trump blue collar supporters

The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump

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Unless something dramatic happens (certainly possible in this election), I believe Donald Trump will win the 2016 election quite easily, and I believe this victory will be driven by the resentment vote. Forget card-carrying Democrats and Republicans, they will vote along party lines. The key to this election is, and always has been, independent voters. I believe the following chart from Gallup tells you all you need to know about who will decide this thing:

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By definition, most of the 43% of Americans who identify as independents have serious misgivings about the two-party system and its so-called “luminaries.” As such, both Trump and Clinton should be battling aggressively for this key voting bloc. Unfortunately for Hillary supporters, only one of them is. The other candidate is rallying the status quo from both parties under one large, oligarch-funded tend of cronyism, militarism and business as usual. Earlier this week, I highlighted how the resentment vote against mainstream media would play a key role in tipping the scales to a Trump victory (see: The Death of Mainstream Media). Today, I want to look at how the resentment vote also targets the two-party political oligarchy.

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Middle Class Destitution – A Devastating Tale From America’s Heartland

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He had made the drive enough times to already suspect what he might find. Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food. Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled.

“These jobs aren’t the solution so much as they’re part of the problem,” Lewandowski said, and now the result of so much churn was becoming evident all across Indiana and lately in Huntington, too. Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Poverty was up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up. Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her three-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.

“Despair is our business, and business is booming,” Lewandowski said…

“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”

“It’s pure greed.”

“They wanted to add another 6 feet to their yachts.”

“We’re becoming like a third-world country. We’re going to have nothing left but fast food.”

“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”

– From the Washington Post article: From Belief to Outrage: The Decline of the Middle Class Reaches the Next American Town

I write a lot about the middle class. It’s been one of the core themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception, yet my posts tend to be filled with statistics and sarcasm, and often lack the crucial element of heart. In order to truly connect with the public and shift their sentiments from apathy to action, it’s imperative to create a deep emotional connection. I admittedly have not done a great job in this regard. Fortunately for all of us, Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has done just that.

I read a lot of articles, and I can’t remember anything that hit me as hard as what he published this past weekend. It tells the tale of the spirit-crushing decimation of the American middle class through the lens of eternal optimist, Chris Setser. Chris is a man who always went above and beyond in order to provide a good life for himself and his family. Working the graveyard shift at an Indiana United Technologies plant so that he could be home when his kids came home from school, Mr. Setser lived his entire life living by the mantra: “Things have a way of working in the end.” Until they didn’t.

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