6 Comments
Nov 9Liked by Policy Tensor

Very interesting. It's going to be tough to bridge the gap between the working classes and the elite in a society so committed to the idea of meritocracy.

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A lot of the problem stems from glossing as “meritorious” the wrong sorts of things …

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I will add something: Introducing The Paycheck to Paycheck Voter https://shorturl.at/6AIkb

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Nov 10·edited Nov 10

Makes sense. I voted McCain in 2008 and Harris 2024 even though I despise her and the rest of the Democrats and really wanted a Republican, just not some wildcard like Trump. For example, Vance would have been fine with me, whereas Trump is unpredictable and a potentially dangerous loose cannon. I was pretty sure the Senate would go Republican, so my vote for Harris was effectively a vote for 4 years of gridlock followed by Republican landslide in 2028.

I am university graduate, live in urban area, and one of the economic winners of recent decades of government policy. For me, 4 years of gridlock under Harris is just a minor annoyance and doesn't affect me other than that it means I have to listen to Democrats gloating that they won again. I am naturally conservative, in the sense of mostly wanting to keep things the way they are, because things are going well for me. But I can easily understand that economic losers with their backs against the wall might be willing to make aleap into the unknown by voting Trump. (He's not completely unknown, however all we really learned from his previous term as President is that Trump is so erratic that effectively he is still an unknown quantity.)

Ukrainians took a leap into the unknown by electing Zelensky in 2019. Leaps into the unknown sometimes go very bad...

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Team D was the coalition of the PMC and various grievance groups.

That coalition largely 0splintered in 2024.

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I live in a growing semi-rural county (Warren, VA) and it's grown richer and larger in population for the past decade plus. It used to be deep red, and is still 3:1 red. Must be an outlier.

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