The are two persistent myths about the 2016 presidential election. The first is that economic anxiety cause whites to vote for Trump. Study after study has shown the real motivation was racial. Fears of loss of white privilege and a false narrative of "losing one's country" were what really carried the day for Trump. The second myth is that more votes went to Trump than had historically should have been the case. That myth falls apart when one looks at the shocking number of Americans who failed to vote. The black vote turn out was significantly down without a black presidential candidate with the result that blacks now have the most racist and anti-minority occupant of the White House in numerous decades. Add to this the Bernie Sanders crowd of "purist" who either staid home or voted for the likes of Jill Stein, a woman also seemingly in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The result, of course is a White House that is the antithesis of everything Sanders supporters claim to uphold. Talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. What's frightening with the Sanders crowd is that they appear to remain just as peevish and place far left ideology over winning elections. Trump and Putin must both be smiling. A piece in Forbes lays out how it was those who staid home and failed to do their civic duty and vote are the ones ultimately responsible for the Trump/Pence regime. Politics is about WINNING and selected at times the lesser evil. Staying home is NEVER an acceptable option. To say that I hold such individuals in contempt is an understatement. Here are article excerpts:
An astonishing spectacle of the election aftermath is the false account of why Trump won. The accepted wisdom is that Trump succeeded in awakening a popular movement of anger and frustration among white, blue-collar, less educated, mostly male, voters, particularly in non-urban areas. Trump promised them jobs, safe borders, and dignity, and they responded by turning out in masses at his pre-election rallies and eventually at the ballots, carrying him to victory.
This story is mostly wrong. Trump did not win because he was more attractive to this base of white voters. He won because Hillary Clinton was less attractive to the traditional Democratic base of urban, minorities, and more educated voters. This is a profound fact, because Democratic voters were so extraordinarily repelled by Trump that they were supposed to have the extra motivation to turn out. Running against Trump, any Democratic candidate should have ridden a wave of anti-Trump sentiment among these voters.
The story of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, then, is not the Trump Movement erupting in the ballots, nor the fable that some “Reagan Democrats” flipped again from Obama to Trump. The story is altogether different, and very simple: the Democratic base did not turn out to vote as it did for Obama. Those sure-Democrats who stayed home handed the election to Trump.
Take Michigan for example. A state that Obama won in 2012 by 350,000 votes, Clinton lost by roughly 10,000. Why? She received 300,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012. Detroit and Wayne County should kick themselves because of the 595,253 votes they gave Obama in 2012, only 518,000 voted for Clinton in 2016. Mote than 75,000 Motown Obama voters did not bother to vote for Clinton! They did not become Trump voters . . . . If even a fraction of these lethargic Democrats had turned out to vote, Michigan would have stayed blue.
Wisconsin tells the same numbers story, even more dramatically. Trump got no new votes. He received exactly the same number of votes in America’s Dairyland as Romney did in 2012. Both received 1,409,000 votes. But Clinton again could not spark many Obama voters to turn out for her: she tallied 230,000 votes less than Obama did in 2012.
This pattern is national. Clinton’s black voter turnout dropped more than 11 percent compared to 2012. The support for Clinton among active black voters was still exceedingly high (87 percent, versus 93 percent for Obama), but the big difference was the turnout. Almost two million black votes cast for Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Clinton. According to one plausible calculation, if in North Carolina blacks had turned out for Clinton as they had for Obama, she would have won the state.
Thanks to these lazy, irresponsible or peevishness in the case of Sanders supporters, America is enduring a national nightmare. Those too lazy or irrational to vote for Clinton need to be held accountable and Democrats must redouble turnout efforts in the lead up to November, 2018. So too must evangelicals who swarmed to Trump and confirmed what I have long known: they are utter hypocrites and morally bankrupt notwithstanding all of the feigned piety and hypocrisy filled sanctimonious posturing.
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