But Donald Trump won by campaigning on making the election a referendum on President Obama’s failed economic policies.
.. Middle class voters, especially in “flyover country,” came to believe on November 8 that the Obama administration’s economic recovery was the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Peter J. Ferrara of the Heartland Institute.
.. But more than half of that supposed decline during the Obama Administration was due to the equivalent of about 7.5 million Americans giving up looking for a job or dropping out of labor force. Furthermore, the current level of part-time employment, at 18.3 percent(about 27.8 million), is a higher percentage than at any time since the Great Depression.
.. Friedman observes: “Liberals are concerned with inequality. People in the lower-middle class are simply concerned with making enough money to live a decent life. They are two very different things.”
.. Friedman credits Trump for also understanding that “these people had lost the culture wars that had been waged for the past generation.” Their churches and parents raised and taught them “gut values.” The pride that comes to the lower- and middle-class from working hard and making a good living for their families was lost had been displaced. In order to be politically correct, the “values they were taught as children could no longer be expressed in public.”