Like many small towns in America, Cleburne has a main
street. I traveled down its Highway 67
and marveled. Store after store was
vacant. The streets had so many potholes
that it made Los Angeles look pristine.
Real estate prices are minuscule compared to Southern California
prices. One can buy a large home for
less than one can buy a condo in California.
During one of my visits, I visited a donut shop. I walked in and was amazed that the inventory
was extremely low and the selection very narrow. I noticed that the heating and air
conditioning was off. The lights were
off as well. I was helped by the
owner. No employees appeared on the
premises. This shop was barely making
it. I made my purchase and walked out of
the shop and looked at vacant store shop after vacant store shop and wondered
where did everyone go? The stories that
I did not know about those who left concerned me. Where did they go?
Cleburne’s stories are not isolated to Cleburne. My wife and I once traveled from Cleburne to
Waco along the back roads and went through small town after small town, all
with lots of vacant storefronts.
My experience with California is not the same. The closet situation existed twenty years ago
with a town called East Palo Alto. The
main highway in the Bay Area Peninsula is Hwy 101. On the west side is Palo Alto, the homes of Stanford
University and Silicone Valley. But on
the east at the time was East Palo Alto, a depressed area with a high crime
rate. It had small shops similar to
those of Cleburne. Then a number of
large box stores, such as Ikea, came in and the area changed. People who avoided the area started to shop in
East Palo Alto. New homes were built
there and Silicone Valley employees began to buy there. The area was reborn and the question became
where did everyone who lived there before go?
In California suburban areas when storefronts go bust, some developer comes in and
reconstructs a strip mall. The new investors tend to be corporations and wealthy investors.
Fiat Chrysler has announced that the Dodge Viper will be
discontinued. That has great meaning for
Detroit. The home of the automobile will
loose its last manufacturing assembly plant within Detroit proper within the
next year. That raises a key question
for all the auto assembly workers from Detroit.
Where did they go?
I shared these experiences with my sister-in-law from
Cleburne. She told me the story of a
machinist she met. He works two jobs and
supports a family and has barely enough.
He has not voted in many a presidential election, but this November he
made sure he voted, and he voted for Trump.
The people who are the subject of the many dislocations that
our economy has experienced over the last twenty to thirty years are still
there. An analysis of the voting patterns
of rust belt and other mid-western states indicate that those who we may wonder
where they went are still there. It also
appears from the voting data that they came out from wherever they went and voted
for Trump.
RealClearPolitics tracked sixteen battleground states. Hillary Clinton won six of them. The average percentage difference or spread
from the last polls and her actual results among all six was a negative
0.2%. In essence, she underperformed her
predicted wins in these six states by 0.2 percentage points. Though she bettered her predicted performance
in Nevada by 3.2% and Colorado by 2.0%, she barely won the Democratic
stronghold of Minnesota by 1.5% when she was supposed to win it by 6.2%, a
swing of 4.7% in Trump’s favor and a swing larger than the margin of error of
most polls.
This swing towards Trump was replicated in other battleground
states. He won the remaining ten by an
average swing of 3.65%. In essence, the
pollsters predicted that his margin would be 3.65% less than it turned out to
be. Trump was predicted to win Missouri
by 11.0% and he won it by 19.1%, a difference of 8.1%. Wisconsin had a 7.3% difference and Iowa had
a 6.5% difference. Again, many of these
results were greater than the margin of errors in the underlying polls. Therefore, the probability that the polls
reflected late deciders may not adequately explain why the polls fell short on
election eve. The real explanation is
that people came out to vote for Trump who normally would not vote in a
Presidential election.
Understand that this voter is not in the voting models of
contemporary pollsters. Current voting
models start with a base from the last election and project off this base. If a major voting block failed to vote in the
last election, pollsters assume that they won’t vote in the coming one. But this election had a major voting block
that did not register with the pollsters.
Trump appealed to this voter by talking about the American blue-collar
worker. He blamed their troubles on bad
trade deals, automation, and a host of other things. They came out from wherever they are to vote
for him. He is now their hero.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post called this voter the
“angry white voter.” There is a problem
with the term “white” since Trump got more Blacks and Hispanics than Romney and
some of these groups share the “angry” characteristic. But if this is true then the question to ask
is why? There is one significant
difference between this voting group with others. This voter lost and lost a lot. This voter is not wealthy or part of a
corporation. These are individuals with
not a lot to support a family. Other
emerging voting blocks have unmet aspirations such as college for kids and some
semblance of economic promise, much of which has now been delayed. But the angry voter lost much of that and
disappeared waiting for someone to speak to them directly, and that person
turned out to be Trump. They hurt, and
he reminded them that they are in pain. Whether
you like him or not, Trump knew they were there and what to say to them.
This voter is from the old economies of the Midwest and
rustbelt states. Without the electoral
college we may never have known about this voter, and Trump would have returned
to his penthouse in Trump Towers. Our
future would be in the new economies of the coasts, and the last hope for the
angry voter would have been lost. But it
was not to be, and now Trump has to mend two economies, one new and one old
into a single national economy.
In the final analysis, this election was about economics and
not about character. Clinton appealed to
her voters on the basis of race and gender politics, and Trump handed her the
evidence that supported her argument on a silver platter. It was a strong argument. And a great many people bought into it with
all of their emotions and hopes, and these people are crushed. They do not see the wisdom of the Electoral
College and believe that the plurality of four million votes in California and
its high-tech economics should overcome Trump’s two million vote plurality in
the other forty-nine states, many with an old rust-belt economy. One person I met distinguished it as the
United Peoples of American versus the United States of America.
In the end Clinton failed to see the economic pain of what
should have been her constituency. These
are Democrats with a large “D”. Her staff advised her to go to these people
and reassure them that they were being heard, and she did not.
This country is divided and each side feels extraordinary
pain. And each side should respect the
pain of the other.
Here is the rub. If
Trump fails to give this lost and hurting voter that is still there the
economic promise that he promised, they will come out from wherever they came
from and vote again. Only this time,
they will vote against him out of lost hope and even greater anger.
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