THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform
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shared by Javier E on 23 May 16
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How Facebook Warps Our Worlds - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...facebook-warps-our-worlds.html
facebook social network shaming groupthink fragmentation partisan epistemic tribal conformity crisis culture
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We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.
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I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want
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“And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”
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prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make
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The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is
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there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.
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So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.
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Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.
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The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.
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We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it
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Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
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We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
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Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
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It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower
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What We Are Hearing About Clinton and Trump - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...g-about-clinton-and-trump.html
news politics media election crisis culture 2016 campaign candidates perception
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we can assume he wants his statements and actions to be seen and heard, to attract attention. The evidence is clear that they are. The public may be getting no more than a superficial understanding of Mr. Trump’s positions on key issues or how he would implement them as laws if he is elected, but the public clearly is repeating back to us what he intends for it to hear.
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By contrast, it’s clear that Mrs. Clinton and her campaign team have not wanted her handling of emails to dominate what Americans have been taking away from her campaign over the past two months
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it may not matter exactly why Americans are so likely to recall reading about Mrs. Clinton’s email situation week after week. Its looming prominence in the public’s mind has become a reality, and it has the effect of superseding public awareness of her policy speeches and statements about issues.
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the public may be learning about the candidates’ temperament, character, personality and health issues, but from what they tell us, Americans aren’t getting much in the way of real substance.
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The moderators of the coming series of debates will most likely focus directly on the candidates’ positions on issues. This may shift what Americans tell us they are learning about the candidates, and if so, it could signal a significant upgrade in the way the process is working. But that also means that a lot still depends on the candidates themselves and how they end up shaping the contours of the debates
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What Americans recall hearing about Mrs. Clinton is significantly less varied. Specifically — and to an extraordinary degree — Americans have consistently told us that they are reading and hearing about her handling of emails
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If Mr. Trump talks about Muslim parents and their son who was killed in action, that’s what the public remembers. If he goes to Mexico or Louisiana, that’s what they recall reading or hearing about him. If Mr. Trump calls President Obama the founder of the Islamic State, “ISIS” moves to the top of the list of what Americans tell us they are hearing about the Republican candidate.
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Since July we have asked more than 30,000 Americans to say exactly what it was they read, saw or heard about the two major party candidates over the past several days. The type of information getting through to Americans varies significantly depending on whether the candidate in question is Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton
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The continuing research, conducted by Gallup in conjunction with University of Michigan and Georgetown, found that since early July more than seven in 10 Americans read, saw or heard something about at least one of the presidential candidates in the days before the daily interviews. On some days that number rises to over 80 percent and has never, even on weekends, fallen below 60 percen
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With a few exceptions, namely Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, Americans have little recall of reading, hearing or seeing information about the policies of the presidential candidates or their positions on issues. Our research shows instead that in the case of Mr. Trump, Americans monitor his statements, his accusations, his travel and his events, and in the case of Mrs. Clinton they report mainly hearing about her past behavior, her character and, most recently, her health.
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Trump, Taxes and Citizenship - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ump-taxes-and-citizenship.html
citizenship taxes trump individualism community culture politics
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You can be a taxpayer or you can be a citizen. If you’re a taxpayer your role in the country is defined by your economic and legal status. Your primary identity is individual. You’re perfectly within your rights to do everything you legally can to look after your self-interest.
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Within this logic, it’s perfectly fine for Donald Trump to have potentially paid no income taxes, even over a long period of time
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As Trump and his advisers have argued, it is normal practice in our society to pay as little in taxes as possible.
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The problem with the taxpayer mentality is that you end up serving your individual interest short term but soiling the nest you need to be happy in over the long term.
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A healthy nation isn’t just an atomized mass of individual economic and legal units. A nation is a web of giving and getting. You give to your job, and your employer gives to you. You give to your neighborhood, and your neighborhood gives to you. You give to your government, and your government gives to you.
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If you orient everything around individual self-interest, you end up ripping the web of giving and receiving. Neighbors can’t trust neighbors. Individuals can’t trust their institutions, and they certainly can’t trust their government. Everything that is not explicitly prohibited is permissible. Everybody winds up suspicious and defensive and competitive.
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this is exactly the atomized mentality that is corroding America. Years ago, David Foster Wallace put it gently: “It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries — we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie.”
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It continues with a sense of sweet gratitude that the founders of the country, for all their flaws, were able to craft a structure of government that is suppler and more lasting than anything we seem to be able to craft today.
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The citizen enjoys a sweet reverence for all the gifts that have been handed down over time, and a generous piety about country that is the opposite of arrogance.
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Out of this sweet parfait of emotions comes a sense of a common beauty that transcends individual beauty. There’s a sense of how a lovely society is supposed to be. This means that the economic desire to save money on taxes competes with a larger desire to be part of a lovely world.
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In a lovely society everybody practices a kind of social hygiene. There are some things that are legal but distasteful and corrupt. In a lovely society people shun these corrupt and corrupting things.
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In a lovely society everyone feels privilege, but the rich feel a special privilege. They know that they have already been given more than they deserve, and that it is actually not going to hurt all that much to try to be worthy of what they’ve received.
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You can say that a billionaire paying no taxes is fine and legal. But you have to adopt an overall mentality that shuts down a piece of your heart, and most of your moral sentiments.
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That mentality is entirely divorced from the mentality of commonality and citizenship. That mentality has side effects. They may lead toward riches, but they lead away from happiness.
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Female Clinton Supporters Are Left Feeling Gutted - 0 views
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The Hidden Scars All Refugees Carry - The New York Times - 0 views
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Many people have characterized my novel, “The Sympathizer,” as an immigrant story, and me as an immigrant. No. My novel is a war story and I am not an immigrant. I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in some corner of my mind
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Immigrants are more reassuring than refugees because there is an endpoint to their story; however they arrive, whether they are documented or not, their desires for a new life can be absorbed into the American dream or into the European narrative of civilization.
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60 million such stateless people exist, 1 in every 122 people alive today. If they formed their own country, it would be the world’s 24th largest — bigger than South Africa, Spain, Iraq or Canada.
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By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves.
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Today, when many Americans think of Vietnamese-Americans as a success story, we forget that the majority of Americans in 1975 did not want to accept Vietnamese refugees
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For a country that prides itself on the American dream, refugees are simply un-American, despite the fact that some of the original English settlers of this country, the Puritans, were religious refugees.
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For people like my parents and the Syrians today, their voyages across land and sea are far more perilous than the ones undertaken by astronauts or Christopher Columbus. To those watching news reports, the refugees may be threatening or pitiful, but in reality, they are nothing less than heroic
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It is understandable that some do not want to speak of their scars and might want to pretend that they are not refugees. It is more glamorous to be an exile, more comprehensible to be an immigrant, more desirable to be an expatriate. The need to belong can change refugees themselves both consciously and unconsciously, as has happened to me and others
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it is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.
Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ness-in-the-working-class.html
dignity sadness working class crisis culture suburb life-cycle
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What Trump Exposed About the G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Rather than a pragmatic fixer-upper, Mr. Trump now seems likely to be the vehicle through which the ideological right achieves its decades-old dream of undoing the Great Society and the Warren and Burger courts. But the victory that made that possible was based explicitly on identity, not ideology.
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One of the odd things about Mr. Trump is that he has brought back J.F.K.’s “trust me” mode in a kind of unhinged parody. His plans are neither detailed nor ideological: He will replace the Affordable Care Act with “great plans” and negotiate better deals.
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What’s the alternative to ideological or identity politics? Before Reagan, politics had been largely technocratic, substituting expertise for ideology. “What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy,” John F. Kennedy said in 1962. Experts would address “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.”
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign was identity-focused as well, in the more traditional sense, defining the country as a happy cosmopolitan polyglot,
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But ideology can also be hard work — most people don’t have the time or inclination to decide if they are “liberal” or “conservative,” and what that means, or to fight about it.
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Ideology had formed a kind of a comforting curtain around the more intractable divides of race and identity. Ideological conflict, as deep and irresolvable as it often seems, at least in theory, lends itself to persuasion and compromise
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Ideology can help structure people’s engagement with politics, giving them clear preferences organized around a few core values.
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Consider immigration, the concept that drove both the Tea Party and the Trump campaign. For most of the long campaign, the media thought that it was about immigration policy: comprehensive immigration reform versus border security and deportations.
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. It’s why Mr. Trump found his strongest support not in areas most affected by immigration but in aging states with the lowest number of foreign-born residents, such as Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin, where immigration is mostly a distant symbol of otherness.
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The election of 2016 is the culmination of this ideological era, but ironically reveals its hollowness. The politics of 2016 breaks entirely along lines of identity: first race or ethnicity, followed by gender, level of education, urbanization and age.
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Ever since the election of Reagan 36 years ago, American politics has been marked by profound ideological division, increasing polarization and often paralysis.
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The election of Donald J. Trump will bring as sharp a turn to the right as this country has seen since at least the election of Ronald Reagan — thanks mainly to the rare conservative control of Congress, the presidency and, before long, the Supreme Court.
What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era - 0 views
When Republicans Take Power - 0 views
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The Democrats' Real Turnout Problem - The New York Times - 0 views
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In the simplest terms, Republican turnout seems to have surged this year, while Democratic turnout stagnated. The Republican surge is easiest to see in those same heartland states that flipped the election.
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an analysis focused on the returns in six states — five that switched from Obama to Trump, and Minnesota, which Trump barely lost. In these states, turnout rose more in conservative areas than in liberal ones. That pattern, obviously, cannot be explained by vote-switching among the white working class.
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In counties where Trump won at least 70 percent of the vote, the number of votes cast rose 2.9 percent versus 2012. Trump’s pugnacious message evidently stirred people who hadn’t voted in the past. By comparison, in counties where Clinton won at least 70 percent, the vote count was 1.7 percent lower this year
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Pennsylvania is a good example. The state’s southern strip stretches from distant suburbs of Pittsburgh through the Appalachian Mountains and Interstate 76, ending in Lancaster County, not far from Philadelphia. It’s solidly Republican territory, even in a normal year.
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This year, the number of votes cast in the counties along that strip rose almost 10 percent relative to 2012. In Pennsylvania’s big cities and the labor union stronghold of Allentown, the vote count rose only a few percent.
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For every one voter nationwide who reported having voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, at least five people voted for Trump after not having voted four years ago. Clinton attracted substantially fewer 2012 nonvoters, the data show. On net, Trump’s gains among nonvoters mattered more than his gains from vote switchers
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Many strong Democratic constituencies — like young voters, Latinos and Asian-Americans — have relatively low turnout rates. African-American turnout has trailed white turnout when Obama was not on the ballot.
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Second, the Democrats should recommit themselves to old-fashioned organizing without giving up on the emerging science of voter turnout.
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Finally, the Democrats should remember that inspiring turnout and persuading swing voters aren’t separate problems. It’s a lot easier to do both with a galvanizing message that makes voters feel part of a larger project — be it an uplifting project or a combative one
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No Racial Barrier Left to Break (Except All of Them) - 0 views
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Mr. Obama's election was by any historical measure the apex of the civil rights period - so many black, white, Latino and Asian-Americans saw him as the fulfillment of Dr. King's vision. The notion that the blood and courage of civil rights heroes had led to that moment was captured by the iconography of the campaign.
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No Racial Barrier Left to Break (Except All of Them) - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...uther-king-racial-barrier.html
structural racism racism MLK policy politics history US race
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We now live in a post-assimilation America. The 50-year-old rules for racial advancement are obsolete. There is no racial barrier left to break. There is no office in the land to which an African-American can ascend — from mayor to attorney general and the presidency — that will serve as a magical platform for saving black people and our nation’s soul from its racist past.
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We cannot engineer a more equitable nation simply by dressing up institutions in more shades of brown. Instead, we must confront structural racism and the values of our institutions.
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the exceptionalism of Mr. Obama’s biography couldn’t save us from the Tea Party revolution, Republican obstructionism, police brutality, voter suppression and Islamophobia.
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We now know that no individual, no matter how singular, can bend the moral arc of the universe. Not even Dr. King could.
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In his last book, in 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” Dr. King warned that the movement was already hobbled by delusion. “The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro,” he wrote. “They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
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We must recognize that institutions are far more powerful than individuals, no matter how many people of color can be counted in leadership.
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In addition, history matters. Black people in charge of, or embedded in, institutions that have not atoned for their history of racism can make it easier for those institutions to ignore or dismiss present-day claims of racial bias. That’s because the path to leadership has often meant accepting institutions as they are, not disrupting them.
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Consider what black Harvard Business School alumni told the journalist Ellis Cose: A key to success is “never talk about race (or gender) if you can avoid it, other than to declare that race (or gender) does not matter.”
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As the failure of the black political leadership in Baltimore to protect black lives and the limited ability of black police chiefs to curb brutality in their own departments demonstrate, people of color can inherit or perpetuate structures of inequality
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Diversity and inclusion policies, therefore, should grow out of truth and reconciliation practices as well as strategic hiring plans.
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Intentional transformation, even reparations, one government agency, one company, one college at a time moves us past the denial and the empty promises
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Georgetown University’s decision to make reparations for its past is a powerful expression of creative dissent. Last year, after its president met with descendants of the enslaved African-Americans owned by the university he declared, “We cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history.” Georgetown will provide preferential admissions to descendants, akin to legacy status for the children of alumni.
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We should judge transformation by how our institutions behave on behalf of individuals rather than the other way around.
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he acknowledged, for the first time, the very real threat of racism to our democracy and the contingent nature of racial progress.
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In a revision to the American creed, he added, equality may be self-evident but it has “never been self-executing.”
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he listed specific areas where systemic racism needed to be uprooted, which he hadn’t done in his State of the Union addresses or inaugural speeches: “If we’re going to be serious about race going forward, we need to uphold laws against discrimination — in hiring, and in housing, and in education and in the criminal justice system.”
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The future is no longer about “firsts.” It is instead about the content of the character of the institutions our new leaders will help us rebuild.
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Why Trump Can't Make It 1981 Again - The New York Times - 0 views
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Despite forecasts of a stock market meltdown if he won, the market registered one of its strongest postelection rallies in more than a century.
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Indeed Mr. Trump’s advisers say that over the next decade, their plans for tax cuts and deregulation could push the average annual growth rate back up to 3.5 percent — the same as during the Reagan presidency.
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In recent years the actual growth rate of the United States economy has been about 2 percent, which is disappointing in comparison with the 1980s, but far from horrible, given its diminished potential.
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With All Due Disrespect - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...with-all-due-disrespect.html
politics crisis history trump legitimacy election presidency
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Is it O.K., morally and politically, to declare the man about to move into the White House illegitimate?
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Hillary Clinton would almost surely have won if the F.B.I. hadn’t conveyed the false impression that it had damaging new information about her, just days before the vote. This was grotesque, delegitimizing malfeasance, especially in contrast with the agency’s refusal to discuss the Russia connection.
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We don’t know, although Mr. Trump’s creepy obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin makes it hard to dismiss these allegations
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Even given what we do know, however, no previous U.S. president-elect has had less right to the title. So why shouldn’t we question his legitimacy?
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he’s lashing out at and threatening anyone and everyone who criticizes him, while refusing even to admit that he lost the popular vote.
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Was there even more to it? Did the Trump campaign actively coordinate with a foreign power? Did a cabal within the F.B.I. deliberately slow-walk investigations into that possibility?
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Congress will be much more likely to stand up to a rogue, would-be authoritarian executive if its members realize that they will face a political price if they act as his enablers.
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What this means is that Mr. Trump must not be treated with personal deference simply because of the position he has managed to seize. He must not be granted the use of the White House as a bully pulpit. He must not be allowed to cloak himself in the majesty of office. Given what we know about this guy’s character, it’s all too clear that granting him unearned respect will just empower him to behave badly.
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Now, anyone questioning Mr. Trump’s legitimacy will be accused of being unpatriotic — because that’s what people on the right always say about anyone who criticizes a Republican president. (Strangely, they don’t say this about attacks on Democratic presidents.) But patriotism means standing up for your country’s values, not pledging personal allegiance to Dear Leader.
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No, we shouldn’t get into the habit of delegitimizing election results we don’t like. But this time really is exceptional, and needs to be treated that way.
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So let’s be thankful that John Lewis had the courage to speak out. It was the patriotic, heroic thing to do
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Donald Trump's Denial About Russia - 0 views
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No matter how divided our politics and our times, Americans can agree that our status as a strong, democratic nation rests on the bedrock of free and fair elections. That confidence is what was targeted when Russia, one of our oldest, most determined foreign adversaries, invaded American computer networks and released thousands of pages of documents to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election.
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How Republics End - The New York Times - 0 views
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I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.
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Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade
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On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rule
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“However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”
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now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.
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Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered.
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For such people, toeing the party line and defending the party’s rule are all that matters. And if they sometimes seem consumed with rage at anyone who challenges their actions, well, that’s how hacks always respond when called on their hackery.
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Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.
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My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”
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what directly drives the attack on democracy, I’d argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.
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One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover.
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But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.
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Can Evolution Have a 'Higher Purpose'? - 0 views
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Hamilton continued, in his British accent, "I could enlarge on that in terms of the possible existence of extraterrestrial manipulators who interfere, and so on, but I think this would be getting too far from the general topic of discussion." Well, maybe, but this sounded at least as interesting as the general topic of discussion.
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Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats? - The New York Times - 0 views
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His legacy regrettably includes the more than 1,000 Democrats who lost their elections during his two terms. Republicans now have total control in half of America’s states.
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Faced with the economy’s potential collapse as he took office, Mr. Obama devoted his presidency to the economic recovery, starting with restoring the financial sector. But he never made wage stagnation and growing inequality central to his economic mission
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At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.
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When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.
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Mr. Obama also offered only tepid support to the most important political actor in progressive and Democratic politics: the labor movement.
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In fact, he spent the last couple of years of his presidency pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade law vociferously opposed by the labor movement. Under President Obama, union membership has declined to 11.1 percent from 12.3 percent.
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Models, it appears, do not substitute for the hard work of organizing and engaging voters in nonpresidential years; models that apparently drove nearly every decision made by the Clinton campaign are no substitute for listening to voters.
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On the eve of the 2016 election, the president used the refrain: “We’ve seen America turn recession into recovery” and 15.5 million new jobs. Pointedly, he said, “Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling.”
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The public’s reaction was stark from the beginning. People did not believe his view on the economy, and his approval ratings fell in Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2010 and in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2014 — the states that led the working-class move away from the Democrats.
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Just as important, however, was the discontent brewing with the Democrats’ own base. Combined, the approximately 40 percent of minority, unmarried female and millennial voters disapproved of how President Obama was handling his job in 2010 and 2014, and many stayed home during the off-year elections. Mitt Romney carried white millennials by 7 percentage points in 2012.
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The president will leave office with a rising approval rating near the same league of Ronald Reagan, an economy nearing full employment and real wages tipping up. Yet a majority of voters in the last election said the economy was the top issue in their vote.
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We think voters were sending a clear message: They want more than a recovery. They want an economy and government that works for them, and that task is unfinished.