Growth in white poverty fuels Trump’s run: Largely ignoring the trend has consequences

[uawchild]

The GOP overlooked the poverty that's spread to white suburbs — those neglected Americans turned to Trump

by ROBERT HENNELLY

here was Donald Trump standing on the platform center stage at the Quicken Loans Arena basking in the moment the highest paid minds in media and politics told us over and over he would never have. What accounts for his improbable rise and what does it say about where our nation is really headed?

Just how did our corporate news media miss the amassing of the millions of mostly angry white voters with their pitchforks and torches that helped Trump stage a hostile takeover of the GOP?

Could it be that the elites of both parties, and their media stenographers, ignored the plight of poor whites for so long that they missed the explosion in their numbers, even as they marched on the town square?

Certainly, people of such poor education and such low social circumstance could not impact the politics of a nation so wordily and wealthy as America. Perhaps, the oversight is understandable. After all, with no disposable income worth targeting, there was no reason to run any detailed analytics on poor whites, unless you were selling beer, guns and bibles.

The reality is that under the current Democratic occupant of the White House, and a Republican-controlled Congress, poverty has exploded and expanded from its traditional urban and rural concentrations into America’s white suburbs. This precipitous deterioration happened as beltway leaders of both parties put their partisan gamesmanship and personal enrichment ahead of attending to the increasing ranks of the nation’s poor and struggling working class of all colors.

In the early 1970s the country had well under 25 million poor people and by 2014, the more recent available data, it was approaching close to 48 million people. But the spike in the real numbers is only part of the story which could help to catapult Trump right into the White House.

According to the Brookings Institute’s “The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty” between 2008 and 2012 our urban poor population grew overall by 21 percent “while in suburbs it more than doubled, growing by 105 percent.” Almost every major metropolitan area in the country saw the number of suburban families living in high poverty and distressed neighborhoods go up.

http://www.salon.com/2016/07/25/growth_in_white_poverty_fuels_trumps_run_largely_ignoring_the_trend_has_consequences/

[independentpiney]

1. The whites I know who probably classify as poor seem pretty evenly split

in who they support, don't really like either and most probably won't be voting anyway. Most of the trump supporters I run into are middle to upper-middle class whites. Purely anecdotal and doesn't mean shit, I know, but I question the premise that poor non-rural whites are overwhelmingly going to show up and vote for trump.

[Ms. Yertle]

2. I just read this interview . . .

Even though this is from a conservative website, the interview with the author provides some insight into this.

Don't know if it's allowed to post links to sites like that, but I think there is some very valuable info in it. Well worth the read.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

[Skittles]

11. Donald Trump is not going to do ANYTHING for those people

[pampango]

3. "The GOP overlooked the poverty that's spread to whites - those neglected Americans turned to Trump"

So whites were mad at the republican party and they turned to a republican to solve their problems.

There is something wrong with that analysis or with the republican base.

[Act_of_Reparation]

4. There's nothing wrong with the analysis.

They're called "low-information voters" for a reason.

[uawchild]

5. They turned to an "outsider" not just another republican

They turned to the most republican-like "outsider" they could find, Trump. These people don't trust "the establishment".

If Bernie was our nominee and Paul Ryan was the republicans, I bet a lot of the current Trump supporters would vote, perhaps secretly, for Bernie. They are all about being fed up with "insiders".

[pampango]

6. I see Trump more as a 'billionaire conservative demagogue' than an 'outsider'.

He rants about foreigners/immigrants/refugees but wants to expand right-to-work, cut taxes for the rich and corporations, deregulate corporations, expand the military. If that is 'outsider', it is the kind of 'outsider' that the republican establishment can live iwth.

If Trump had not run or imploded early on, the republican base would have turned to the next "republican-like 'outsider'" they could find - probably Cruz - and not Bernie. It would not - and still does not - occur to them that historically, white poverty rates (and those of everybody else as well) have increased under republican and decreased under Democratic presidents.



http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm

[uawchild]

8. Interesting points. The RNC certainly sees Trump as an outsider though, doesn't it?

Thanks for the information.

As for turning to Cruz if Trump wasn't around, I take your point. But Cruz was not really hitting on the economic issue, so, forgive me I am a dreamer, I still feel working poor republicans might secretly have voted for Bernie if he were the nominee.

But of course this is just sheer speculation on my part.

[daleo]

9. Poverty fell a lot in the 60's and remained stable during the 70's

I suspect that's what Trump supporters are longing for, though I can't see him actually being an agent of positive change. Trouble is, the current establishment doesn't seem to care about the working and middle classes, though they occasionally make vague statements about there being a problem. He has been surprisingly successful in picking up on this underlying issue and giving the impression that he will do something. If he is elected, he's bound to be a big disappointment to followers that want to share the wealth of society more evenly. After all, he is a product of the very wealthy class, himself.

By the way, I think Obama has tried to be an agent of change, but he has been quite constrained by the intellectual tenor of the times (globalization is supposed to help us all, in the long run), and the reality of political fund-raising (the money largely comes from people who are not hurt by the continuation of the status quo).

I think we will see a slow retraction from the global capitalist paradigm, but it is hard to say how far and fast it will proceed, and how much good it will do in rectifying inequality.

[JI7]

12. he ran attacking the republican establishment that "rolled over" for a black president

so they see him as different or someone who will be different.

and he has credibility with them because of all the birther crap.

[coco77]

10. These Trump supporters have..

Their RepubliCON House and Senate to thank for that they wouldn't pass infrastructure or anything else because the President is blAck. They did this on purpose so that anger would be fueled in white communities.

[Solomon]

13. Those whites have no one to blame but themselves.

Always voting for assholes and not for working class issues because they want to be better than the brown and black.

[HereSince1628]

14. But, as you know, no one blames themselves.

They always look elsewhere.