As we begin to recover from our shock from the election, we need to form a plan of action to limit the damage over the next four years, and we need to make gains in 2018 and lay the groundwork for the next chance at the Whitehouse in 2020. To do that, we need to understand how Donald Trump could possibly have won. What we don’t need to do is start an endless cycle of blame. It won’t help to say this or that demographic group should have come to the polls in greater numbers, or that such and so wasted their vote. In this post, I don’t claim to have all of the answers, not by a long shot. What offer instead is a story that I hope raises some of the questions we need to be asking.
To begin, I live in New Jersey. I never finished college, but I was raised by two parents who earned graduate degrees and held professional positions. My brothers and I were raised to question authority by doing our homework, so facts and details are important to me. To a Trump voter, I think like a liberal elitist. I work as a customer service representative, so I spend my days talking to people all over the country, and I usually tell my customers as needed that I don’t discuss politics with them. However, on Wednesday, a customer said something I found interesting. She said she didn’t like Donald Trump, but she voted for him, and she was glad he won because Hillary Clinton scared her. At first, I found this incomprehensible, but I did not press her for details because that is not the job I was doing. But thinking about it later, I remembered something that happened in 2013.
In the spring of that year, my family and I made a trip to Williamsport PA for my daughter’s college search. Williamsport is home to the Little League World Series, but I didn’t see much else to recommend it. The city looked to me like a concentrated suburb, with the local Wallmart being a prominent feature, and no particular sign of any local culture. But my wife saw something quite different. She had lived briefly in Williamsport about 25 years earlier, and she had found it at that time to be a pit of despair. It is a town that would much rather be known for baseball than being home to a large alcohol and drug rehab center. But, in 2013, my wife was astonished at all the new construction she saw. Something had brought hope to this place, and the local economy was on the move.
Later, we found out what it was. We stopped at a local diner for lunch, and our waitress was friendly and talkative. I enjoy this kind of service, and would be happy to get her again if we were ever out that way. She told us in glowing terms what had happened to Williamsport and that part of Pennsylvania. In two words, natural gas. The natural gas industry, including fracking, had arrived, bringing plentiful good paying jobs, and it had saved people’s lives out there. To our waitress, anything the natural gas industry did was all good, because it helped her and everyone she knew. In the distant past, this had probably been coal or steel country, but those jobs were gone and never coming back.
Was our waitress racist or xenophobic? I have no reason to think so, but it is possible. She probably would not have said sexual harassment was OK if we had asked, and might even have had a story to tell. But I’m guessing she and many people she knew voted for Trump. It’s not hard to see why. I can sit in my New Jersey home and tell you all about the evils of fracking, and I can give you the facts to back it up. But that waitress would only find all of that threatening to the life she knows. She might have said that Hillary Clinton scared her, and this is why. When I think about this, I realize that the substance of the Clinton email scandal was not important in places like Williamsport. It did not matter that the FBI eventually finally declared that there was no basis for any criminal action. In Williamsport, what mattered was having some kind of cover to justify voting for Trump. The racism, sexism, and all of the other –isms might have made our waitress uncomfortable, but having something to blame Hillary Clinton for made a Trump vote easier on her conscience.
To recover from this election, we need to bridge the gap between the insular world of Washington DC and all of the Williamsports around the nation. Before we try to explain in loving detail why our ideas would be good for that waitress, we need to listen to her and address her concerns. Out of that may come new ideas, ideas that are good for both of us. We can certainly find solutions that are kinder and nobler than what Trump wants to do, but we did not do that this time. Instead, we put all of the Williamsports in a basket of deplorables, and tried to win without them. Now we know how that worked out. It is worth remembering that towns like Williamsport were once Democratic strongholds. We need to remember why, and get back to treating people there like part of our community.
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