I still see posts, here and elsewhere, telling us not to waste our breath on Trump voters. The articles usually feature visuals of fat white people with ugly scowls waving Confederate battle flags, people, we are told, who are irredeemable racists, parochial bigots, and resentful hate-mongers.
Such descriptions, I assume, are directed not at the Republican rank-and-file who pulled the lever for an “R” because they didn’t have the imagination to do otherwise. They are, instead, intended for those who turned out singularly for Trump out of enthusiasm or out of desperation. If so, the descriptions likely are accurate for many of the enthusiasts, though not uniformly so even among them. And they may or may not be accurate for the desperate. Trump-voters are not clones of one another, and talking about them as if they were is presumptuous, ignorant, and dangerous.
This last election, given our opponent, should have been an easy win. Instead, we have a Republican Senate and a Republican House. For a President, we have an incompetent, unbalanced, authoritarian who lies like other people breathe. And we are about to have a judiciary of loyal, partisan Republicans. Something serious went seriously wrong.
Rather than comforting ourselves in having won the popular vote by almost 3 million effectively meaningless votes, let’s look at Trump’s margin of victory in three swing states. Had these three states gone the other way, we would not be in this mess. (The full set of data can be found here.)
- Michigan 16 Electoral Votes 10,704 Vote Margin of Victory (0.20%)
- Wisconsin 10 Electoral Votes 22,748 Vote Margin of Victory (0.70%)
- Pennsylvania 20 Electoral Votes 44,292 Vote Margin of Victory (0.70%)
Had we flipped half-plus-one of the voters represented by these margins in each state, we would have won: 273 electoral votes to 258. But we couldn’t be bothered with reaching out to just 39,000 voters. They were “deplorables” and not worthy of our attention. Surely it would be sufficient merely to point that out to people. Well, it wasn’t.
And it’s not as if we haven’t seen this before. In the 1960s, The New Left took over the party and turned toward political activists and away from that “variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements” called the Roosevelt coalition. Mark Schmitt called it “the reformist liberalism that split the party from organized labor and the white working class.” The result was President Richard Nixon.
How, then, do we reach out? We do it by stressing an optimistic economic program that emphasizes jobs. We also must, and this is critical, point out exactly what Democrats have done for the benefit of all Americans and the lengths to which Republicans have gone to dismantle that for all but wealthy Americans. It’s not hard. It’s not unnatural. It’s morally right. In fact, it’s traditional, Democratic messaging. Or it was before neoliberals took over. We abandoned such messaging while Republicans continued throwing free market, trickle-down lies at these voters. That as much as anything explains the situation we are in.
No one expects that we will win over the hard core Trumpites, but we don’t need to. We do not need to change water into wine, deplorables into Democrats. We need only to talk to those voters who, for decades, had been a solid part of our base. Even then, we don’t need to change everyone’s mind – fewer than 39,000 would have done the trick in the last election.
Are we so full of ourselves that we would not reach out to Trump voters in Michigan in hopes of changing just 5,400 minds, or just over 22,000 minds in all of Pennsylvania? Are we so sure that feelings of hopelessness over having lost jobs and families and towns are just a cover for intractable racism? Are we so bigoted ourselves that we would write off any of our fellow citizens, reject their concerns out of hand when many are, in fact, trapped in a downward spiral of unemployment and poverty not of their making, the very condition that we work so hard to fix in other groups? Will we be as sure of ourselves in the next election as we were in the last? All of these would be dangerous and just stupid.
“There are 33 Republican governors, the most since 1922. In 25 states now, Republicans have unified control of the governorship and legislature. Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire joined that club last November when the GOP took control of five more House chambers and two more Senate chambers. Today there are 4,195 Republican state legislators, compared to 3,132 Democrats.”
We cannot afford to be stupid the next time. The country cannot afford that.