The white working class voters acted rationally in voting for Trump

Kyle Smith:
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The WWC is plagued by crisis within and without — household income in this group has been all but stagnant for 40 years. The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high-school education has increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. Opioids arrived and factories left. Democrats at best didn’t seem to notice; at worst they seemed to be causing misery by supporting NAFTA and mass immigration that drives down wages while imposing environmental policies meant to crush carbon-intensive industries. Then they mocked their victims as rednecks on the wrong side of history.

Williams isn’t interested in mocking her subjects. She is a liberal who is genuinely worried about the plight of the WWC. An admitted silver-spoon baby, she married someone she calls a “class migrant” — a guy from the working class (he’s an Italian-American from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) who earned a spot at Harvard Law School, where the couple met. Right away, she was unable to hide her fascination with his people. At a family dinner, his father took a dislike to her because Williams seemed to be studying everyone like an anthropologist.

At a high school reunion, her husband returned home still using the habits he had picked up in the upper class, and it led to an uncomfortable moment. “What do you do?” he asked an old classmate. When you’re a lawyer or a financier, part of the global professional class, it’s a perfectly innocent question. Elites love to talk about their jobs, indeed define themselves by their professions. Not so the WWC. They see work devotion as an indicator of upper-class narcissism. They do the bulk of the boring, repetitive, unglamorous work, some of it physically demanding, and they don’t define themselves by their labors at all. That classmate of Williams’ husband replied spitefully, “I sell toilets.”
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... To them, bicoastal urban America is a joke to which they don’t get the punchline. They feel excluded, marginalized, left out. Worse than any of this, they feel condescended to, and it infuriates them, Williams writes.

Hillary Clinton did a marvelous job of confirming their suspicions when she said — in New York City, at an LGBT event — that “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Being called names such as these is exactly what gets the white working class fired up. She might as well have told everyone from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, “Don’t vote for me.” Outside of Chicagoland, they didn’t.
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There is much more.

You can tell that Democrats still don't get how they alienated these voters and how they have also harmed them.  Democrats seem to prefer imported labor that is cheap to the skills of the white working class.

This piece is worth reading in full if you want to understand why Trump won and it has zero to do with Russian conspiracy theories which are another Democrat attempt to insult the intelligence of voters.

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