, other health-care providers (according to most criteria used in the study), and, that there was no widespread evidence of long waiting times generally in the VA (although in a few places some veterans did experience long wait times) and, that most veterans get their appointments within a few days of their preferred date for care. Specifically, more than 90 percent of appointments for already-enrolled patients, and 80 percent of appointments for new patients, occur within two weeks of the desired date.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Health_Administration_scandal_of_2014
How much did we hear about that study compared to the “100s” that died waiting for VA care?
Did you know the VA can only hire Veterans now? It may sound good on paper, but it is creating a drop in qualified candidates when put into practice. Instead of getting the best candidates we are are getting the best of a limited pool, and it is making the VA more male and white dominated, because the military is 75% white and 14% female. I have no idea why NOW has not brought a lawsuit. No one ever wants to discuss the problems of good intentions being implemented into failed policies.
Did you believe she was really against TPP?
It can’t be news to you that ISDS have been a standard part of trade agreements in the past? NAFTA, Korean, Colombian…all had them.
What is relatively new is the abuse of the opening by opportunistic vulture funds. But since she operates on the thesis that the market knows best, I don’t know why she would object. She hadn’t before.
Whether it would have been a winning strategy or even one Hillary could have undertaken will never be known. I have my doubts as to both.
There really is a limit to how many new demographic factions one can pander to and get their votes in one election cycle. Even more difficult if a candidate has a long record of not being interested in the demographic or their plight.
Hillary has aligned herself with those that hold a certain economic worldview, and that worldview has but one interest in rural communities, how much is that we can extract and make good profits on.
This will complicate some narratives:
WaPo – Donald Trump didn’t `hoodwink’ his voters, says professor who has spent nearly a decade researching them
Nobody ever said that voters are rational. But often the things they cite as reasons for why they voted one way or the other are rationalizations for things they don’t want to cite or they’re going with their gut which can’t be articulated.
Maybe, but after reading a lot of stories like this, going over the exit poll data, seeing where the voter switchers were and putting it in context of Clinton’s embrace of BLM, I’m much more receptive to the idea that they voted for Trump for racial reasons.
The good news is that there wasn’t some “surge” in white vote or “hidden” white vote and they can be won back.
Seriously, if there were any voter shifts from Obama to Trump, it’s so minuscule that it’s not worth the effort to think about it.
Nationally Trump got the GOP presidential election base. No more than that. It’s flat and not growing.
What is also not growing and has shrunk in the past two election cycles is the DP presidential election base. 69.5 million on “hope and change” in ’08. Didn’t deliver and millions of voters declined to reward a broken promise. What were Clinton’s campaign themes? “It’s my turn.” “Status quo.” “I promise nothing and therefore, I can’t disappoint.” “Trump is deplorable.” And less we forget “Putin, Putin, Assange, Wikileaks.” If Trump had been more awful (difficult to imagine how) and significantly depressed the GOP vote, even fewer Democratic leaning voters would have bothered to show up this year. As it was, TrumpFear brought them out.
What does the Bureau of Land Management have to do with it? Or are you referring to those Bundy kooks?
Black Lives matter.
Easier to understand if you add the hashtag.
Is the argument that the voters are so hoodwinking themselves that they demand the wrong things from their politicians?
The media and not just FoxNews is the reason for a lot of it as is the “Telephone”-like way that information travels through their communities. And the social pressures to conform of small communities.
And some issues are so big to comprehend that people say “That’s beyond me.” and are reluctant to grant that they might be difficult but not beyond everybody, especially those who spend most of their time to consider the isssue.
Finally, in an information environment of so much outright lying and bullshit, all outside information gets dismissed as bullshit and reliance is made on people that they trust. Especially people they have thought from elementary school were smarter than them.
I wonder what the chatter in the Masonic lodges and other secret societies that are key institutions in rural areas are like these days. I wonder to what extent they have been replaced by militia organizations or other types of gun clubs. Or to what extent they exist in parallel. And then there are the local veterans organizations.
>>the local veterans organizations
i can only speak for the groups i work with every year for their Memorial Day event, and in this semi-rural part of California the veterans groups are hurting more than their community is. People are still serving, but they aren’t joining the Legion and VFW.
Okay, I don’t know that Trump promised to reduce federal operating costs, but it could fall under the category reducing waste, fraud, and abuse of government dollars that rolls off the lips of almost all candidates for federal office that he must have said something like that.
He did get off to a decent start by declining the $400,000 per/year presidential salary. Trust government administrators heard that and will make sure that no salary “checks are cut” for him.
But this might be an even bigger cost savings: The Guardian – Donald Trump transition team in disarray after key adviser ‘purged’
This is something that the media (if they haven’t lost all their journalistic skills) knows how to go after. Slice, dice, and fillet WH total incompetence and fecklessness. Ha-ha, they though their little cottage industry campaign hawking a human Ginsu knife was a transferable skill set to running the executive branch of the USG.
More:
Gonna be a big wake-up call for this gang that has depended totally on family nepotism for income and whatever it is that they supposedly do in the Trump Org. (Kushner is also a product of a family biz.) As a POTUS requesting top security clearance for his kids and son-in-law has probably never happened before (or occurred to any prior POTUS to request it or any member of Congress to contemplate that anyone would ever request it), sure hope there’s a structure in place to tell Trump to stuff this one you know where.
The Donald may also be surprised that the “football with the button” is handed to him upon his inauguration. Maybe it could be sent out for repairs until Trump moves out of the WH.
He can’t bring him on officially (anti-nepotism law after RFK, and it includes son-in-law), but I’ve read that he can officially sign off on their security clearances if he wants.
NYMag
That looks as if it’s a no go. And I’m willing to wager that none of the USG employees (not including the bozos that Trump plans to hire) that in person inform a POTUS of top-secret or classified information will tolerate having one or more of his kids in the room.
Trump’s refusal to not take a salary looks good to the average person, but think of the $$ he will save by the Repubs cutting taxes for the wealthy. Small price to pay.
like Bloomberg in NY – no salary but changed zoning advantageously; tripled his fortune.
Exactly, but the public only can see that the guy is willing to do the job for free because that’s easy to comprehend and they can’t see or understand how the guy and his friends are making out like bandits on the back end.
Excellent and very cheap PR. That meager NYC mayoral paycheck wouldn’t buy Bloomie one-tenth of the the good PR he got from declining the salary. He still did have to spend a boatload of his own money to get that third term.
The average person doesn’t know the difference between payroll and income taxes. 47.3% voted for the guy that’s going to make America great again by bringing back jobs from China and cutting income taxes. He can only accomplish the cutting taxes pledge which won’t make America great and only a small percentage of his voters will see any reduction in their taxes because they aren’t paying much as it is.
Trump is a good carney barker and waving around his waiving a POTUS paycheck will reinforce their hope that Trump is going to clean up DC and reduce federal operating costs.
GG:
I fear that the scapegoat list is so long that they won’t run out of names on it before the 2020 election.
Who gives a fuck?
Blame blame blame blame blame blame blame.
If you’ve got an idea how to win Pennsylvania, I am all ears. If it involves convincing people not to run for office, I’m not interested. If it involves relitigating the primaries, I am not interested. If it is nitpicking a campaign that virtually everyone thought was on track to win, then it better be good.
Why don’t you ask team Clinton — they are the ones doing the blaming and scapegoating. I was just passing along the latest one for others that might find it of interest.
Where the fuck did you get the idea that I have ever suggested or attempted to convince people not run for public office? Although many Hillary supporters seemed to desire that she have no primary opponent and seemed delighted that Trump was the GOP nominee. I learned the lesson from 2000 not to cheer when the GOP nominates a nincompoop in the expectation of an easy win for the D nominee. If a Democratic nominee isn’t up to the task of beating a tough opponent, maybe that’s not the right person to nominate.
This comment was intentionally posted in a diary thread and not one of your FP threads so as not to disturb the lingering campaign bubble that virtually everyone thought was on track to win. I only thought (and erroneously so) that Trump’s campaign was on track to lose but not by much because as slick as it was, there wasn’t much there there in his opponent’s campaign. That’s not the same as describing the opponent as “on track to win.”
Ignore and don’t analyze (or nitpick) what went right and what went wrong in the 2016 election at your own peril. Good way not to see the same result for the same reasons coming in a future election.
Look for a similar result in Illinois. Illinois and Chicago are losing population. There is a critical point wherein if Chicago gets too small, the state switches red.
Both Illinois and Calfornia would have been spared much pain if the FED had bought their bonds and foregone the interest. You DO know that the FED foregoes the interest on the federal bonds it buys, don’t you?
Where are you getting that the FED buys/sells other than federal government or federal agency backed securities?
Also, the Fed doesn’t issue securities.
Hell, they were floating the idea of the Fed buying CORPORATE bonds!!! QE is not doing it for them any more, it seems/
Voice was speaking of what he claims is an existing policy/practice which does differ from floating and idea of what could possibly be done.
Perhaps — to bring back US factories and jobs, Trump will order US corporations to repatriate all the cash their sitting on and use that to buy back their own bonds. OTOH, considering the market response to Trump winning, they are acting as if they’re more empowered than ever (or could be engaging in a massive pump and dump scheme, creating a buying frenzy among the Trumpsters to jump into the market with their slim cash nesteggs).
“Voice was speaking of what he claims is an existing policy/practice ” NO! I said IF.
There current practice that may have confused you is that they don’t collect the interest on the US Treasurys that they hold. This is a not insignificant amount of interest since QEx. When they buy bonds from private hands, the federal government (Treasury) has to pay interest (semi-annual on mine). But the FED board always tells the TSEC “that’s OK, forget it”.
The FED and Treasury are joined at the hip on matters of US debt. The FED extinguishes US debt, which pays interest to private holders of US debt instruments. When those bonds are retired, the FED extinguishes the debt.
The US Treasuries that the FED holds and buys from private hands in order to increase the money supply are being extinguished, sometimes ahead of time. Of course the FED does not collect interest on that. That is the current practice. It is pretty straightforward FED operation as the issuing and extinguishing agent of Treasury.
Populism Takes a Wrong Turn …Of the $362 billion that earned a “tax holiday”, most went to dividends, corporate bonuses, and stock buybacks.
…
Unless the worker’s share of GDP reverses its downward trend, and capital’s share peaks, then populists worldwide will reject establishment parties in almost every future election – initiating in some cases growth-negative policies revolving around trade, immigration, and yes, in Trump’s case, lower taxation that may lower GDP growth, not raise it. Global populism is the wave of the future, but it has taken a wrong turn in America.
Read the whole thing. Yes, the Bond King is in the 0.01% but his investment columns always pan out sooner or later. I wish I had taken his advice, just before the banks crashed, to cash out of stocks and into 5% TIPS instead of only buying a measly $5K. In any case, he seems to be on the Left of Bernie Sanders!
Our comment wires got crossed on this one. Let’s set it aside for another day when to cover in more depth and when it’s more newsworthy.
Ok, but read the link. It’s rather astonishing, coming from a wall street insider.
They don’t, but I believe they could. If not Congress could authorize them to buy state/municipal bonds.
Never said the FED issues securities, Treasury does. Therein lies the problem of regulatory capture of the Dept. of treasury.
Those states could have been spared pain if they set up a public bank like the Bank of North Dakota that functions a lot like the FED with respect to state bonded indebtedness.
Should the FED buy state bonds? If states are unwilling to raise taxes for debt service, I would say not. The FED has enough trouble with Congress not raising taxes to retire debt.
See my comments about foregoing interest below. The same process could occur with a public bank.
Why should I or any ordinary citizen bother coming up with ways to defeat GOP candidates? That’s that’s preserve and domain of the VSPs and VIPs who make the decisions and tell us how it shall be. Just as they did in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Politico Soros bands with donors to resist Trump, ‘take back power’
This is inspiring:
The Intercept on the new Senate Minority Leader (and highest elected Democratic official come January 20, 2017
Has team Clinton gotten around to blaming Schumer for her losing PA, OH, and WI?
It’s the “Tickle me Donald” leadership with Warren and Sanders placed to be scapegoats for failure.
What an effing disappointment.
Essentially Warren shares in the policy and Bernie is supposed to sell it with all the colleagues wired to the status quo that brought failure to begin with and a minority leader who has already announced that he will roll over.
Worse that Harry Reid keeping his powder dry when he should have struck back or Pelosi taking impeachment investigation off the table.
nothing compared to what he raked in by making favorable real estate zoning changes
Another view of the same subject:
Jane Lindsay, The Guardian opinion: I am a Democrat in rural, red-state America. My party abandoned us
link doesn’t work