Quotulatiousness

January 17, 2024

“The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Batya Ungar-Sargon attempts to explain at least one aspect of the inexplicable-to-liberals Trump appeal for many Republican voters:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

To the surprise of no one and the dismay of the liberal commentariat class, former president Donald Trump has crushed the first GOP primary election.

Iowa, which voted twice for Barack Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, gave Trump a decisive win Monday night. And in Iowa, as in the Republican Party and the country more generally, the class divide was the defining feature of the night.

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin — just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many — 33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump — and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities.

Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream — all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced — the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.

Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer.

The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.

Whether they realize it or not, this is why Democrats truly hate Trump. Without him, the left would soon have had a pretty permanent monopoly on power.

But if Iowa is any indication, not so soon after all.

Should Trump manage not to get thrown off the ballot (or sent to jail) by the time the election rolls around, he can’t count on Justin Trudeau for support:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says voters in the United States will face a choice later this year between optimism for the future or nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Trudeau made the comments in Montreal today to a business crowd in reference to Donald Trump’s victory Monday in the Iowa Republican caucuses, which gives the former president an early lead for the Republican nomination ahead of the November election.

The prime minister says a second Trump presidency would be difficult for the Canadian government, as there are many issues on which he and former president disagree.

On Monday, a majority of Iowa Republican supporters said they back Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Though he didn’t mention Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre by name, Trudeau said Canadians will face a similar choice to American voters when they head to the polls.

February 18, 2023

Nikki Haley’s presidential bid is clearly doomed because … she uses her middle name? Let me read that again.

Filed under: India, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jim Treacher (whose name I should now probably put in scare quotes because it’s a nom-de-plume) explains why Nikki Haley is a no-hoper in the next Republican presidential primaries:

As I revealed over a decade ago, “Jim Treacher” isn’t my real name. This is just a message-board pseudonym that got way out of hand, and now I guess I’m stuck with it. My government name is Robert Sean Medlock, but my parents have always called me Sean. I don’t know why they didn’t just name me Sean Robert Medlock, but I was in no position to argue my case at the time because I couldn’t talk yet.

So now, every time I need to fill out paperwork somewhere, I have to explain that I go by my middle name. Doctors, dentists, car repairs, insurance, what have you. The routine is kind of annoying, but at this point I’m used to it.

I’m not deceiving anybody by using my middle name. It’s just my name, man. Lots of people go by their middle name.

In other news: This week Nikki Haley announced she’s running for president. I don’t know if she has a shot, but the libs sure seem to think so. They’re already attacking her for … going by her middle name.

Check out this idiot:

She didn’t. Her birth name was Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. Not “Nimrata”, as it’s commonly misspelled by supposedly sophisticated libs:

My goodness. Guess it runs in the family, huh?

The Randhawa family referred to their daughter as Nikki, which is Punjabi for “little one”. And she changed her last name to Haley when she married a man named Michael Haley.

Y’know, like Hillary Rodham did when she married Bill Clinton.

Here’s another dummy, who of course works for CNN:

Yeah. Wait. What?

And if that scandal wasn’t enough to sink Nikki Haley’s chances utterly, CNN’s Don Lemon helpfully points out that she’s way, way, way past her peak:

Now, you know I’m not one to cry sexism often. Frankly, when I found out a hot college professor of mine had been fired for doing a #MeToo, I was offended for not being involved. I’d gone to office hours, for godsakes. But there is sexism this week we have to call out. Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. She’s a reasonable Republican candidate who is, of course, a long shot against Trump. There are plenty of ways to criticize her politics, but for some reason a bunch of people we are meant to respect tried to say that the real problem is that she’s a woman, that she’s not young, and that she’s Indian.

You may think I’m exaggerating.

Here is Don Lemon on CNN: “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry”, he says, looking to camera, a little smile on his face. “When a woman is considered to be in her prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s …” His co-hosts, both women, balk. (“Prime for what?”) But Lemon keeps going. Watch the extremely stressful video here, where he goes on … and on … about how Nikki Haley, who is 51, cannot criticize Biden’s age. Because women peak in their 20s, and she’s long past that.

Or here’s progressive hero Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, who disavowed him and became a star of the intelligentsia. She decided that the best way to insult Nikki Haley this week was by highlighting that she’s Indian, because Nikki is her middle name. Again, this is a real statement Mary Trump released on Twitter: “First of all, fuck you Nimrata Haley.” Sorry, I’m slow: If you’re a white person trying to insult someone who’s not white and you do it by highlighting their race, what’s that called again? I’m sure there’s a Robin DiAngelo chapter on this somewhere.

December 9, 2019

Nikki Haley, 2024?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell looks at the US political scene and wonders if Nikki Haley will be the President after the 2024 federal election:

President Donald Trump and Ambassador Nikki Haley at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, 24 September, 2018.
Official White House photograph by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Following on from my previous post, I suspect that former Governor (South Carolina) and US Ambassador (to the United Nations) Nikki Haley might be President-elect of the United States five years from now. She is, right now, I think, the wholly unofficial but very clear voice of the post-Trump Republicans. She shares many of the Trumpian aims but she will campaign with a much different mixture of grit and grace, as the title of her recent book (campaign manifesto?) suggests.

It also seems pretty obvious to me, and to some other observers, that Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada have decided that they can win a majority in (probably) 2021 by appealing even more strongly to the Laurentian Elites and thereby securing a half dozen more seats in each of Greater Vancouver and in urban Quebec and another dozen in (mainly) South-Western Ontario.

[…]

I think that Ambassador Haley’s comments are a shot across Canada’s bows made on behalf of the American establishment, not just Donald Trump. I suspect her remarks were very carefully crafted and even blessed by influential leaders in government, academe and in the huge array of think tanks in which America’s “government in waiting” resides. She is not speaking for Donald Trump; he can (likely will) speak for himself in his own, inimitable, bullying style. She is speaking for a larger, more permanent establishment, the “deep” administrative state that guards America’s permanent, vital interests.

Canadians need to pay attention. Nikki Haley matters; she (or someone very like her) is the future and she (or that similar someone) is the future to which we must accommodate ourselves for the 2020s and into the 2030s. We must remain a steadfast, trusted member of the US-led West. We, under Mackenzie-King and Louis St Laurent and John Diefenbaker, helped to build the US-led West, we even helped to lead it. Pierre Trudeau wanted to change Canada; he did, but not as much as he wished. His own Liberal ministers would not follow him all the way. Justin Trudeau is following in his father’s deeply flawed strategic footsteps which aim to make Canada irrelevant. He has a much tamer (weaker) cabinet allowing him and Chrystia Freeland to push Canada towards a strategic place where our country will be politically isolated, largely friendless and poor.

Liberals, by which, in the 2020s, I mean Conservatives, must speak out and offer Canadians a better, principled strategic vision which aims to secure our sovereignty, our prosperity and a respectable, responsible, leadership role ~ what Paul Martin called a role of pride and influence ~ in the world. Otherwise, Canada’s very sovereignty is in peril. If, as I expect, Donald Trump is re-elected next year and is then followed in 2024 by another, albeit “kinder, gentler” Trumpian, (which I believe is very likely because I think the Democratic Party in the USA will shatter after the 2020 election and will not be a real force again for a decade or more) then Canada must adapt. The importance of our bilateral relationship with America is to all other things as ten is to one.

Powered by WordPress