Scoffing at credulous Trump voters is not a winning political strategy
On one side of the debate, a rather old-fashioned brand of centrist liberals advocate a sort of operatic pity towards his disproportionately white and male supporters who were sold a working-class agenda on which Trump will never deliver. On the other side, many angry liberals openly celebrate Trump-supporting coal miners potentially losing their health insurance under the GOP’s ill-fated American Health Care Act. Serves ’em right, the thinking goes.
.. The thought that poor whites are poor because of their bad decisions has a brother: that poor blacks are poor for the same reason, as Williamson has also argued.
.. Or, one could weave some sympathy for poor whites into a stark moral condemnation of white racism precisely because “prejudice and blindness” has put poor whites “into the position of supporting your oppressor,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.
.. Lack of uncomfortable talk about more taxes also helped with fundraising and a general party strategy of rolling up votes in wealthy suburbs. Her advertisements had the least policy content of any presidential campaign going back until 2000 at least, and by far. All that implicitly allowed Trump to own the issue of trade and jobs.