EVEN WITH THE GOP’S STRONG POSITION, THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR THE DEMOCRAT’S FUTURE

…Trump took the credit, but VP elect Governor Pence pulled off the Carrier save

 

The three states that gave Trump the electoral win, did it with a combined total of only 78,800 votes out of 134 million.

 

OK, the Republicans now run the White House, the House, the Senate and they will probably have the Supreme Court after Trump nominates a new Justice to replace Scalia.   As to the different states, 32 of 50 have Republican Governors, and the Republicans run 32 of 50 state legislatures.

 

As one writer put it, “The Democrats are in danger of moving from complacency to panic. Neither would be particularly helpful.”

 

This is pretty sad for a party that out-voted the Republicans for president in the popular vote by over 2.6 million votes (so far), a record for someone that did not win the election.

 

What is really sad is that the winning margin in the three states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that gave the electoral college to Trump was only a total of ~78,800 votes.  That’s out of 134 million votes that have been counted so far.  The amount of people it took for Trump to win these 3 states would just about fill one of today's NFL stadiums.

Therefore, even though the American public across the board did not want Donald Trump.  Enough of those white working class Americans in the important states in the rust belt of America, they gave the presidency to Trump, so he is now our “liar-in-chief”.

 

As just one example of the lies, Trump said he wasn’t going to use incentives to keep jobs from leaving the country.  He was going to instead have a 35% import tax put on every piece of equipment that was sent from an American company building products outside the US. 

 

However, the big deal he pulled for keeping one division of the Carrier air conditioning company in the US was actually implemented by the Vice President elect, who is also still the governor of Indiana.  The state of Indiana is now giving Carrier an annual tax incentive of $700 thousand to keep ~700 Carrier jobs in Indiana.  But Carrier is still sending another Indiana plant’s product to Mexico, costing another 1,300 jobs.  Indiana alone has lost over 147,000 jobs to countries outside of the US since the year 2000.

 

In addition, Carrier’s parent company United Technologies, is a major government contractor.  They have been concerned that if they didn’t come to some conclusion about keeping this Indiana division in the US, it would affect their major business opportunities within the US government.  This is also a key symbolic win for Trump to demonstrate that he was going to keep a company from going out of the country, even if it is being done exactly the opposite of how Trump said he was going to do it.

 

The problem here is that the individual states, and the US government, do not have enough money to offer all the companies that want to relocate out of the country, due to the high labor rates in the US.

 

So, what are the Democrats going to do, being that they have become such a minority party in all the political areas of the US government?

 

Even though this is what the current positive state is for the Republicans, there are some good signs that the nation is in a position for serious changes.

 

The massive popular votes for Clinton do speak to other future opportunities. It reflected a shift toward the Democrats in Sun Belt states with large minority populations that are likely to continue. In Texas, Clinton got over 560,000 more votes than President Obama did in 2012.  And while Trump ran 4.6 percentage points behind Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing. Trump also fell short of Romney’s percentages in California, Arizona and Georgia.

 

The Democrats’ big Sun Belt problem on election night was Florida. Both major-party candidates received more votes there than both the 2012 nominees, but Trump’s gains were significantly larger. If Democrats are looking for a state to fret about in their postmortems, Florida should be at the top of the list.

 

Trump’s narrow wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (unless they’re miraculously overturned in recounts), plus his large victories in Ohio and Iowa, have the Democrats now focused on the white working class.

 

But, in a recent New York Times opinion article by Mark Lilla, a Columbia University political philosopher, he wondered if this election was the “the end of identity liberalism.”   But hopefully, the Democrats focus on America’s white working class won’t take the attention off of, or being advocates for, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, immigrants and women or to back off from their commitments to gender equality.

 

Liberalism offers Democrats long-term advantages both in the Sun Belt and among America’s younger voters who will eventually own the future.

 

A panicky abandonment of their core commitments is the last thing America’s Democrats need.

 

On the positive side, the Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, has urged the Democratic party to re-engage with rural and small-town voters.  In addition, the formation of a Blue Collar Caucus in the House was announced this week by Reps. Brendan Boyle, an Irish Catholic from Philadelphia, and Marc Veasey, an African American from Fort Worth.

 

This sends exactly the right message. Progressive’s embrace of social and economic justice is about lifting up the left-out across all of our dividing lines.

 

It must be noted that this is exactly what is needed for the party’s first steps toward having a political recovery.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016