THE VOICE OF THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS …THE USA SWUNG TO THE RIGHT IN 2016

Nov 18, 2016 News

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By: Sase Singh

Introduction
Rural USA swung to the right while the inner city democrats stayed at home. This situation caused one of the biggest upsets in US elections. The person whom I thought did the best job at explaining this entire scenario was Fareed Zakaria who said, “The victory was secured in Wisconsin which last voted red 32 years ago”.
I might add two other traditionally blue states helped, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which last voted red 28 years ago.
The Map
Donald Trump dominated the swing. What many people in the Caribbean community are failing to recognize is that even in hardcore blue counties like Queens and Brooklyn, there was a swing of more than 29,000 voters away from Secretary Clinton and in favour of President-elect Donald Trump.
This is not funny stuff. If in the county where you have your national headquarters (Brooklyn) you lost some 4,000 votes; then you have got a problem. It is like watching the PPP lose votes in Whim and Bath settlement in the 2011 elections and 2016 elections or the PNC losing votes in Linden in the 2006 elections, when Robert Corbin got a fine electoral “shellacking”.
So while people are protesting in cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, it is all empty sloganeering because many of these same people, when called upon to do minimal advocacy by voting, they stayed away from the polls. The evidence clearly shows in most of these cities with protest, compared to four years ago, the voter turnout was lower. So why protest now when you chose not vote.
As President Obama said to them, “do not boo; vote”. But clearly, they did not get the memo from the President or chose not to listen to him.
The 2016 elections are over. But there are important lessons for the Democratic Party to learn concerned this red swing in 2016 in several counties in hard core blue states like Connecticut, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire in favour of the Republican.
Too Many New Yorkers Do Not Know the USA
The post-industrial revolution has left large swaths of the USA behind. While President Obama can boast about having created some 10 million new jobs under his watch, most of these jobs were created on the East Coast and the West Coast. Well the USA is not the West Coast and the East Coast and there are millions of real living voters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who are catching hell and whom the Obama term did very little to help.
It is like the Granger administration boasting that it created thousands of new jobs in Georgetown, but at the same time actively destroyed thousands of jobs in the sugar industry and continues to wonder why the sugar belt will reject him overwhelmingly in 2020.
Politics is all local in a normal democracy. You can do the best possible job nationally, but if the goodies are not filtering down locally, you are finished.
Fareed Zakaria has released some very interesting data. He illustrated that under Obama, 8.5 million college graduates got new jobs, but for people with high school diplomas, there was only an increase in jobs for them totalling 80,000.
So the working class in rural USA and in the inner cities is still stuck in the 2008 depression. It is these people who were fired up with all the wild rhetoric from President-elect Trump. This is the fundamental point that the Secretary Clinton campaign missed and she paid a heavy price for being aloof and out of touch with the pains of rural USA and the inner city poor.

My Trip to Pennsylvania
I went to a small town called Coatesville in Chester County. Anyone who has been to Coatesville will know that there is a steel mill there that is a shadow of its former self. In its heyday in the 1970’s, there were more than 6,000 employees working at that plant; today the current employment is just over 600 persons.
After finishing my campaigning task, my colleagues and I went hunting for a local diner and we found one. When I asked the host what are some of the sites to see in Coatesville, she looked at me in bewilderment and then laughed. She said the only thing to do in Coatesville is to go to the local bar because this is a depression town.
My colleagues and I did go to the bar. But what I found in the bar was that the majority of the people in the bar were African-American. Thanks to Google, I found out that 50% of the population of the town was African-American and that the 40% of the people in that town are living below the poverty line.
I asked one younger Afro-American gentleman if he was going to vote and he said to me, “Hell no. What has Obama done for me in the last eight years? Nothing” The results of elections were an accumulation of such sentiments. Too many people born in America felt left out of the American dream that I have personally benefited from and this situation can cause some sense of resentment to us immigrants with our college degree.
The old timers tell me that this is the capitalist way, but the people do not have to accept this system, especially when it is not working for them.

Conclusion
So in the final analysis, I believe Secretary Clinton lost for a few good reasons:
1. She took the hard-core blue states like New York, Maryland and Massachusetts for granted.
2. She did not connect with the people, especially in the inner cities, where people are in real pain in places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburg. These cities have all helped her to lose these elections by staying home in their numbers.
3. She used the big guns like Barack Obama too late in the campaign to work the inner cities.
4. She failed to leverage the power of “bubba” and his saxophone. I once read a book called “Bubba between the Bushes” and it clearly illustrates the political prowess of William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton, the America boy. Bill Clinton is the man with the fairytale story who grew up in a single family home from a small town called Hope Arkansas. He is a living testimony of the American Dream. But he also has a loyal following especially among white women, a very important demography, who voted for Trump (53% of them).
5. She should have chosen Senator Bernie Sanders as her Vice Presidential Candidate.
6. Florida did not lose Secretary Clinton the elections; hard-core blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin did.

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