Yes, Millennials also cost us the election.

[Dems to Win]

34. Democrats won't win until they understand how bad trade deals and uncontrolled immigration

hurt native born blue collar workers. They can see it, they can feel it.


I made this post on another board on Sept 30, after the first debate:

The Democrats seem surprised that the 2016 election has now turned into a referendum on NAFTA, after they nominated the wife of the man who signed NAFTA's implementing legislation. I'm surprised that they are surprised.

If we elect a demagogue in 2016 it will be in large part as a backlash against NAFTA. It will be quite a direct belated rejection of the Clinton Administration, who invested so much political capital into passing NAFTA.

The worst moment for Hillary in the debate, and the best issue for Trump, was her curt dismissal of the manufacturing job losses and devastation of factory towns across the USA as "That's your opinion."

They don't call it the Rust Belt because manufacturing is booming.

NAFTA also hurt Mexican corn farmers, and sent a wave of undocumented immigrants to America. Decades later, they are still here, and their children have grown up to be Dreamers.

When one out of 20 workers in the US are exploitable, hardworking, very low wage illegal immigrants, it depresses wages for the entire working class.

Working class Americans feel a double hit from NAFTA: so many manufacturing jobs have been shipped south to Mexico, and the remaining hard jobs in the US are filled with low paid undocumented immigrants instead of native born Americans making a living wage, as it was 30 years ago.

Say what you will about Trump: he's at least noticed these people and their hardships. More than we can say about the Clinton Democrats.

*****************

Don't believe me? How about a union leader and Democratic activist in Ohio:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/rust-belt-democrats-saw-trump-wave-coming

These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming
And they tried to warn the Clinton campaign.

PEMA LEVYNOV. 11, 2016 3:32 PM


Like labor unions everywhere, the local Plumbers & Pipefitters union in Ohio's Mahoning Valley—a historically Democratic bastion due to the influence of labor—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in September 2015 and urged its members to vote for her. But unlike in years past, when Roland "Butch" Taylor briefed about 200 members on the union's support of Clinton and the prospective benefits of a Clinton presidency in May, the meeting didn't go well. "I got a lot of boos," he recalls. "I got a lot of chatter back. And out of the group, only one person came up and asked me for a T-shirt."

snip...

Like Betras, Taylor doesn't believe his peers and neighbors who supported Trump are racist. But he understands how Trump's talk about immigration appealed to people in the Rust Belt. A few years ago, his union was working on a billion-dollar natural gas processing plant, and the workers noticed that the bulk of the work was being done by Spanish-speaking laborers who arrived each morning on buses. "It brought a lot of resentment to the area because they'd never seen it before," Taylor says. "People see that and then they go tell everybody else, and social media, the way it is, it just runs wild." He believes Trump benefited when the community saw immigrants "taking jobs that Americans think they should be doing."