Revenge of the Dirt People

One of the things I have been looking at in the polling data is the fact Trump seems to have a steady vote share across demographics, excluding race. Despite all the blather from the Conservative Industrial Complex about Trump relying on low-skill angry losers, he polls well with the college educated and he does well with higher income earners. In the GOP field, Trump is the broadest based candidate running.

That said, he seems to be locked into a range from 25% to 35%, with some polls in some places ticking up a little higher. Members of the CIC have started to look at this and cheer, thinking that once the field narrows, their guy will get the other 65% and charge to victory in the later primaries. It’s a comforting thought, I bet, so it is easy to see why they are clinging to it. Whether or not that happens is debatable.

Humans tend to emulate one another, which is why candidates get a “bump” after doing well in public opinion surveys, early primaries and the on-line polls after a good debate performance. If a lot of people like Candidate X, you will at least give Candidate X a look. Trump winning New Hampshire and then winning South Carolina would send a powerful signal to other voters that it is OK to vote for Trump.

Putting that aside, the question no one wants to ask is whether the GOP can win without the Trump vote. If you look at a Trump rally, it looks a lot like the Buchanan and Perot rallies back in the early 90’s. By that I mean there are more garden variety white guys than you typically see at a political rally. No notices that rallies are mostly middle aged women and young people bused in so the campaign can seem hip.

Trumps’ rallies are much more a normal mix of adults, which means more males than you usually see at these things. These are the people Sam Francis described in his essay, Message From MARS, with “MARS” meaning Middle American Radicals. (I don’t have a link for it, but you can probably find if you look for it.) These are normal people who try to ignore politics until they have no choice.

I don’t want to get too deep into the anthropological weeds, but there are a class of men with varying degrees of economic and cultural success, rooted in what we used to call working class values. These are men who get married to one biological women, have kids and do what was necessary to make sure the wife and kids have a good life. They may have been in the service, some went to college, while others went into the trades. These are the Dirt People

In 1992, the GOP pissed off these voters and many either skipped the election or voted Perot. Enormous effort was put into denying this reality to the point where the Conservative Industrial Complex internalized it as part of their dogma. They did not need to be more like Reagan. No, they needed to be more like Clinton! Eventually, Democrats offered up a bad candidate and we got George Bush the Minor, a sort of booby prize for Dirt People sticking with the party.

That’s the real lesson of 2000 and 2004. Al Gore appeared to be having a nervous breakdown during the debates with Bush. That and his loopy policy proposals allowed an otherwise uninteresting George Bush to win the election. In 2004, the Democrats offered up a ridiculous gigolo that no one in their right mind would elect to dog catcher. The fact that it was still a close election says a lot about what people truly thought of George Bush the Minor.

Regardless, the Conservative Industrial Complex drew a different lesson. Seeing waves of little brown guys washing up on our shores, changing the ethnic mix of the nation, they decided that the lesson of the last quarter century was that white guys were finished. Their time had passed. The future of the party and country was a Latin Yugoslavia with as many Africans and Muslims that could make the swim.

The Right concluded that in order to keep pace with the Left, they had to race into the vibrant future where the only pale penis people that matter are the homosexuals. For over a decade they have been yapping about how immigrants are natural conservatives, apparently not understanding the glaring contradiction in that assertion. The result was a push for amnesty, open borders and the whole buffet of multicultural nonsense.

The disaster that is unfolding for the GOP and the CIC is not simply due to getting too far over their skis. Mitt Romney built his campaign around polling, and he knew he needed to be against amnesty. He tried to split the difference between what the data said and what the party leaders said. The result was no one believed him, and he lost a winnable election.

The GOP concluded, amazingly, that the reason Romney lost was he did not embrace amnesty. Trump, for all his defects, was smart enough to see that the future is not now and America is not yet the vibrant multi-culti paradise. This revolt of the Dirt People is based on the obvious fact that a growing majority of people are thinking it is time to put the brakes on the madcap dash to the vibrant future.

Whatever the long term outcome, some basic math says the GOP can’t win without the Trump vote. Even if 10% of it abandons the GOP, it means millions of votes that never materialize. Given that Trump has enjoyed far more success than Perot or Buchanan, you have to assume that the potential boycott numbers could be quite large if the party screws the Dirt People.

Tonight, the Dirt People have spoken.

22 thoughts on “Revenge of the Dirt People

  1. Sorry, Trump is a spoiled rich kid at 70 years old. I’m a dirt guy if I follow the argument, but I’ve run a small international engineering business for 25 years (and my dad was in commercial real estate). In general business is still a win-win affair where you treat the other guy with some respect. Trump shorts his contractors and sues his partners frequently, while behaving like a child. But people seem to think this Hollywood portrayal of a “tough businessman” is the real thing. There is a reason Trump doesn’t do much on his own anymore. He can’t get people to work with him.

    Your going to hire a President, look behind the curtain.

    • When you vote you are at the counter of the Turd Sandwich Deli. You get to pick your turd sandwich, but it’s always going to be a turd sandwich. Just don’t order a milkshake.

      • Yes, it’s pretty much just making the best of an all around bad situation. There is no Man on the White Horse. Its hard to imagine a worse president than the current occupant of the White House, so I’m willing to roll the dice on the Donald.

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  4. Gore lost because of his clown makeup in the debate. Romney (and Ryan) lost because they let obama and biden laugh at them in their respective debates without slapping the grins off their stupid faces. That would have won the election for Romney/Ryan in itself. But they didn’t have the balls to even argue, much less give the jerks what they so badly needed.

    • The first debate, Gore was making all sorts of weird noises and rolling his eyes like he was having a seizure. That was the story after the debate. Allegedly, he was advised to do it. Then there was the VP debate with Cheney and Lieberman looking rather courtly the whole night. The press fawned over it, comparing Lieberman favorably to Gore. The next debate, Gore came out dressed in the same outfit as Lieberman, using his one liners and mannerisms. It was bizarre and I think a lot of people wondered about his sanity at that point.

      The other problem he had was the crazy lurch to the Left on guns and social issues. He lost his home state over it. He probably could have overcome the debates, but the all over the map campaign and the bizarre TV behavior swayed enough voters to cost him key states. Rubio just saw his campaign go up in flames by making a fool of himself in the last debate. Quayle never recovered from being bitch slapped by Bentson. Rick Perry is out of work because he could not remember his name at a debate.

      The point is, Bush was not carried to victory by an enthusiastic electorate. He was the least bad choice. If your party is based on hoping the other guys screw up, you may as well disband.

      • Obama won the last elections by a very narrow margin against a very uncharismatic candidate so it cuts both ways. By the way, Ben Shapiro claims Obama won because his campaign portrayed the Conservative candidate as an evil man who puts puppies on his car and kills his employees, is selfish and awful while the Conservative candidate praised Obama as a decent human being. Shapiro points out the left always paints the right as immoral and the right always tries to argue the left is ineffective and the public will prefer someone ineffective over someone evil. There’s some truth to that too.

  5. The Huffington Post is all in a lather this morning, check out their headline. Reduced to name calling because – “gasp” – people came out in droves for Trump. Did you know that when they first started covering Trump they placed any stories about him in their Entertainment section, saying that he couldn’t be taken seriously? And now he’s on their main page. Boom!

  6. The Dirt people are not generally registered Republicans. So in an open primary like NH and against a long line-up of opponents, Trump wins easily. In closed primaries like Iowa and SC, he’ll lose unless the rest of the votes are split too many ways.

    Trump winning or losing may just be a matter of how soon most of his opponents drop out and consolidate the rest of the vote.

    • The trouble with that is NH is not an open primary. You had to register by October or November of last year. Democrats had to vote in their primary and Republicans in their primary. The undeclared could pick one, but they automatically became a Democrat or Republican once they declared. To change that they will need to file paperwork with the state. That’s why the percentage of undeclared is about 15%. It’s now a hassle to strike that pose.

      Even so, Trump won across all demographics. His numbers were fairly consistent too. His win was about as broad based as you can get in a multi-candidate field. SC does present some challenges, but it is a quirky state that tends to like populist renegades. They went for Gingrich over the party man in 2012. They went for McCain over the Evangelical in 2008. Ted Cruz will work the western part of the state as that’s a different culture from the eastern part of the state. Trump will once again focus on the big population centers.

  7. May I recommend a sampling of Z’s absurdly fine blogroll, “Why Trump?” from Free Northerner:

    “Average Americans have to glance over their shoulders and make sure there are no hostile commissars around before they declare support for a mainstream political candidate. This is happening not in the USSR, but in the USA.

    This is why we support Trump.
    We *ucking fear you and we *ucking hate you.”

    (In the comments is a link to the windy Archdruid Report, who submits that we have seen the wage earner class decimated to the benefit of the salary class. The rentier class and welfare class remain largely unchanged. Interesting.)

    Read the whole thing!

    • More Free Northern goodness:

      “We don’t *ucking care about your “conservative principles” of hating Russia (the only major power fighting degeneracy and supporting the church).

      We don’t care if his Christian convictions are superficial (it’s been 40 years and you’ve done *hit all about Roe, not to mention you’ve done nothing to prevent Christians from having their businesses destroyed by kangaroo courts). We don’t care if he gave money to Democrats a decade ago  (y’all keep importing new voters for them).”

      Hallelujah! Bush was just a liberal who went back to church; Obama and Hillary are closet neocon globalists.

      Rile up the trumpen-proletariat!

      • It’s why I mock people who insist Trump is fueled by anger. It’s more about bewilderment. People look at the results of the last twenty-five years and they are dumbfounded as to why they should keep voting for the same guys.

        • Funny concepts they have , these people.. what they should be wondering is why should they still be voting at all. a day late and $10 short.

  8. “This could also work if Kasich finishes second.” From Gaming New Hampshire, two days ago.

    Kasich? I thought. Had a Scooby moment there (Rrruh?)- turns out you were right!

  9. I agree that the GOP has sold out the American worker (this from the carpenter son of an electrician) My Rust Belt late home town is dead in the water, probably never to rise again. There’s something unsettling about Trump though, he’s unvetted, of bombastic temperament, speaks in generalities. Beware the man on the white horse.

    • Unvetted? How so, exactly? The media have been up his ass with a microscope since the mid-80s, when he became one of their favorite punching bags. He’s been easily the most-scrutinized Presidential candidate in American history. Frankly, I can’t think of who comes in second; they are so far in back of Trump they aren’t even visible.

      As far as “bombastic” goes– you obviously can’t be over 40. If you were, you’d realize that, for almost 30 years, political candidates have been entirely fagged-up to appeal to women and beta males. What you mistake for “bombastic” is good old alpha-male signaling. Goldwater, Reagan, JFK, LBJ and even Nixon– those were MEN, and they weren’t afraid to show it.

      You’re right about one thing: Trump does speak in generalities. So what? That’s what Obama did, and it got him elected twice, even though he was a piece of shit in a brown paper bag that the media set on fire and left on our collective doorsteps.

  10. Today I had my chance to vote for Trump.
    What a pleasure – Finally a candidate I actually wanted to vote for.
    Not another McCainRomneyDoleBush.
    ¡Trump 2016!

    And here’s what the NY Daily News thinks of Trump voters:
    http://www.nydailynews.com/

    • One of comments from the insufferable Daily News-
      “…Trump. What a pleasure- Finally a candidate I actually wanted to vote for.”
      Amen! As Chateau Heartiste says, he is an Alpha $hitlord with Zero *ucks Given- ZFG, baby!

  11. I think the GOP establishment don’t see Trump supporters as Dirt People and more like cheeseburger eating subhuman beasts.

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