- Sat Aug 06, 2016 9:06 am
#75217
And this is from MSN
Eight years ago, they voted for the outsider, the excitingly different candidate who dared to say that the system wasn’t working, the man who spoke of hope and change.
This year, they’re voting for the outsider, the excitingly different candidate who dares to say that the system isn’t working, the man who promises to make America great again.
They are Obama-Trump voters, and though the concept strikes many people in both parties as kind of weird, the people making those choices say they’re being quite consistent. In 2008, they wanted someone to shake things up, put the focus back on the middle class, reverse the country’s depressing sense of decline and stick it to the powers that be. This year, they still want the same things.
When a silver-tongued young senator from Illinois electrified huge crowds at rallies across the country in 2008, Lynette Anderson, a high school teacher watching from home in Kenosha, Wis., thought: “This is a guy who can move mountains, especially on race relations. He wasn’t entrenched, and I felt he had nothing to lose. As the first black president, and someone pretty new to the Washington political game, I thought he would take care of stuff, break some china.”
But President Obama disappointed Anderson, who is now a guidance counselor at a pre-engineering high school. “He turned out to be the same old same old,” she said. The candidate who spoke eloquently on behalf of people who had been left behind by technological and economic change, who pledged to unite a polarized nation, turned out to be just another politician who couldn’t push through the paralysis in Washington, Anderson said.
She thinks Donald Trump can do that. “I trust him,” said Anderson, who is 51. She generally votes for Democrats in local and state elections; as a teacher, she finds the GOP too eager to cut efforts to lift children out of poverty and into career tracks. Her choice this fall has little to do with party and more with who will find a way forward for the nation’s middle — people like her who make $100,000 a year but feel like the country is building a future designed just for rich people. She is looking, she said, for strength.
“Trump could clean house,” she said. “It has nothing to do with him being a billionaire, and I know the president doesn’t have carte blanche to change things, but Trump’s got some muscle to make people make deals.”
Even amid the chaotic tribulations of the Trump campaign in the weeks since the Republican convention, a solid base of supporters has remained devoted to the candidate. These core voters say Trump’s controversial comments about the parents of a fallen Muslim American soldier, sexual harassment and Republican Party leaders don’t diminish their support but rather bolster their belief that Trump, like Obama eight years ago, is the candidate of change.
Survey data doesn’t provide a clear picture of how many Obama ’08 voters are in the Trump camp this year but the data indicates the more millenniums learn about Hillary Clinton, the more inclined they are to support Trump as the outsider.
- By johnforbes