President-elect Donald J. Trump: the electorate
In the fourth-of-five in the fifth installment of a five-part series analyzing each Presidential candidate’s policies, Samantha Lindsay dissects the electorate.
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Written by Samantha Lindsay
The following report is the fourth-of-five in the fifth installment in a series presenting a comparative analysis of select legislative proposals that were a part of the platforms of the two major candidates in the 2016 presidential election; Democrat (D) Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican (R), Donald J. Trump. In the four previous installments published before the election, I addressed the candidates’ positions on the issues of paid family leave, the economy, gun control, and the Affordable Care Act.
This series is not an endorsement of either candidate.
Trump’s Electorate and the Media
Who are the people that voted for Donald Trump?
In spite of the media’s failure to address the issues in this campaign and the subsequent failure of the polling agencies to accurately predict the outcome of the election, many people on both the “right” and the “left” think they know the answer to that question. What they believe is not flattering.
On Feb. 23, Glenn Beck, a writer for The Blaze and contributor to the National Review posted a status update on his Facebook page characterizing Trump’s supporters as “Brownshirts.” The characterization is a reference to Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany where some particularly violent members of the Nazi regime wore brown shirts. Beck’s characterization of Trump’s supporters set the tone of his election coverage, during which he frequently compared Trump to Hitler. Meanwhile, at the National Review, Kevin Williamson and David French wrote a series of articles wherein they declared that white working class communities, which they claim form the heart of Trump’s support, are drug addled and deserve to die.
Not to be outdone, on Sept. 10, the Associated Press reported that Hillary Clinton, in a speech at a private fundraiser, declared “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorable(s). They’re racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic; you name it.”
These are all shocking allegations that fit right into the scandalous narrative promoted by the media. According to CNN, 62,516,883 people voted for Trump. If the critics are correct about these voters, then we are in deep trouble as a country. In this past election, they made up 46.4 percent of the entire electorate. But, is it true? Are Trump’s voters all of these evil things? Do they deserve to wear these “scarlet letters” used to label them? Perhaps the answer to that question can be found if we discover why they voted for Donald Trump.
The next part of this installment will focus on Trump’s electorate and the issues.
Edited by Ben Webb
Featured image by DonkeyHotey on Flickr, obtained using creativecommons.org
