OPINION:
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — because she doesn’t have a record to run on (unless you count her pay-to-play success with the Clinton Foundation) — decided to attack her GOP rival Donald Trump as racist on Thursday, and perhaps even more disheartening, cast his supporters as white supremacists, neo-Nazi’s as well.
Nothing could be further than the truth.
Gallup did a massive survey released this month describing the Trump supporter and debunking many myths — the most prominent being all are unworldly, uneducated, poor, bigoted white folks.
After polling 87,000 people over the course of a year, it found Mr. Trump’s supporters earn relatively high household incomes, most are employed or run their own small businesses, and their jobs have not been affected by international trade or immigration.
Although they do have some economic anxiety, the overall feeling that unites them is a fear their children, and their children’s children, will not have as good of life as theirs.
That what a high-school education once was, is now a costly college degree. That growing up in one town all your life, and choosing to stay there, somehow makes you backward. That the church is losing membership, and wholesome shows on television — like “My Three Sons” — can no longer be found on the dial.
Mr. Trump’s message of “Make America Great Again” resonates with this crowd — it resonates with me. We are not racists, we are not xenophobes, we are not nativists. We had to Google what “alt-right” meant yesterday — if we even had the time between getting our kids ready to go back to school, work, buying the groceries and making dinner.
In traveling across the state of Pennsylvania, Salena Zito, a columnist at the local Trib Total Media, picked up on this vibe, too.
“While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you’ll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power,” she wrote.
“Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street board rooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile (many live in the same eight square miles that their father’s father’s father lived in),” Ms. Zito details.
“Thirty years ago, such people determined the country’s standards in entertainment, music, food, clothing, politics, personal values. Today, they are the people who are accused of creating every social injustice imaginable; when anything in society fails, they get blamed,” she wrote. “These Trump supporters are not the kind you find on Twitter saying dumb or racist things; many of them don’t have the time or the patience to engage in social media because they are too busy working and living life in real time.”
Ms. Zito is exactly right.
These are the folks Mr. Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway says is the undercover Trump voters, who are not recognized by traditional pollsters, because they’ve never really been politically active before. They’re also are worried if they say they support Mr. Trump out loud, or in a poll, they’ll be labeled a bigot.
Mrs. Clinton went as far as call them that yesterday. It was a new low in a very dirty campaign year.
I have no idea how large or wide Mr. Trump’s national support is — the polls could be an accurate reflection of his base. I do know, however, what that base looks like — it’s made up of everyday, working Americans concerned about their children’s future.
Not so different from you or me.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.