Lesson of Pennsylvania: Biden 2020 Was the Fluke, Not Trump in 2016
22nd November 2024
President-elect Donald Trump’s win two weeks ago in Pennsylvania was always right in front of you if you were objectively listening to the concerns of the people and the data showing the most important, but misread trend of all: The Republican Party had now become the party of work.
In interview after interview, waitresses, welders, rank-and-file union members, plumbers, HVAC small-business owners, hairdressers, and barbers would tell national news reporters, including me, that they were voting for Trump.
No matter how often these voters said this, it often was dismissed as an outlier. Or it was placed in a silo of race, meaning it was only the white working class. The blindness among reporters and Democrats was that they thought it was only white middle-class voters behaving that way, missing that working-class voters of all races were voting shoulder to shoulder.