Trump voters said they were angry about the economy – many of them had a point
Trump voters said they were angry about the economy – many of them had a point
If real, inflation-adjusted wages are up, then why are millions of Americans so down about their economic prospects?
Unpopular opinion: blaming the voters is counterproductive. It's important to understand why they voted (or abstained) the way they did.
Yes, some percentage of voters are indeed racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. But hypothetically, another percentage are people who were unhappy because of economic reasons and felt they were presented with two bad options:
- an unreliable candidate who acknowledged they were unhappy
- an unknown candidate who said they were wrong and should just be happy
Is this hypothesis correct? I don't know, but just assuming the voters are ignorant, or just saying that leopards will eat their faces, isn't productive.
But the ongoing theme is that “voters voted on the economy” and if you do just the smallest, tiniest bit of research of on one of those magical rectangles we all have in our pocket it’s blindingly obvious that Trump is probably going to screw it all up.
It’s like everyone turned on Fox News for half an hour and went “yup, this is our guy.”
We can blame crappy education, but my barely functional public school at least taught us to do our own research at least to some degree.
I’m not saying the campaign was perfect, but we have to assert at least some effort on the part of the voters — how do you vote for someone only having seen the news or a manufactured social media feed, c’mon.
No, most people decided neither option was good enough. Trump destroyed the economy, Biden finished it off. Harris lies to voters and said they were better off than they were under Trump, which isn't true for any group of voters.
So if Harris doesn't even see a problem, she's not going to help. Trump is a liar but at least sees there's a problem. At worst nothing changes regardless of who gets in office using this reality. At best maybe Trump accidentally does something good.
Harris, by deciding to lie about the Biden economy and ignore the economic reality the majority of Americans are experiencing, effectively eliminated herself as a candidate. She explicitly and implicitly stated she doesn't care about and will not improve economic conditions.
Harris ran the same campaign as Clinton, plus genocide. She failed worse than Clinton. It was predictable, guaranteed really.
Shouldn't be an unpopular opinion
With fascists in control, are we sure productiveness is a concern? GL with fascism when shits unproductive as fuck.
People who are upset about high prices and stagnating income do have a point. People who think that prices will go down because they were lower last time Trump was president fail to understand cause and effect at a fundamental level and have me thinking some undemocratic thoughts.
I think these people are gonna get a reality check when the tariffs kick in, the dollar continues rapid devaluing, etc.
Deporting half the farm workers will surely reduce the cost of groceries.
A lot of them won't. They'll keep blaming whichever minority they think of, or simply be mad at higher prices without actually ever analyzing where those higher prices came from. We saw it in 08, we saw it after COVID, and we'll see it now.
They got $1200 last time, surely it will happen again
I guess they really wanted a recession so they are going to get one.
Yup, a lot of donvict's fans were actively cheering one on during Biden's term so that they could get power.
Ironically, they just might get a really, really bad one. But during donvict's tenure.
The economy is good but all the money is going to the rich. “Quick, let’s elect the rich guy who campaigned with the other really rich guy to help us get our fair share.”
Yep. Dumb as a box of rocks.
But no, no one should blame voters that "think" like this...oh no.
So that's a way of saying the economy is bad that starts off with a lie.
The economy is working as it was rigged to do and by most measures, it’s good, but it doesn’t work for most people. Trump is not going to help that because it’s people like him (and also directly him) who rigged it to work like that.
Democrats need to understand that due to our complete shit education, most Americans don't understand how a budget works much less the nuance of economic indicators.
It shouldn't have been hard to understand that all of the median income earners did get a wage increase of did not keep up with the massive inflation cause by Trump's botched response and price gouging and talk to it directly.
I know we made fun of VP elect couch fucker when he made that video of egg prices but again, Americans aren't bright or observant. They just got told that eggs are four bucks a dozen, most Americans will latch on and remember that yeah, egg prices were high so that means they're high right now, despite just having been at the store earlier in the week. Democrat should have been heavily pushing back on that, but they didn't. The lie is now truth.
He was mocked because the prices were literally visible behind him in the video, contradicting him
And yet here we are.
FTA:
...for at least 20 million U.S. households, there is good cause for disillusionment. The method the federal government uses to calculate real incomes tends to capture the economic realities of higher-income people better than those of working-class and middle-class Americans.
While I don't disagree that the BLS has some issues with calculations they tend to just lump everyone in the overall report, they do provide a breakdown of non-supervisor wages.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000030
Wages increase by 17% across for rank and file.
Another study from last year that looked at a breakdown from that and found low wage workers wages increased by 12%
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
But again, when inflation, everyday Americans don't feel like they're actually making headway, which I can understand because I've been there growing up and Democrats need to be a lot move vocal about that and talk to the working American about that
the nuance of economic indicators
I think people understand the nuance of pseudo-scientific political numbers being eternally massaged and engineered to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The shit education is that people actually believe this grift is science.
Biden has had nearly 4 years to fix this and did nothing that's changed our material conditions. All while telling us we are not struggling.
Let's see, not the biggest fan of Biden or Democrats but you've got to be a completely dense to say something like that.
Biden economy increased wages for rank and file by 17%, he's helped get unions back up of the ground, he's helped get a shit ton of American manufacturing jobs including getting Taiwan to build a American chip fab going, he and his admin got inflation down without a recession, he got climate change initiative going.
If you're still bitching about egg prices, well have I got bird flu for you.
Did he do everything that progressives wanted, no and of course that is annoying. Was Harris time deaf when she answered the "I wouldn't have done anything differently" when asked about the economy, yes. But to say nothing has changed is complete bullshit and not grounded in reality and you really need live in actual reality.
Edit: just to reemphasize, Democrats suck ass at messaging and publicly and vocally having the workers back.
This does a good job of pointing out how the economic models that show things are going well are outdated and inaccurate.
All the folks who claimed that statistics should be enough to convince people the economy is good should read it to see how wrong they are.
Whatever happened to the Misery Index? We need to maybe start up an American Happiness Index because international things (like the OECD better life index) are not trusted by the magabrainz and so we'll have to stamp something highly performative of their identity politics on it....
So let me get this straight.. telling people who are struggling financially and can barely make ends meet 'No you aren't! You're just too stupid and uncultured to understand these numbers!' doesn't get you their vote and even can make them vote for the other guy!? Who would have thunk!
Biden got inflation under control. He passed the CHIPS act. Average wages rose. Dems want to raise the minimum wage. Unions had a renaissance during Biden’s tenure.
Trump voters are lying. They voted for Trump because they are racist and misogynist and they mistakenly think he will lower their taxes.
Those that sat out the election were the real problem.
I’m angry about how bad the economy is, so I’m going to vote to make it substantially worse.
Trump voters when reading this article:
"Economists argue that Republican nostalgia for the economy under Trump’s first term is largely misguided (https://apnews.com/article/trump-economy-biden-election-president-e3a153c9b0c615ea6e0f2afb91cdc785). However, the GOP’s pessimism over current economic conditions resonated with voters." (who were wrong, and will suffer from #47's policies economically and in many other ways - I hope I'm wrong)
Historically the economy fairs better under democrats than repubs. I'll be happily surprised if this is not the case. And, like so may others I'm looking for ways to spend money between now and Jan 17, in the hopes that I won't have to spend as much when the tariffs raise the price of things. Hmm, what will I need to spend money on now, so I don't have to spend any for the next 4-6, or more, years. smh.
If they really cared about fixing the economy they'd be progressives.
Every bad thing their own president does to them is justice. Every bad thing he does to others is injustice.
There’s a big fucking difference in my mind between voting for Trump and not voting. I know the electoral math makes those choices roughly equivalent, but in terms of personal motivations, there is a difference.
This is, to be frank, a big step in viewpoint for me. Before the election, I was all “staying home is a vote for Trump”. I was doing my best to be pragmatic. But I cannot deny that the DNC shit the bed SUPER HARD here. And thus, I cannot deny the fact that there’s a BIG difference between “I’ll vote for the party that’s gonna fuck me over more rapidly” and “I don’t want to vote for either party that’s been fucking me over for close to two decades”.
There's not one single reason when the election went the way it did, just like there is not one demographic that made the election go the way it did.
But the argument "It wasn't the economy. The economy is great, just look at these numbers [published by the government]!" is just politicians falling for their own rhetoric.
The US governments have been skewing official statistics for decades. I've lived through decades of "Oh, X is fine" when my lived experience has been quite the contrary.
I suspect that a significant source of D's sitting this election out is similar to a lot of R's thoughts: "You've ignored us for decades telling us that things are getting better, but they never do. We're done. Burn it down."
Maybe they don't expect things to get better after this election, but maybe their hoping that spreading the suffering will prompt more people to demand change as well.
Just a thought.