“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd

Donny Deutsch. former CNBC program host and regular guest on MSNBC, says people who voted for President Trump are “like Nazis.” Actor Peter Fonda tweets that the President’s young son should be kidnapped and turned over to pedophiles (he apologized after a huge uproar). Comedian Kathy Griffin displays the President’s head and eventually apologizes (sort of). The President himself regularly tweets any number of true, untrue, half-true, and who-the-heck-knows-what’s-true things every day.

Welcome to what passes for public and political discourse in 2018 America. There’s no question that the 2016 presidential election is still creating a major upheaval in American politics and society. 

Salena Zito and Brad Todd considered what happened and took a deep look at the five states where the election was won for Donald Trump – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa. All five voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. And they went deeper that statewide results – they went into the counties that flipped from Obama to Trump, and many by large margins. And unlike most mainstream media reporters, they didn’t parachute in from New York or Los Angeles the day after the election, interviewed a few people, and then left. They stayed around, and they talked with people, often I their own homes. They talked with their families and friends, too.

The result of their work and research is The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.

They didn’t find Nazis, unless a lot of Nazis voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016. In fact, they didn’t find a “typical” Trump voter at all. What they did find was that people who voted for Donald Trump in the counties in those five states could be broadly classified into seven groups, and, because one of the authors is with an opinion research firm, they gave the groups catchy titles.

The seven are “Red-Blooded and Blue Collared,” “Perot-istas,” “Rough Rebounders,” “Girl Gun Power,” “Rotary Reliables,” “King Cyrus Christians,” and “Silent Suburban Moms.” The chapter on each includes interviews with representative people. 

Salena Zito

I don’t live in one of those five states, but I recognized every single person they talked with. I know people just like them; I have family members just like them; I go to church with people like them. 

And while these groups and the people are markedly different, certain common themes clearly emerged. They don’t trust big corporations. They don’t trust the national and even the local news media. They believe Barack Obama, even though they voted for him, led the country in the wrong direction, and especially when it came to national defense and security and the economy. Many of them own small businesses, and they watched their medical insurance costs skyrocket with Obama care while big corporations were exempted. They saw a playing field tilted against them and the communities they live in and love. They believed they were disdained by the economic and cultural power centers on the coasts. And they saw Hilary Clinton offering more of the same.

Their concerns ran so deep that they could look at Trump’s vulgarity, antics, crazy statements, and tweets and say, yeah, they’re bad, but maybe he’s the one who will blow up what needs to be blown up.

Brad Todd

The authors consider these groups, and then they look at the broader implications of what happened in 2016, and what that means for the future. 

Zito, a native of Pittsburgh, worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for 11 years. She joined the New York Post in 2016 and is a political analyst for CNN and a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Todd is the founding partner of OnMessage, Inc., a national Republican advertising and opinion research firm. 

The Great Revolt tells the story of 2016. It suggests that none of the people the authors talked with have changed their minds since the election, and that national mainstream media coverage of Trump – contrary to what journalists and editors might think – is only reinforcing their beliefs. 

As a nation, we have moved into uncertain and uncharted waters.

Top illustration: the U.S. electoral map after the 2016 presidential election. 

"The Day Christians Changed America" by George Barna

It was a Sunday, shortly after Donald Trump had locked up the Republican nomination for President. We bumped into some good friends at a local restaurant. We’d known them from church and our local community for almost 25 years, and they were both well attuned to local politics.

What do we do, we asked? Whom can we vote for? Both major parties were putting forward problematic candidates. And the minor parties – the guy in favor of legalizing marijuana and the Green candidate somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders – offered no alternatives.

Our friends didn’t immediately offer advice. What they said was this: “You may to think about what you know you can expect versus what you simply don’t know.”

As it turns out, we weren’t the only people of our generation and faith having serious problems with all of the presidential candidates. In The Day Christians Changed America, George Barna points out that people who fit our demographic were having the same reactions to the candidates. It wasn’t the “evangelical” group that the news media is so fond of referring to. It was a group identified after extensive research.

Barna calls this group “SAGEcons” – spiritually active, governance engaged conservatives. They’re partially a subset of “evangelicals,” but they’re also a subset of Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and other faith traditions. They tend to live largely but not exclusively in the South and Midwest, and they tend to be of the Baby Boom generation and older. They tend to have been married to the same spouse for decades. They have grandchildren. They generally tend not to participate in opinion polls. And what they believed was happening was the collapse of American culture (in fact, they likely still believe this is happening).

Historically, says Barna, this group largely voted for Republican presidential candidates, even though they’re weren’t completely thrilled with either John McCain or Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections. They are tens of millions strong, but (again) they are not all what the media consider as “the evangelicals.” Barna says that a Republican presidential candidate can’t win with them alone, but also can’t win without them. And Trump had to get their votes.

This SAGEcon group ended up voting for Donald Trump in the national election, but it did not vote for Trump in the primaries. The primary preferences were candidates like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and especially Ben Carson. Trump was not an option.

Until he was the Republican choice. Barna describes in detail what happened to eventually bring the SAGEcon Christians into support for Trump. One event was a meeting at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, when Trump spoke with more than 1,000 Christian leaders. Another was the selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. And there were others. What was critical was this group’s understanding of what happened during the eight years of the Obama Administration, and what was likely to happen with his designated successor, Hillary Clinton.

George Barna

A vast majority of the SAGEcons voted for Trump, but not all of them did. A fraction voted for Clinton. Others didn’t vote. But most went for Trump, fully understanding that he was a seriously flawed candidate.

Barna was founder of the Barna Research Group in 1984 and focused its work on the intersection of faith and culture. He’s also been a pollster in three presidential campaigns. He currently is the executive director of the American Culture and Faith Institute, a division of United in Purpose, and president of Metaformation, a faith development organization. Barna is also the author of numerous books on faith, culture, and politics. He graduated summa cum laude from Boston College, received two master’s degrees from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. degree from Dallas Baptist University. He and his family live in California.

The Day Christians Changed America is based on Barna’s own extensive research and experience in American politics. It’s not the traditional news media understanding of politics, but then this was one election when the news media and the opinion polls were consistently wrong. The book is written especially for the SAGEcon group it talks about; Barna uses the language of faith that this group will understand immediately but others might not.

But it is an important contribution to understanding what happened in the 2016 election.

Top photograph by Elliott Stallion via Unsplash. Used with permission.

My father would have voted for Trump

Last year, I retired after several years of seriously planning for it. We had help from an advisor, and we worked with a legal and financial framework that had essentially been in place for the last 15 years.

Then, late last fall, Congress passed and President Obama signed the compromise budget bill, which was considered a great step forward in intra-governmental relations. Embedded in the bill, and no one will admit who did it or even if congressional leaders were aware of it, was a provision that changed some Social Security provisions. It was a change desired by the Obama Administration for years. What it effectively did was save the government $11 billion annually in Social Security costs.

Guess who is helping to pay for that? People like me. It’s coming out of the hide of the middle class. It was one of the assumptions of our retirement planning. And now it’s gone, with no one wanting to own up who did it.

Guess who isn’t paying for it? The Congress who passed it, the President who wanted it, and the congressional staff people who slipped it into the legislation. They’re not covered by Social Security. They can make policy decisions without any thought of the impact on themselves, because there isn’t any (unless their constituents get riled enough to evict them from office).

They are what columnist and author Peggy Noonan calls the “protected class.” My wife and I are  members of the unprotected class, although our saving and spending habits over the course of our marriage probably make us more protected than many. Our financial planner had to do some scrambling for us and their other clients, because this hit with a wallop and it hit suddenly.

This reminds me of my father. He had more experiences than you might imagine of dealing with unexpected changes in laws. He was a small businessman who often found himself operating on the basis of negative cash flow, which you can do for a time but ultimately not sustain. Federal, state, and local tax laws changed constantly. Adding insult to injury was the constant harassment by local police in New Orleans looking for “considerations” so he could avoid having his delivery truck constantly ticketed.

A member of the World War II generation, he was often bewildered by what passed for political wisdom. He voted Democratic in state and local elections (there was no real Republican Party in Louisiana until the late 1970s and early 1980s) and Republican in national elections. He was conservative. He believed in law and order. He didn’t trust the national Democrats. He liked Richard Nixon (until Watergate) and he loved Spiro Agnew (until he was indicted). He particularly liked Agnew because the Vice President would publicly say things – like against the news media – that outraged the media, liberals, and progressives. And he voted for Ronald Reagan twice.

My father struggled in business as he watched big corporations and big banks get benefit after benefit from the federal government, including from some of the very same people he had supported. He watched privileges and special considerations be conferred upon people whom he believed didn’t deserve them. And he would have understood the concern many people have about illegal immigrants – and he would have seen them as ways for big corporations (and big agriculture) to manage labor costs.

If he were still alive today, my father would be supporting Donald Trump.

And my father and I, who tended to vote for generally the same national candidates, would have parted political ways.

Of the remaining candidates in the race, the one who speaks to my heart is Ben Carson.

I have friends on Facebook who say that you can’t be a true Christian and vote for Donald Trump. I understand their anxiety, but I don’t place my hope in political candidates, or place my hope against them. If Trump wins the Republican nomination, and Hilary Clinton the Democratic nomination, I will be completely perplexed on how to vote.

But my faith remains intact, regardless of who runs, regardless of who wins. Nothing else in this life is certain.

Top photograph by Peter Griffin, and lower photograph by Kai Stachowiak, both via Public Domain Pictures (second photo here).  Used with permission.