"I don't want some female who wants her agenda"
by digby
The NY Times checks in with the most important people in the whole world and guess what? They still love them some Trump:
What I want from a president is the rest of the world to look at him and go, ‘Don’t mess with that guy, he will get even,’” Mr. Franks said one morning in the Yankee Kitchen in Vienna Township, Ohio. “I don’t want kinder, gentler. I don’t want some female that wants her agenda.”
Surprised? I'm not.
Matt Borges, a former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, said a fundamental demographic realignment has taken place under Mr. Trump. “We’ve traded off suburban Republicans who may never find their way back to the party for that white working-class traditional Democratic voter, who has been more and more alienated from their party’s rhetoric,” he said. “Is this a long-term gain for Republicans here? Yes.”
About 40 percent of the union autoworkers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, voted for Mr. Trump, which was twice the support for Republican presidential candidates in the past, said Tim O’Hara, vice president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, which represents the factory.
He said very few were abandoning the president, even after the plant, which made the Chevy Cruze, laid off thousands of workers in three waves since Mr. Trump’s election. At a rally in Youngstown in 2017, the president promised the jobs in shuttered factories “are all coming back,’’ urging, “Don’t move, don’t sell your houses.’’
Mr. O’Hara advised Democratic presidential candidates not to waste breath trying to win back union voters who supported Mr. Trump.
“I don’t think those Trump people are going to flip back, even if it’s Joe Biden, who has a lot of support in this area,” he said. “I think they’re dug in on Trump. Whatever happens, they’re going to go down with the ship with him.”
These are not the kind of people to admit they were wrong. They are the same people, after all, who would rather forego benefits for themselves and their families than allow racial minorities to have them as well. They are a large subculture of Americans that goes all the way back to the beginning. It is xenophobic, nationalistic, overwhelmingly white and extremely defensive about its culture, demanding that they be allowed to dominate no matter how many others disagree with them. It used to be concentrated in one region but it's now dispersed throughout the exurbs and rural areas of America.
That is not to say that all the people in those areas fell that way. There's this report today as well:
Donald Trump’s aides and allies are moving aggressively to shore up his support in three Rust Belt states that propelled him to the presidency — but where his own polling shows him in trouble heading into 2020.
Trump will travel to Pennsylvania Monday for a rally that comes after recent visits to Wisconsin and Michigan, two other states at the center of his reelection strategy. Those appearances are just the most public display of his team’s efforts to fortify his standing.
Behind the scenes, they've rushed to the aid of languishing state Republican Party machines and have raised concerns that a potential GOP Senate candidate in Michigan could hurt the president’s prospects there. They are also scrutinizing the map for opportunities to fire up his base in the trio of states.
The moves come at a time of growing anxiety over the geographic linchpin of his 2020 hopes. The Trump campaign recently completed a 17-state polling project that concluded the president trails Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, according to two people briefed on the results. America First Action, the principal pro-Trump super PAC, is expected to conduct its own polling and focus groups in Pennsylvania and Michigan later this summer.
He only won in those states by 77,000 votes. Any erosion is bad news for him even if the vast majority of his supporters still worship him.
So, all is not lost. But it's going to be a battle. These people are not living in the same reality that we are.
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