Amerika

Apparently Donald Trump is losing ground with working-class Whites for reasons that remain unclear:

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted between August 5 and August 9, found that in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, more white voters without a college degree, a group that has typically favored Republicans, are backing Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to the poll, Trump’s lead among the demographic has been slashed by 13 points since May, when Biden was still the presumptive candidate for the Democratic Party. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted between April 28 and May 9, Trump was 26 points ahead of Biden among white non-college-educated voters when third-party candidates were included—with 52 percent to his opponent’s 26 percent.

White non-college-educated voters have historically voted Republican and were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 28 percent.

Perhaps we can treat this question as conservatives would, by looking at history and change over time. Trump was leading when he had Joe Biden to beat up on, but then Democrats switched the target like Lucy yanking a football away before Charlie Brown kicks it. Then came J.D. Vance as the vice president.

Trump knows he walks a fine line with the “Reagan coalition” of evangelicals, libertarians, and paleoconservatives. To keep the Christians in line, he tells them that he will protect their rights, and then tosses them a bone by picking a religious fanatic for his vice president. Sort of like Mike Pence, J.D. Vance is the Jesus wing of the Trump party.

Perhaps the loss of faith arises in part from a lack of faith in faith-based candidates, but there is probably more to it:

No matter how many times he says Democrats and their pals in the media are taking the “childless cat lady” line out of context, they’ll hammer Vance with it from now until Election Day. It’s one of those things that sounds like a character said it on “Saturday Night Live.”

Trump must be wondering if Vance is hurting him with independent women voters who will have a big say in who wins the election — or with anyone else not already in the MAGA camp, for that matter.

Then there’s abortion, just about the only issue that was helping Democrats even before Vance joined the ticket. Vance opposes abortion even in the case of incest or rape, though he does say there should be exceptions in cases when the mother’s life is in danger. He may flip-flop on abortion — if he thinks he has to — but chances are it won’t work.

An experienced observer might conclude that non-wealthy Whites do not have a problem with Project2025 per se, but are leery of the religious right and its tendency to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Your average person does not care about abortion like the religious fanatics or casual-sex-at-all cost childless cat ladies and Redditors do.

However, one thing they do care about… this is an election about stopping the slide into the third-world morass of diversity and the socialism it will bring. You cannot have a brown wife; J.D. Vance has the worst kind of brown wife, the quota person who is lauded with usual oversold qualifications in the quota system:

When she took the stage on the third night of the convention to introduce her husband, she remarked on their cultural differences: “That J.D. and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry is a testament to this great country,” she said. “It is also a testament to J.D., and it tells you something about who he is… He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like. Although he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food for my mother—Indian food. Before I knew it, he’d become an integral part of my family.”

Usha Chilukuri Vance, 38, was raised in a San Diego suburb by Indian immigrant parents. Her mother is a biologist and serves as the provost of Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego, while Usha’s father is an engineer. Usha received an undergraduate degree from Yale University and later completed a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, after having received the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Following her time at Cambridge, she returned to Yale for law school, where she met J.D. Vance and served in editorial positions at the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & Technology. In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recounted how they initially connected through a class writing assignment in which they were paired as partners, leading him to develop a deep affection for her. “In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home,” he wrote, adding that she “always encouraged me to seek opportunities that I didn’t know existed.”

Diversity get little boosts to help them through schooling, and many are voracious memorizers who have trouble thinking clearly about anything that was not in their textbooks. Even more, he defers to her and acts like he is sacrificing his culture to embrace hers, which is itself a good summary of diversity.

The Trump story is one where he married women who were not a good fit until he found a mostly-Austrian Slovenian woman who has finally brought him some peace of mind. We can accept that. The White guy who wants to tell us how great foreign cultures are and has miscegenated, not so much.

J.D. Vance is good at what he does. This is not a hit piece on him. However, the fact of his having a brown wife and being deferential to her signals that we are a conquered people. Not surprisingly, this is turning off White voters, who have had their fill of diversity.

Tags: diversity, donald j. trump, election 2024, j.d. vance, kamala harris, usha chilukuri vance