this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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True, I might be projecting what I've seen in my own country as a member of a small left-wing party whilst observing the younger generation in the party who are almost all middle class children of the middle class and who, unlike me, did not experience how it is to grow up in the poor working class (and hearing stories of crushing poverty from my parents who both came from very poor countryside families).
Whilst, thanks to my country being far more fair and equal than the US, I had the opportunity to get a degree from a good University and theoretically am now middle class, all I need to do to remind me of how the working class thinks is talk to the vast cohort of uncles and aunts I have (the younger generation are mainly like me and got degrees) and all I need to do to understand how it is to grow up without my own room in a house in bad state were people counted every cent is to remember my earlier childhood.
But yeah, maybe the truly poor (rather than the recently squeezed types who grew up in middle class families in a proper house and not having to sleep in the living room) in the US are amazingly different from those in my home country and hence my experience and observations are not applicable.
There are people in poverty who support trump, for example, I have a neighbor who does, and even when I point out to him, the GOP, are trying to prevent him from getting their insulin, he just said "that isn't true". So I showed him it in writing, from a GOP source, and he said "well, they will come up with some other way, for people like me, to get their insulin". I bet this happens, because democrats block everything until there is some way for this to happen, and then he thanks Trump. Because things like this happened under Trump, repeatedly.
However, most of the people I know with disabilities, chronic medical issues, are minority groups, have a lot of people who were pushing for Harris, because the GOP was literally running on a platform aim directly at ruining their lives. These people range in beliefs, they aren't all left wing, but they aren't stupid enough to vote their lives away. While most of the people I know, who support trump, are middle classed, trades/white collar people with decent salaries, and wealthier people. In my poor city, in my neighborhood which has a large project housing development, is deep blue. When you get out into the suburbs, with their McMansions, is where you start seeing the Trump signs. Most of the poorer people I see who, support Trump, are in rural areas, and being in the rural areas has a lot to do with why they stay poor. Recently though, a lot of the blue collar guys, in this region, got hit with a loss in compensation due to their manufacturing companies preparing for the onset of the Trump tariffs. They are mad, but I don't know if they are mad at Trump/GOP, or they are going to blame democrats/immigrants/etc., like they did when a car manufacturing plant here closed, after Trump promised a subsidy to keep it open, then didn't do that.
I live in the SW PA, SE OH, N WV, Appalachian region, many people are poor here. Like some of the poorest people in the US. Parts of WV are literally seeing third world conditions.
Well, it's that kind of awareness that I would like to see more here.
A lot of people here that just a week ago were making Vance + Couch memes and mindlessly repeating the "Not voting is the same as voting Trump" slogan whilst their candidate wouldn't move a muscle to make herself appealing to the working class are now raging about how the 14 million who didn't vote are to blame rather than the person they uncritically supported and of whom they demanded nothing at all, who was making no effort at all to appeal to anybody but the hard right.
It's those I feel are disconnected from the wider reality of being somebody who is living salary to salary and sees no way out of that for themselves or their children.
The people being squeezed extra hard are ready to grab anything that looks anywhere like a lifebuoy and plenty of those are ignorant and gullible so easily swayed by snake oil peddlers like Trump whilst the ones who are not gullible are probably as distrusting of the Democrats as they are of Trump (and probably thing something along the lines of "they're all liars").
My point is that these are not the people whom a candidate from a party who mainly does what's good for the rich will convince to vote for her solely on the slogan "Not voting for me is voting for Trump" and saying that "Transsexuals will be in danger if Trump is elected" all the while cozying with the hard right in her party like Dick Cheney and claiming to be anti-racist whilst supporting and extremely racist Genocide in Palestine (even if people don't personally care that much about Palestinians, they're still reading the character of the candidate and saying one thing whilst doing the opposite in quite an extreme way is hardly going to make the candidate be trusted when she makes any promises).
(From my own personal political experience, the biggest blindspot of the typical party member - who are generally very tribalist - is the expectation that, as they themselves trust their party leaders completely and hence immediately believe anything those leaders say without even a minimum amount of analysis and checking for logic and consistency, so does everybody else, thus in the absence of a deep down understanding that other people are not starting from a position of unquestionable trust of that party's leader, they're totally lost as to why the party doesn't perform as expected and people aren't as supportive of it as they should given all those great things the leader says).
Lots of people here expect that all those people out there value the same things as they do, feel as they do about various subjects and trust one candidate and distrust the other as as much as they do themselves, hence "logically" (on top of such ridiculous and wholly disconnected axioms) the loss is all the fault of those people for not voting, not of their party's candidate for not trying to appeal to them or of themselves for uncritically supporting a candidate that is not doing do what is needed to win (at times quite the opposite) even though it was right there in front of her and wasn't even that much of a risk.
Unsurprisingly and judging by the results, this was less a Trump win than it was a Democrat loss.