Of course, Jon Stewart makes his classic “both sides are bad” argument. It seems it hasn’t occurred to him that his good buddies may not be as candid around him as he believes:
Many logical and rational Americans understood what Trump’s Make America Great Again, a recycled Reagan slogan, truly meant. Naturally, the Fourth Estate, the media, NEVER pressed the orange-hued fan of tyrranical dictators for specifics, on anything. Let’s face it, Great is White in alt-Right, Trump’s America. Sadly, we knew we were fighting the battle against what…
It’s gonna be a long eight years.
OK, a couple of things: Those insurance premiums? They would have been much higher and bought much less actual coverage without the ACA, which Trump has pledged to repeal, so maybe those guys in Jon’s neighborhood should read a little.
And I’m kinda sick of hearing about “Trump voters” like they are some newly minted white working class uprising whom we ignore at our peril. Trump got around 60 million votes, just like Romney and McCain did, even with the larger population we have compared to those previous elections. We lost the election because we didn’t show up and vote. Last I checked, Hillary had about 62 million votes, and we knew that was not enough to beat a Republican after the gutting of the VRA. I heard someone say last night that it was 100,000 votes total that lost three Midwestern states, and that the crosscheck voter purges were larger than Trump’s margin of victory in at least three states. We knew about those tactics before the election, and still eight million of us stayed home. Which was the Republican strategy from Trump’s nomination forward: make the election so gross, stupid, and ugly that enough of us wouldn’t want to participate to allow them to win with the same 60 million votes they can count on turning out every time.
My point is that I believe we should turn our attention to figuring out how to get our own voters to show up and vote, even in the mid terms, at the levels we saw in ’08 (almost 70 million) or even ’12 (65 million). I’m not saying we should ignore white working class voters (I’m one of those) or fail to attract them with policies that help them, but get this: we already do that. My situation as a white working class voter will not improve because of a Trump (or Republican) administration, instead, I’m set to lose a big chunk of my health insurance, and I live in a state mired in a five year long drought that is not being helped by climate change,
Perhaps sweeping generalizations about classes of people should be guarded against, but so should the invention of entire classes of people for political ends. /rant.
I agree – Trump squeaked in thanks to a rigged system and a lot of tomfoolery on the part of red state’s election boards. We have no way of knowing if machines were hacked in Ohio because they turned off ballot imaging and audit logs – features they had paid a lot of money to get. So’s wtf is up with that? NYT? Wapo? Purging voter registration rolls, vote caging, removal of hundreds of polling stations and throw the FKD up electoral college system in for good measure. Add billions of dollars worth of free advertising in for Trump and a ridiculously long campaign season with zero candidate vetting of the GOP side. FBI interference and decades worth of character assassination of the Clinton side.
But it’s all Hillary’s fault because she was a poor candidate.
We’ll see what happens, but I’m inclined to like what the Dems are in the process of doing. The guy running against Pelosi would have my vote because he comes from the rustbelt and knows what’s happening in those states, Warren and Bernie now have platforms from which they can speak out strongly for the progressive left, and Schumer is smart enough to know how to win districts across this country by supporting Rep.Ellison for the DNC chair, Muslim or not (which,BTW, is probably a pretty damn good thing, given trump’s proclamations regarding Muslims. The thugs are already trying to smear Ellison, which ought to tell us something about their fear of him as the DNC chair.) Just saying……………