Saturday, October 13, 2018

Last Call For It's The Trumpconomy, Stupid

The NY Times notes that while college-educated suburban white women are bailing on the Republicans in huge numbers, college-educated white suburban men are sticking with Trump, and the reason is Trump's tax cuts have been very, very good for them.

White men without a college degree were Mr. Trump’s most reliable supporters, but they made up only 33 percent of his total vote. College-educated white men were also essential to putting him over the top.

One reason for their continued support now: White college-educated men have benefited unequally in the Trump economy. While the president’s favorite barometer of success, the stock market, is up 26 percent since he took office, individual stock ownership is concentrated among people in the upper income brackets, who are far more likely to be white. The Republican tax cut also delivered higher benefits to whites than to blacks or Latinos, according to a recent study.

These men, largely Trump voters whose support for him has solidified since his election, are business owners and sales executives, veterinarians and lawyers — men who largely wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally chanting “Lock her up!”

They may cringe at a president who humiliates cabinet secretaries and foreign allies, and who utters a stream of easily disproved falsehoods.

But many have quietly struck a bargain with Mr. Trump: They will overlook his trampling of presidential norms because he is delivering just what they want on the economy, deregulation, immigration and foreign affairs.

“He’s tough, he’s a bully, but boy things are getting done,” said JD Kaplan, who runs a graphics business from his home on a neatly landscaped block in Dublin, an affluent suburb of Columbus. Mr. Kaplan, 63, who is a Republican activist, moved years ago from northeast Ohio’s struggling Rust Belt, where a younger brother still runs Kaplan Furniture, a store their grandfather founded.

“Whether it was Obama who started it or not, the economy’s better,” he said. “I see my brother’s businesses are doing better, my graphics business is doing better, my wife’s got a better job.’’

Dublin is in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, where Troy Balderson, a Republican, squeaked out a 1-point victory in a special election in August.

Mr. Balderson is on the ballot again on Nov. 6 against the same Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor. The race has dropped out of the national spotlight it held during the summer, but the same dynamics are at work: whether Mr. O’Connor, an official in Franklin County, which includes most of Dublin, can attract enough votes in the suburbs to offset rural conservatives who favor Mr. Balderson.

Here, as elsewhere around the country, the vote has become largely a referendum on the president.

Interviews in August and on a recent return visit showed that while Mr. Trump is losing droves of white women with college degrees, many of their male counterparts now strongly support him.

They are country-club Republicans who long voted for business-friendly politicians like Gov. John Kasich, who represented the 12th District in the House and is the national face of never-Trump Republicans.

Trump has given country-club male Republicans basically everything they could have wanted from a GOP government, especially economically, and no matter how much of an autocrat he is, they will never vote for Democrats as long as the economy remains in the non "crashing and on fire" state it was in 2008. 

That's the big reason why Obama won, because the economy was so bad, even the country-club Republicans didn't think the GOP could fix it.  Once the bleeding stopped and Obama tried to regulate Wall Street even a little, these same Republicans turned on him, and Democrats got repeatedly crushed.

Like it or not, white Republican men still run the country and have since forever, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

It doesn't mean however that we can't vote their proxies out.

Just don't depend on them to look out for anything more than their own interests.

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