By Robert Field
While on vacation, we had time to reflect on why Donald Trump is polling so high with ‘gray’ and ‘blue collar’ Americans, and is apparently the candidate of choice of 25% to 35% of Republican voters.
Our decades of involvement with the construction industry gives us special insight.
President Barack Obama is a graduate with a Liberal Arts Degree from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard. The President speaks a fluent, letter perfect English. Everything he says comes across as well reasoned and highly polished.
Donald Trump took his undergraduate degree at a top business school (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) and spent his youth and a large part of his working life in the straight talking construction industry. Therefore he expresses himself in the manner that carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and other blue and gray color working class are used to.
His outlandish statements and torturing of the truth is part of his means of expressing thoughts. Twisting the facts are for Trump ‘poetic license’ for making points.
According to Wikipedia: “Trump runs on a highly populist platform that often appeals to the concerns of working-class voters who feels displaced by job losses and changes to America’s ethnic and religious demographics. He has made his opposition to political correctness and willingness to ‘tell it like it is’ a major component of his style. Trump’s anti-illegal-immigration politics have earned him support among working-class voters amid widespread opposition from Hispanics, business leaders, and other Republicans. Trump has also focused on reducing terrorism and has advocated for a complete ban on Muslim immigration, which has also produced widespread opposition.”
At a time when “working –class voter feel displaced by job loses and changes to America’s ethnic and religious demographics”, members of the lower middle class perceive him as expressing their feelings, as one of them. They have tired of President Obama’s subtlety and nuances.
These are hard working, decent folk of limited education who crave simple answers to complex problems. Trump tells them what they want to hear, how they want to feel.
To our shock, half of the responses to NewsLanc’s Facebook pages come from such people. They mean well, but they disregard, if they even grasped, the issues, and they flail out with their resentments and prejudices.
The fate of the next election and perhaps of the nation and world will depend upon just how many will continue to support Trump. They aren’t stupid. They just have other things to devote themselves.
For the moment, politics is a parlor game, not yet perceived as their and their children’s future. Hopefully in time they will begin to recognize that they and “The Donald” don’t have much in common since his goals are not their goals.
A benefit of the long, torturous elections campaign in the USA is there is time for this process to take place and public opinion to evolve.
