Some of the latest polls are suggesting that Donald Trump might win the Presidential election. That would seem to be the greatest surprise in U.S. presidential elections at least since the Dewey-Truman election of 1948, but the closeness of the election isn’t all that much of a surprise to me, for a number of reasons.
First, what appears to be an overwhelming majority of non-college educated white men are angry, really angry, for a number of reasons. Older men in this group feel that they’ve had the economic rug pulled out from under them by the change in manufacturing technology and the globalization of the world economy. Younger men in this group are having a hard time finding even halfway decently paying jobs. Both want to blame somebody, and they don’t want to listen to anything realistic about what has happened and why. It’s much easier to listen to the wild and impossible promises of a candidate who also seems to share their feelings.
Second, there are the younger people, many of whom were attracted to Bernie Sanders. They’re facing or already enduring the high cost of education, or even precluded from that education by the higher costs… and they want that changed now, and many of them feel that Hillary Clinton denied them to chance to vote for Bernie Sanders, the candidate who promised what amounts to educational pie-in-the-sky. And while Trump isn’t promising them much, except “good jobs, lots of wonderful good jobs,” or some rhetoric to that effect, a number of the younger voters appear disinclined to vote for Clinton because she won’t go so far as Bernie in what she promises.
Both groups want everything, and they want it now, even if it’s financially, legally, and economically impossible.
Then, there’s the “elephant in the room,” the elephant – and it’s not the GOP, at least not this time — is the fact that much of the United States retains a patriarchal mindset, so much so that, as I’ve repeatedly noted, Clinton gets blasted for being the untruthful one, when Trump’s lies and misstatements are more than twice as frequent as hers. As one of my readers noted, she’s being investigated for acts that weren’t even questioned when male Republican politicians did the same things, and, also, interestingly enough, those who are flocking to third party candidates are rallying around the men, despite the fact that the sole “national-level” independent woman appears to be far better qualified than either of the two leading male “independents.”
I’m getting this feeling that all too many voters in the U.S. would rather have a womanizing, crude, lewd, cheating, unscrupulous, and incompetent male than a competent woman who has a few flaws in that she exhibits some, but not all, of the characteristics of almost all male politicians. I’m hoping that this blatant misogyny doesn’t result in Trump’s election, but if he’s elected this next Tuesday, don’t say I didn’t tell you. Even if Clinton wins, if the election is as close as it appears, that also says a great deal about too many American voters, and what it says is less than favorable in all too many ways.
But then, I’m just a writer who spent almost twenty years in politics. I really don’t understand why an incompetent lying “fresh face” that’s male is to be preferred over a somewhat flawed but competent and experienced woman.