I Don’t Care That The Average Trump Voter Made $70,000

So there’s a meme right now. That the average Trump voter isn’t poor. That they make $70,000. Let’s challenge that for a moment. Not the fact itself. But whether or not it actually matters.

That $70,000 is purely averages. Maybe, on average, they make $70,000. And yes, maybe, Hillary won slightly over half of poor working people. Sure. But when we’re talking about demographics containing millions of people, even a couple of percentage points can matter greatly. Even if Trump only got 44% of the poor vote (hypothetically), if we could have made that 42%, he’d have lost. Handily. That’s important.

I want to say there’s no excuse for nearly half of poor working people to vote Trump. But that’s bullshit. There’s plenty of excuses. NAFTA fucking hurt people. Let’s stop pretending it didn’t. Running a Clinton who championed NAFTA is not going to work for these people. A lot of these people still hurt. And forgiveness while you’re still being affected is called permission. That’s a Clinton vote to them.

I spent time talking to Trump supporters. I flipped a few of them. Mostly to Stein (who I don’t even like!), because they would not even consider Clinton. And I’ll note, this was in Ohio. Many of these people voted Obama. They wouldn’t vote for Clinton, no matter what. What I didn’t do was say they were actually comfortable, that their pain was invalid. That won’t work, no matter how many times you try.

You can throw numbers about healthcare coverage or unemployment statistics in their face. But you’re denying their lived experience.

Stop.

Leaning on averages in these interactions is a gamble, because averages often don’t even reflect most of the population. Every single billionaire counterbalances hundreds of people making nothing. Somebody underemployed whose healthcare went up 75% doesn’t give a shit that 90% of people are now covered. They care they’re broke. Someone in a town with 30% unemployment doesn’t care that Obama’s dropped unemployment to 4.whatever percent. Telling them that coal is dead, that they should just learn another trade? That’s no different than “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

These people need help. And when nobody is actually offering to help them meaningfully, they make bad, reactionary choices. All your identity politics tactics work perfectly here. Because, surprise, “destitute” is an intersection of identity. Listen and believe. Whether or not you want to admit it, there’s a class war. And you can’t sit out. Choose which side you’re fighting on. Let’s stop talking about rejecting identity politics. Let’s simply acknowledge that class is a meaningful part of identity.

Let’s stop talking about rejecting identity politics. Let’s simply acknowledge that class is a meaningful part of identity.

It doesn’t matter if the average Trump voter made $70k. We should have fought harder for the 50% that made less than $70k. And more importantly, we should have fought very, very hard for the 20% that made effectively nothing. If Hillary won every Trump voter with an effective $0 income, she’d have won by a landslide. But that’s the thing: She’s not a candidate that appeals to people making $0. She’s a champion of “welfare reform.” Of NAFTA.

Could she have appealed to those voters? Absolutely. But that would have meant acknowledging and apologizing for her role in orthodox policies. The fact is, her gross refusal to acknowledge the harm she caused was an explicit statement that she’d continue to cause the same harm. These people aren’t stupid. They get it. In identity politics, do we forgive people that haven’t owned the violence they’ve caused? No. Let’s just acknowledge that the millions of Obama voters who didn’t vote Hillary didn’t make that choice because they’re racist. Hillary Clinton had numerous opportunities to appeal to those people.

She failed, of her own accord. She spent time fundraising with Goldman Sachs and George Clooney, while spending no time whatsoever in Wisconsin. There was voter suppression in Wisconsin. That’s a real issue. But, there’s no reason a strong Democratic candidate should not have been able to engage Wisconsin voters and offer them solutions for their very real problems. Holding a Jay Z and Beyoncé concert isn’t going to change the fact that the water in Michigan is fucking poison. It’s no surprise some 90,000 Michigan voters didn’t even vote for President, while voting down-ticket.

Hurt people hurt people. We know this. Let’s talk about how we stop the hurting, instead of chastising victims for making bad choices.

Worse, disregarding entire swaths of America abandons very put-upon people. People of color, LGBT people, all the people identity politics should be protecting, those people live in Middle America, in poor, rural areas. If you a) focus on identity politics, and b) think we should disregard Middle America, what you’re saying is that you only care about marginalized identities if they live in hard blue states. Fuck that.

We need a more comprehensive, more inclusive identity politics. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party didn’t bank on a coalition of the marginalized. She banked on a coalition of the 51%. That kind of gamble meant everyone lost. Now we’re sitting here, picking up the pieces, and people are making the exact same mistakes.

Do we need to all empathize with the alt-right? Fuck no. Do we need to acknowledge that this packaged, corporate, smile-to-marginalized-identities-while-actually-offering-nothing-of-substance message simply didn’t resonate with enough people, and maybe ask why that is and what we could do better? Absolutely.

This isn’t about abandoning (insert marginalized group of your choosing) for the “white working class.” This is about acknowledging that we’re all in this together, and people we’re actively hurting are under no obligation to support their abusers. It’s about recognizing that in the absence of better choices, people will make bad choices.

You might have been able to rationalize your “lesser of two evils vote.” But you have to understand that not everyone was willing to do the same mental gymnastics you were. And when you sat down and connected point A to B to C to D to E to tell yourself Hillary Clinton wasn’t that bad, that was on you. The rest of America didn’t make those same connections, and didn’t make that choice. So many people spent so long grinding their gears to justify that choice, when we should be asking ourselves, “why do we settle for candidates we have to bend over backwards to justify?” The answers to that question are why she lost. Why we all lost.