This is a headline in today's online Boston Globe:
The "Leftover People" May Deliver a Win for Trump
Good heavens. Who talks about a sizable portion of their fellow Americans, a portion that may actually be large enough to "deliver" a win for one of the candidates, this way?
Well, it's been going on for a long time. Author of the Boston Globe article Mike Stopa describes these citizens this way:
The NASCAR-loving, country music-listening, culturally conservative working class doesn’t exist just in the Rust Belt or the South. It also exists in Massachusetts. These are the people whose salaries have ebbed as the 1 percent has prospered. These are, in the late novelist Carson McCullers’s words, the “leftover people.” They know, as The New York Times recently trumpeted, that the rich this year are voting for Hillary Clinton. They know they are not. And they might just win.
Once you get past the condescension implicit in the term "leftover people" (and getting past the condescension is becoming a full-time job these days), however, Stopa does an excellent job in capturing why so many American voters are angry:
Consider that the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows, by a 64-29 percent margin, that Americans believe that the country is headed on the wrong track. The principal components of that sentiment are legion.
Disapproval of the Affordable Care Act — the Health and Human Services reported last month that federal exchange premiums will rise by an average of 25 percent next year — is as great as ever. Voters are not convinced after six years that insuring the unfortunate really required the appropriation, increased cost, and constriction of everyone else’s health care plans.
Meanwhile, the prospect of rewarding illegal immigrants and their employers with amnesty strikes many Americans as deeply unfair to those who have waited and continue to wait in line — to say nothing of the unfairness to those Americans whose raises were postponed or whose jobs were taken as a result of lax border enforcement. Further, the extreme moral hazard of amnesty in a world where billions of people would happily come to America is frightening to many.
If Trump should win on Tuesday, however, the message will not be merely that a majority of Americans sought to change failing Obama-era policies. For Democrats, an equally critical issue will be that many working-class men and women — who, arguably, once made up their core constituency — will be among those voting for change.
These working-class voters have heard Trump say that he will bring mining back to coal country, whereas Clinton more highly prioritizes climate change. . . .
They have heard Trump talk “extreme vetting,” while Clinton calls for a 500 percent increase in Syrian refugees. And they know that the refugees are coming to their towns and not to Montgomery County or Westchester or Bel Air.
Certified lefty Thomas Frank has a remarkably similar take on why the Democratic elites are so unable to understand the people who once reliably voted Democratic.