Last Call For Class(less) Warfare

With John Kasich dropping out of the 2016 race and leaving Donald Trump as the GOP nominee,
Nate Silver puts a definitive end to the ridiculous notion that Trump's rise was ever about "working class anger".

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy. Trump voters have lower incomes than supporters of John Kasich or Marco Rubio. And things have gone so badly for the Republican “establishment” that the party may be facing an existential crisis. 

But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

In other words, the people putting Donald Trump up as a "new" voice for America's middle class are delusional.

Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median in all 23 states, sometimes narrowly (as in New Hampshire or Missouri) but sometimes substantially. In Florida, for instance, the median household income for Trump voters was about $70,000, compared with $48,000 for the state as a whole. The differences are usually larger in states with substantial non-white populations, as black and Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly Democratic and tend to have lower incomes. In South Carolina, for example, the median Trump supporter had a household income of $72,000, while the median for Clinton supporters was $39,000. 

Ted Cruz voters have a similar median income to Trump supporters — about $73,000. Kasich’s supporters have a very high median income, $91,000, and it has exceeded $100,000 in several states. Rubio’s voters, not displayed in the table above, followed a similar pattern to Kasich voters, with a median income of $88,000. 

Many of the differences reflect that Republican voters are wealthier overall than Democratic ones, and also that wealthier Americans are more likely to turn out to vote, especially in the primaries. However, while Republican turnout has considerably increased overall from four years ago, there’s no sign of a particularly heavy turnout among “working-class” or lower-income Republicans. On average in states where exit polls were conducted both this year and in the Republican campaign four years ago, 29 percent of GOP voters have had household incomes below $50,000 this year, compared with 31 percent in 2012.

So no, it's not about working-class voters at all.  It's about angry voters who are buying Trump's nasty message about bigotry, racism, and Islamophobia.

This is now the Republican party.

It was never about class.  It is about putting those people in their rightful place, beneath Trump and his supporters, in America's power structure.

Brick House Fight

The White House is set to announce in June that part of Greenwich Village near the iconic Stonewall Inn will be designated as a national monument dedicated to the modern gay rights movement.

President Obama is poised to declare the first-ever national monument recognizing the struggle for gay rights, singling out a sliver of green space and part of the surrounding Greenwich Village neighborhood as the birthplace of America’s modern gay liberation movement.

While most national monuments have highlighted iconic wild landscapes or historic sites from centuries ago, this reflects the country’s diversity of terrain and peoples in a different vein: It would be the first national monument anchored by a dive bar, surrounded by a warren of narrow streets that long has been regarded the historic center of gay cultural life in New York.

Federal officials, including Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, National Park Service director Jonathan B. Jarvis and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), will hold a listening session on May 9 to solicit feedback on the proposal. Barring a last-minute complication--city officials are still investigating the history of the land title--Obama is prepared to designate the area part of the National Park Service as soon as next month, which commemorates gay pride.

The protests at the site, which lasted for several days, started in the early morning of June 28, 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn, which was frequented by gay men. While patrons of the bar, which is still in operation today, had complied in the past with these crackdowns, that time it sparked a spontaneous riot by both bystanders and those who had been detained.

While national monument designations are partly symbolic, backers of the move said it could bolster the fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which led to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

I really do love me some last year Obama.

Trumpmare Scenario

People are, at best, lukewarm when it comes to Hillary Clinton, this is true.

But people completely hate Donald Trump, as Greg Sargent tells us.

And a new CNN poll out this morning underscores how deeply flawed a nominee he is likely to prove. The poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Trump nationally by 54-41. 

But more important, the new CNN poll finds Trump is viewed unfavorably by 64 percent of women; 73 percent of nonwhites; 70 percent of voters under 35; 67 percent of college graduates; and 57 percent of moderates. Those are mostly constituencies the GOP had hoped to improve among. And while it’s often rightly pointed out that Clinton is disliked, she fares substantially better than he does among most of those particular groups, who will be pivotal to Clinton’s hopes of reconstituting the Obama coalition this fall. 

And on top of all this, the CNN poll shows that Trump is also viewed unfavorably by 37 percent of conservatives, suggesting the possibility that some might potentially support a third party challenger, or if no such challenge materializes, at least stay home. 

Obviously those numbers could change over time. But Trump — who is plainly susceptible to allowing the giddy highs of victory to cloud his capacity to reason — is not showing any awarenessthat the general election audience might see his antics differently than GOP primary voters do. And if Trump’s numbers among key voter groups, including conservatives, continue to tank — which could very well happen, once Democrats get serious about unleashing a sustained national attack on him — that could pose a stark choice for GOP officials and Republican lawmakers up for reelection amid a presidential year electorate, in states carried by Obama.

If even half of those 37% of conservatives don't vote for Trump, on top of the rest of those number, he's done.  Like, Hillary Clinton gets 400+ electoral votes in November done.

And I can see that happening, given Trump has six more months to open his mouth and keep making things worse for himself.

Donald Trump stood by his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Wednesday, saying he doesn’t care if it hurts him in the general election. 

“I don’t care if it hurts me,” the presumptive GOP nominee said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday. “I’m doing the right thing when I do this. And whether it’s Muslim or whether it’s something else, I mean, I have to do the right thing and that’s the way I’ve been guided.”

“And I've been guided by common sense, by what's right," he continued. "And you see what's happening. We have to be careful. I mean, we're allowing thousands of people to come into our country, thousands and thousands of people being placed all over the country that frankly nobody knows who they are. They don't have documentation in many cases — in most cases. And we don't know what we're doing.”

Please proceed, jackass.

StupidiNews!

• More than 50,000 residents of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada have been ordered to evacuate as a massive wildfire consumes homes and businesses.
• President Obama will visit Flint, Michigan today as the city's drinking water remains contaminated with lead after months of promises from GOP Gov. Rick Snyder.
• Dozens have been killed in a major battle in Aleppo, Syria as rebels backed by the West clash with forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the western part of the city.
• As automakers and tech companies team up to spend billions on driverless cars, new studies show the vast majority of Americans don't trust the technology to work, and don't want it.
• Federal authorities are considering additional charges against former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli over alleged embezzlement and fraud.