These Lifelong Democrats Voted for Trump and Aren’t Sorry "Bonnie Smith was one of the unlikely participants in that unforeseen realignment that happened across the Great Lakes region in hundreds of communities like Ashtabula County, flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa into the Republican side of the electoral college after serving as what journalist Ron Brownstein dubbed the reliable industrial Democratic “Blue Wall” for decades. More below. How Democratic was Smith, and how recently? In March 2016, she voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primary contest. Voting Republican wasn’t even on the table for her, until suddenly it was, just a few months later.
“I am not sure what happened, but I started to look around me, and my town and my county, and I thought, ‘You know what? I am just not in the mood anymore to just show up and vote for who my party tells me I have to vote for,’” she says. She was not alone. Ashtabula County had given its votes to John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Michael Dukakis. It gave Barack Obama a 55 percent majority share of its vote twice—before turning 180 degrees to prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, a 31-point swing from one election to the next. At first look, the numerical magnitude of Ashtabula’s swing, in a nation presumed frozen in partisan polarization, is what seems notable. At second look, the remarkable aspect is just how common that kind of change was in 2016 in the states that make up the Rust Belt." The problem for the Democratic Party is that most of the Democrats outside of the hardcore environmentalist, feminists, racialists, genderists, and the LGBT alphabet soup crowd are voting against their interest when they vote Democrat. Now that gays can marry and most of the other real social issues have been tamped down, it is difficult to convince middle America that they are racist, sexist, xenophobic, gun clinging deplorable rubes who need to vote Democrat against their interests. The Midwest just shifted and will not shift back, particularly since Trump is keeping his promises and forcing the Stupid Party® to agree. The 2018 election will be a shocker both for establishment Democrats and Republicans. Americans in the Midwest have awakened, and are not interested in progressive politics as usual. The 120-year stranglehold the progressive movement has held over American politics is likely to break down during this election and the next Presidential election. "For Smith, who lives with her husband, George, on a working farm in nearby Saybrook, the political tipping point—even more than the job losses and the decay of the area—was a result of her faith and her growing disconnect on cultural issues from the candidates she had previously supported. “I had looked the other way for far too long, had accepted that I was supposed to be more modern in my views when I wasn’t comfortable with the views my party started to take,” Smith says, making clear that this was a difficult decision to have made and to discuss publicly. “And I took a stand for myself, my beliefs, for life, and for my country.” She says she also took a stand for her community: “All of this decay has happened under their [the Democrats’] watch.” The shopping district where Legally Sweet sits is struggling; a Family Dollar store is around the corner, and the majestic Ashtabula County courthouse, where she worked for years, is across the street. Shuttered businesses dot both sides of the street." The lunatic social issues of the progressive far left are the crux of the matter, most of middle America is, for example, uncomfortable with the idea that there are an infinite number of genders and people can change gender at will, but that men are oppressors and women the oppressed. These social issues are illogical; further American's will not long tolerate a rigged "heads I win, tails you lose system." Hillary's inability to come to terms with her loss point out the problem quite succinctly. She blames everyone except herself. Some in her campaign go so far as admitting that she should have addressed the economic issues more forthrightly especially in the Midwest. But even these issues would not have won the day. The base problem may be the economics of the Midwest but as Smith says, "I had looked the other way for far too long, had accepted that I was supposed to be more modern in my views when I wasn’t comfortable with the views my party started to take,” Smith says, making clear that this was a difficult decision to have made and to discuss publicly. “And I took a stand for myself, my beliefs, for life, and for my country.'" The economic issues form the base, but it is the antiscientific, culturally destructive social issues which those like Smith can no longer ignore. The Democratic Party cannot survive if it retains these whacky social issues, middle America will no longer hold if the Democrats retain this nonsense. On the other hand, the lunatics who believe the -isms will revolt if the Democratic Party so much as back burners these issues. People like Smith want women to have every opportunity, and to be able to achieve just like men, but they do not believe men and women are identical, nor are they offended if someone notes that on average men are taller or stronger then women or that women are the sex which can birth babies. To real people, who are not idiotic social constructs of the postmodern, neo-Marxist mass movement, these ideas are normal, scientific, and reasonable. The normals are shocked that the postmodernists illogically argue contrary. American's are incredibly tolerant and willing to extend goodwill but in the end, reason, and enlightenment values will always win out in middle America. The progressive movement is about to run aground on the shoals of middle American sensibilities, reason, logic, and enlightenment values. This has been a long time coming, but middle America will only take a short time to shift away from these irrational ideas. Once the paradigm shift becomes obvious, it will quickly spread across much of America including the more reasonable parts of the Clinton Archipelago. Any serious international conflict will accelerate this shift. I predict that we will see a shocking political realignment over the 2018 midterm election and the 2020 Presidential election. The shift will begin cleaning out the progressive establishment deadwood in the Republican party and reducing the Democratic Party to a whacky far leftist fringe limited to the furthest reaches of the Clinton Archipelago. If the Democrats do not wake up, they will be reduced to a far leftist fringe rump. There remains a chance that the Republican Party will split with the NeverTrumpers and the Middle America parts of the party separating. The Middle America Party would attract the people like Smith who are conservative and uncomfortable with the social issues in the Democratic Party.
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