Atlantic: Many Trump Voters Have Never Left Their Hometown

Your daily disparagement from your "elite" superiors working drudgey jobs cranking out clickbait for online websites.

According to the just-released PRRI/The Atlantic poll, 40 percent of Donald Trump’s likely voters live in the community where they spent their youth, compared with just 29 percent of Hillary Clinton voters. And of the 71 percent of Clinton voters who have left their hometowns, most—almost 60 percent of that group—now live more than two hours away.*

The effect is even stronger among white voters, who already tend toward Trump. Even a bit of distance matters: Trump wins by 9 points among white likely voters who live within two hours of their childhood home, but by a whopping 26 percent among whites who live in their hometown proper.

And speaking of Consistent Conservatives --

Why, I'm old enough to remember when Conservative Websites used to mock the media for crying "Angry White Men" or whatever the disparagement of the day was for people not voting the way they wanted, instead of dutifully joining in on the disparagement of Republican votes.

Remember when conservative (or "conservative") writers used to write articles castigating the left for its "oikophobia," its casual venom for everyday Americans?

Here's how Charles Krauthammer described the leftist venom for their fellow Americans in 2010:

Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Now that seems to have changed: It is now the accepted position among much of our intellectual class that if we don't stop Trump by electing Hillary, the shabby, uneducated gang of racists we call "Republican voters" will mainstream racism and antisemitism and demand that the White House seal be replaced with Pepe the Frog.

Speaking of "consistency," fellas, remember when we used to be pretty sure that the left's claim that the US was on the verge of anti-minority pogroms was a fanciful but politically useful paranoia?

Turns out that when this becomes politically useful for many on the right, they too seize upon it and use it as an easy line of attack against people who committed the grotesquely racist crime of disagreeing with another putative "elite."

As Krauthammer observed:

"Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. . . . What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument."

In the current moment, the GOP Establishment has lost the argument in the court of Republican primary electorate opinion, and so... resorts to the same tactics of deligitmization and dehumanization they once objected to when employed by the left.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

posted by Ace at 05:41 PM

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