Contrary to the MSM’s narrative, 2016 was ‘not this kind of economy, stupid!’

The media narrative this election season has been that angry white voters were flocking to Trump. That angry white Republican voters did is absolutely true. Did angry blue collar Democrats switch? Some did. We know about West Virginia. Democrats in that state were most vocal.

In a study on party affiliation trends released in September 2016, Pew Research published a lot of graphics and data that hinted at what was to come.

Click an image to open gallery view.

Meanwhile, media prognosticators were telling us that Hillary Clinton’s win was assured to be in the high 90th percentiles. To anyone whose analyses pushed them toward a conclusion that this was an election about trade and jobs, rather than the xenophobia of uneducated or insufficiently educated whites, that narrative just didn’t ring true. That is not to say that race and xenophobia weren’t a factor, for they most certainly were.

Based on party affiliation, according to the charts published by Pew, though they made a more prominent showing this election, there doesn’t seem to be much of a  basis for the claim Donald J. Trump was elected thanks to the uneducated white voter only. While many more uneducated whites voted this time around, one should also account for much lost ground by the Democrats, a fourth election in a row.

Exit polling data collected by the Edison National Polling Pool and analyzed and published by Pew Research show that Donald Trump did about as well as Mitt Romney, when it came to white voters.

“White non-Hispanic voters preferred Trump over Clinton by 21 percentage points (58% to 37%), according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool. Romney won whites by 20 percentage points in 2012 (59% to 39%).”

When it comes to educational attainment and white voters, the same Pew Research article notes as follows:

“College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%), while those without a college degree backed Trump 52%-44%. This is by far the widest gap in support among college graduates and non-college graduates in exit polls dating back to 1980. For example, in 2012, there was hardly any difference between the two groups: College graduates backed Obama over Romney by 50%-48%, and those without a college degree also supported Obama 51%-47%.”

Republican voters without a college degree edge out Democrats without one, but not by as wide a margin as one might think:

There was general agreement among media analysts that Hillary Clinton would carry the degreed white vote. She didn’t:

The number of degreed white voters affiliated with either party is not equivalent, with the Democratic party holding a substantial edge of 12 points over Republicans in this category. From the same Pew Research report:

“Among whites, Trump won an overwhelming share of those without a college degree; and among white college graduates – a group that many identified as key for a potential Clinton victory – Trump outperformed Clinton by a narrow 4-point margin.”

“Trump won whites with a college degree 49% to 45%. In 2012, Romney won college whites by a somewhat wider margin in 2012 (56%-42%). Trump’s advantage among this group is the same as John McCain’s margin in 2008 (51%-47%).”

The Clinton campaign focused largely on a suburban female voter base that included Republican women who were thought to reject Donald J. Trump on the grounds of past sexist conduct. Media analysts were also widely agreed on this score. How did she fare? As charted below, more women are affiliated with the Democratic party than with the GOP. According to Pew’s analysis:

“Women supported Clinton over Trump by 54% to 42%. This is about the same as the Democratic advantage among women in 2012 (55% Obama vs. 44% Romney) and 2008 (56% Obama vs. 43% McCain).”

The Pew authors noted that the gender gap wasn’t much different in 2016 than in previous elections dating back to Bush/Gore. Hillary Clinton absolutely needed women to come out and vote.

Hillary Clinton probably fared the worst among younger voters, consistent with her performance during the primary. In, More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined – by a lot,  the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote:

“It’s hard to overemphasize how completely and utterly Sen. Bernie Sanders dominated the youth vote to this point in the 2016 presidential campaign. While Hillary Clinton dominated him among older voters, he dominated her right back among younger voters — even winning more than 80 percent of their votes in some states against no less than the eventual Democratic nominee.

But this fact might say it better than any: In the 2016 campaign, Sanders won more votes among those under age 30 than the two presumptive major-party presidential nominees combined. And it wasn’t close.”

The Philadelphia Tribune, in “A Look at Black Millennial Performance” reports:

“In examining recent figures tabulated by the United States Elections Project at the University of Florida, so far 135,228,196 total ballots have been officially counted and tallied in the 2016 election.

Out of that number, exit polls have determined that 3 percent of them were submitted by Black millennial voters, for an estimated total of 4,056,846 ballots.”

This count is somewhat lower than that of the 2012 election, and considerably so from 2008. The online magazine, Mic, rounds out our look at how African American women voted. A similar drop in votes is noted here, with a lower turnout among women in this category:

“Unsurprisingly, turnout for Clinton was higher among black women than black men, with Hillary earning 94% of the female black vote (4% for Trump) and just 80% of men (13% for Trump). This reflects larger trends nationally, with Clinton earning 54% of women’s votes and just 41% of men, and is also significantly higher than the Hispanic turnout, in which Clinton won 62% of Latino men and 68% of Latina women. There was a drop in votes as compared to 2012, however, in which Obama captured 87% of votes by black men and 96% of votes cast by black women.”

Here is a look at the breakdown in voter affiliation by age group:

** Silent Generation: born from 1925 to 1945

** Baby boomers: Born from 1946 and 1964, includes ages 52 to 70, 2016.

** Gen X: Born from 1965 to 1984

** Millennials: Born from 1982 to 2004

Though the overall Black vote was Hillary Clinton’s Southern Firewall during the primary, she was not able to match Barack Obama in the general election:

“Hillary Clinton did not run as strongly among these core Democratic groups as Obama did in 2012. Clinton held an 80-point advantage among blacks (88% to 8%) compared with Obama’s 87-point edge four years ago (93% to 6%). In 2008, Obama had a 91-point advantage among blacks.”

Clinton did not fare as well as Barack Obama with Latinos, either. Donald J. Trump garnered about 27% of the Hispanic vote, even though the share of Latinos who identify or lean Republican, fell by about 4% since 2012.

Closing out this section on how Americans voted is Pew Research’ chart on overall party affiliation:

The breakdown is Republicans: 29%, Democrats: 33%, Independent: 34%. How did independents vote?

The only conclusion one can arrive at is that Clinton under-performed across the board, especially among minorities, the young, and independent voters. Why?

Martin Luther King reminds us of the place of media in stoking fears in two quotes from a speech he gave at Selma:

“If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)”

“To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.”

Martin Luther King, 1965, Selma

Given what the 2016 electoral map ended up looking like, King’s words are prophetic.

In, Donald Trump Lost Most of The Economy in This Election, the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley writes:

“The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.

Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy.”

What exactly does this mean? More from Tankersley’s piece:

“… U.S. economic activity has grown increasingly concentrated in large, “superstar” metro areas, such as Silicon Valley and New York.

But it’s not the case that the counties Clinton won have grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country — they represent about the same share of the economy today as they did in 2000. Instead, it appears that, compared to Gore, Clinton was much more successful in winning over the most successful counties in a geographically unbalanced economy.

The Brookings analysis found that counties with higher GDP per capita were more likely to vote for Clinton over Trump, as were counties with higher population density. Counties with a higher share of manufacturing employment were more likely to vote for Trump.

“This is a picture of a very polarized and increasingly concentrated economy,” said Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings metro program, “with the Democratic base aligning more to that more concentrated modern economy, but a lot of votes and anger to be had in the rest of the country.”

This is precisely the picture that emerged during the month of May, when Pew Research released a study whose findings I incorporated here:

https://www.rimaregas.com/2016/06/03/profiling-the-angry-american-in-this-new-political-and-economic-era-blog42/

Plainly put, the former middle and working class rebelled against the establishment, first by choosing Donald Trump over all other Republican candidates, the vast majority of whom were experienced politicians and, second, by completely changing the nature of the contest on the left and when the victor on the left turned out to ignore them, the vote became a protest of neoliberalism, rather than a victory of conservatism.

Whereas Hillary Clinton was supposed to run uncontested, the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders was the expression of the left’s rejection of neoliberal policies. But something happened on the left that didn’t happen on the right. The establishment won. One may, perhaps, attribute the ability of the Democratic establishment to hang on to power to the fact that Sanders was its first real challenge, whereas the GOP establishment had been under challenge ever since the 2008 election. More likely, one should attribute it to a combination of the new economic reality, relative newness of the challenge, a sizable number of disgusted Democrats at what would transpire as the underhanded manipulation by the DNC and Clinton campaign of its voters through a decidedly partisan corporate media.

What does the face of a “very polarized and increasingly concentrated economy” look like? Well, in spite of the message that the media and certain politicians have been driving home for nearly a year, that face isn’t exclusively Caucasian. Everyone except for even fewer Americans these days participates in the economy. More elderly Americans work out of necessity than before. That has been a trend since the Great Recession and before, and certainly is the case now. As I explain in my essay on the angry American voter, how well one survived the Great Recession greatly depends on where in the middle class they were before it started and where they are located, geographically. Those in rural areas and the suburbs not only haven’t fared well, they are still languishing. Those in larger cities fared well, depending on their demographic and the city they live in.

As the concentration of wealth has changed since the start of the Great Recession, so did the voting patterns of counties traditionally thought of as safe Democratic voting blocs.  In “Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election, Jim Tankersley writes:

“The last candidate to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, Democrat Al Gore in 2000, won counties that generated about 54 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, the Brookings researchers calculated. That’s true even though Gore won more than 100 more counties in 2000 than Clinton did in 2016.

In between those elections, U.S. economic activity has grown increasingly concentrated in large, “superstar” metro areas, such as Silicon Valley and New York.

But it’s not the case that the counties Clinton won have grown richer at the expense of the rest of the country — they represent about the same share of the economy today as they did in 2000. Instead, it appears that, compared to Gore, Clinton was much more successful in winning over the most successful counties in a geographically unbalanced economy.”

Pew Research gave us a glimpse of what that change in concentration translates into, in terms of where salaries are worth the most and least:

Where this gets complicated is in the cost of living disparities, which are what is mostly behind the push for a $15 minimum wage. From a Pew report on wage disparities:

“Using the RPPs for 2013 (the latest set), the biggest gap was in Illinois: The price level in metropolitan Chicago, while only 6.6% above the national average, is 34.6% above the price level in Danville, a small city about 140 miles to the south that is the second-cheapest place to live in the nation.

Not far behind Illinois are California and New York, where the most-expensive metro areas are 33.2% and 31.9% higher, respectively, than the least-expensive places. The states with the smallest gaps, such as Idaho, Wyoming and Vermont, tend to be largely rural places with few (or no) big cities.”

The changes in wealth concentration and deepening of disparities detailed here provide an explanation for the electoral map of Election 2016. Voters who suffered life-changing economic declines as a direct result of the Great Recession were looking for change. Their offspring, for whom the economic outlook remains bleak relative to that of their parents, also looked for the kind of change offered by Senator Bernie Sanders in this election. Neither group found their desired change in the candidates who emerged from the primaries – only confirmation, via leaked emails and the narrative presented across the media, that their story was being erased from the national consciousness. The candidate who ran on the promise of change got the votes. Donald J. Trump also benefited from the rebellion against the establishment on the left.

The logical question that follows is asked by Kirk Noden in The Nation:

Why Do White Working-Class People Vote Against Their Interests? They Don’t.

Corporate Democrats have never advanced their interests—and at least Republicans offer a persuasive story about why they are getting screwed.

Just as Republicans rebelled against the establishment in choosing Trump over experienced politicians, so did Democrats in rejecting Hillary Clinton.

The discontent among voters has been festering since 2013, as I reported in a voting day 2014 post:

“Survey after survey, poll after poll since 2012, have shown that Democratic voters are leaning increasingly leftward. Yet, congressional Democrats have increasingly compromised on or proposed new legislation that takes it away from the wishes and stances of its base.  Lately, this estrangement by party leaders has been to the personal detriment of millions of voters who are still stranded in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Of note is the fact that the leadership has effectively ceased to actively decry the effects Republican tactics have had on our country, either through obstruction or attempts at forcing through legislation. The deafening silence since the passage of the Ryan-Murray budget right before Congress went on winter break in December 2013, has not been forgotten. Neither has Congress’ very lax legislation schedule in the intervening months. There has been a dearth of Democratic initiatives to get any of the most painful budget cuts back on the discussion table.”

How did many of these abandoned voters fare since then?

Depending on where we sit in the middle class, we’ve spent the past election year either talking about how much better we’re all doing, or how horrible the economy is, and how all these new jobs have been created.

Well, it’s true, a lot of jobs have been created. But is that all there is to this story? Judging by the mood of the American electorate, the answer is no, and the anxiety is now justified by two additional new studies, focusing on the “Gig Economy.”

First, though, let’s take a look at last month’s jobs report and economist Jared Bernstein’s blog post:

Election Eve Jobs Report: The labor market in Oct 2016

Payrolls rose 161,000 last month, in yet another in a series of solid reports on conditions in the US job market. Revisions to prior months added 44,000 to job counts, bringing the near-term (3-month average) trend in job growth to a robust 176,000 per month.

The unemployment rate ticked down slightly, but this was due to a slight tick down in the labor force, which remains stuck below 63%, down from 66% before the recession. While most of this decline is attributable to retirees aging out of the workforce, some portion, as discussed below, reflects the fact that, while the job market is clearly strengthening, it is not yet at full employment.

Average hourly wages grew 2.8% over the past year, their fastest growth pace since June 2009, suggesting that the tightening labor market is giving workers more bargaining clout. Since inflation has been running at around 1.5%, the real buying power of an average hour of work is up by more than 1% over a year ago. As I show below, that’s an improvement in the pace of real wage growth compared to earlier in this expansion. Faster real wage growth in recent months is a function of two factors: a) the tightening job market pressuring employers to bid up wage offers, and b) slower price growth that erodes less of the buying power of the nominal wage.

There is, however, an important caveat to the current wage story. While the pay of most workers appears to have gotten a boost from the tighter job market, it may be that higher-paid workers are gaining faster. The growth in the hourly pay of blue-collar workers and non-managers has been stuck at around 2.5% over the past year. That’s still a full point above where it was a few years ago, but this difference–faster growth at the average compared to that of lower-paid workers–is suggestive of the earnings inequality pattern that’s been embedded in our labor market for decades.

There’s a hint in today’s report of one factor that could be in play in these differing wage dynamics. Net employment growth was exclusively in services last month, as goods-producing sectors added zero jobs. Factory jobs have declined (slightly) in each of the last three months, and they’re down 62,000 so far this year. Construction employment has also been weak. These sectoral pressures may be putting downward pressure on wage growth for mid-wage workers.

In order to boost the signal-to-noise ratio of the monthly job gains, the smoother bar chart below shows 3-, 6-, and 12-month averages of monthly payroll changes. Over the past six months, average monthly gains are up around 179,000, a slight deceleration over the 12-month trend. This pattern is what we’d expect as the labor market expansion ages, though there are still underutilized labor resources, i.e., non-workers who could come into the labor market along with employed workers who could work more hours.

Source: BLS

This latter group looms large in the underemployment rate—what the BLS calls u-6—which is one of a few indicators which clearly shows we’re not yet at full employment (see figure below). This rate provides a more comprehensive look at the extent of slack remaining in the job market, as it includes just under 6 million involuntary part-timers (IPTs) who’d prefer full-time jobs but can’t find them. While it has fallen sharply off of its recessionary peak, when there were over 9 million IPTs, it has been stubbornly stuck in the mid-9’s (9.5% last month) for most of this year, about one percentage point above its rate at full employment (by my calculations).

Source: BLS

Other still-weak measures include the labor force participation rate, though this one is harder to read because, as noted above, demographic factors—our aging workforce—put downward pressure on this measure. A cleaner measure is the employment rate (employment-to-population ratio) of prime-age (25-54 year-old) workers. This metric fell sharply in the recession and has slowly been climbing back, thus far gaining back 3.4 percentage points of its 5.5 point loss, peak-to-trough. (As discussed here, for prime-age men, these cyclical movements are occurring around a long-term, negative trend.)

Of course, as this is the last jobs report before next week’s general election, its results will be scrutinized through that lens, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters’ preferences are already locked down. Still, I thought it would be interesting to compare job market conditions on the eve of this election to that of a few past Octobers in presidential election years.

The table below shows unemployment and underemployment (u-6) rates, along with average monthly payroll gains (Jan-Oct) and real yearly wage growth. By these few, top-line measures, the table shows labor market conditions to be quite solid compared to similar periods in past election cycles, with tighter job markets, and importantly, faster real wage growth (though the inequality caveat from above is germane here). To be clear, election cycles are not synonymous with economic cycles, and the latter dominate in determining these trends.

Source: BLS

That said, on the eve of the election, the job market continues to improve, and reliably so–monthly job gains have been steady and strong enough to tighten up employment conditions, which are in turn boosting wage growth (I hasten to add non-inflationary wage growth, Janet and co.!).

Clear pockets of concern remain, including slack as measured by underemployment and prime-age employment rates, and perhaps some evidence of wage inequality, as wage gains may be more significant for higher- as compared to lower-wage workers.

But there’s absolutely no case at all for the Trump message of a terrible US economy, especially among the metrics that people care most about: jobs and paychecks.

* Reprinted with permission from Jared Bernstein.

I must point out here that I disagree with Bernstein’s conclusion. Donald J. Trump’s characterizations of the state of jobs were exaggerated to some degree. We are by no means anywhere near the desperation level at the start of the Great Recession. That said, all too many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds have yet to see their way, either to a return to their former middle class status, or to the kind of stability that brings some assurance of a climb back. The Black middle class was nearly decimated by the Great Recession. Black unemployment is always nearly double that of overall unemployment.

As for quantifying the ranks of the unemployed, particularly the aging workers who were considered of prime age at the start of the Great Recession, please see the links below the fold for a discussion on how we count the unemployed.

In these times, when we talk about unemployment, we must include underemployment as a necessary part of this discussion, and make the distinction between those who fall in the working class category by virtue of what it is they do, and those who are a part of the precariat, by virtue of an economy in which they are no longer able to fully participate to their potential. Pew Research has a calculator that allows users to see where they fit in our system of classes.

In a new study published by Pew Research, we are now able to get a fuller sense of the depth and magnitude of what we now call the ‘Gig Economy.

Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing

24% of Americans report earning money from the digital ‘platform economy’ in the past year. The extra income they make is a luxury for some, but a necessity for others.

24% of Americans translates into millions of people. At the outset, it is necessary for me to critique this study for the way data that are unrelated are commingled. The study looks at whether and how Americans are earning their living online, but not all online activities are work that translates into making a living. For example, one cannot compare the earning capacity of an Uber or Lyft driver to that of an artisan or artist who sells their work on a site like Etsy. For example, an Uber driver could potentially work an 80-hour week to arrive at a living weekly wage, whereas an artisan can only produce so many tapestries within that same timeframe. The more ornate and intricate the needlepoint piece, the more time it takes to make. Granted, one piece can fetch several hundred dollars, but how long does it take to make it? An uber driver can earn several hundred dollars each week, after expenses.

By the estimation of this study of the gig economy, Pew reports that:

“Against this backdrop, a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that a relatively substantial share of the public has earned money recently from a digital commerce platform. In the context of gig employment, nearly one-in-ten Americans (8%) have earned money in the last year using digital platforms to take on a job or task. Meanwhile, nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have earned money in the last year by selling something online, while 1% have rented out their properties on a home-sharing site. Adding up everyone who has performed at least one of these three activities, some 24% of American adults have earned money in the “platform economy” over the last year.”

“Along with these demographic differences, users of labor platforms and capital platforms express different levels of reliance on the income they earn from these sites. Some 60% of labor platform users say that the money they earn from these sites is “essential” or “important” to their overall financial situations, but just one-in-five online sellers (20%) describe the money that they earn in similar terms.”

More from the introduction of this extensive report:

“Ultimately, there is no universally accepted definition of the range of activities that fall into the “gig economy” or for who should be counted as a “gig worker.” As a result, research on this subject has produced a wide range of estimates for how many people are using digital platforms to work or otherwise earn money:

• A 2015 survey by Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger found that nearly 16% of all workers are engaged in “alternate work arrangements” of one kind or another (such as temporary, contract or freelance work) and that those who provide services through “online intermediaries” (such as Uber or TaskRabbit) account for 0.5% of the total workforce.

• More recently, a 2016 study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 20%-30% of the working age population in the U.S. and Europe engage in in some type of independent work and that 15% of these independent workers have utilized digital platforms to find jobs.

• A 2016 study by the Freelancers Union and Upwork estimated that 55 million Americans engage in some type of freelance work and that 54% of these workers have been paid for projects that they found and completed online.

• A JPMorgan Chase analysis of its checking account customers conducted in late 2015 estimated that 1% actively earn income from some type of online platform in a given month and that 4% had participated in one of these platforms over a three-year period.

• A survey of independent workers by the consulting firm MBO Partners found that 9% of these workers (totaling around 2.7 million people) use “on-demand platforms” to connect with job opportunities.”

A thorough read of this report is highly recommended as, in my view, it explains the high degree of voter dissatisfaction across the board this election season. In her campaign, candidate Clinton made few efforts to reach out to those voters who are most likely to comprise the population studied in this Pew Research survey and paid the price for it. By all accounts, President Obama enjoys a very high degree of approval in spite of these findings and in spite of the slow recovery from the Great Recession. A logical conclusion for this approval may simply be that voters understand the dynamic between GOP obstruction and nullification and the degree to which they, themselves, were able to recover and they do not blame our president for it.

We’ve spent the last six years talking about the fact that elections have consequences, yet for the top leadership in the Democratic party, four losses in a row have caused none of the customary shakeups following heavy losses.

This is now the fourth election in a row in which Democrats performed badly, and the fourth post-election period in which those who most represent the ideals voters rejected are consolidating power in Congress and leadership of the party. If what President Obama called a “shellacking” in the 2012 congressional races didn’t serve as a warning, it should have in 2014, but didn’t and top Democrats behaved no differently. This time, voters revolted at a time when the stakes were far higher, with consequences for decades to come, and it doesn’t appear that establishment Democrats will loosen their grip. In the Senate, N.Y’s Chuck Schumer, after winning his election as leader, filled the top three positions with the most right-of-center senior Senators he could have chosen from and then named Senator Sanders to a new voter outreach position, which is hardly commensurate with the degree of political clout Sanders earned over this past year. In the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who has lead the Democrats for the last fourteen years, is being challenged by Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, and fighting very hard to retain her position. Ryan has won the backing of former Congressional Black Caucus Chair, Marcia L. Fudge.

The failure of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is more a reflection of what she was expected to be able to accomplish if elected, versus what she set as goals to achieve. Voters were far more enthusiastic and in agreement with the progressive platform and reasoning of Bernie Sanders and wanted those from Hillary Clinton. By all accounts, Clinton was keenly aware of voter wishes. Daily WikiLeaks revelations about Clinton’s true intent, once in office, only confirmed voter suspicions and most likely contributed the most in the decision to abstain from voting, blanking out votes, voting third party, or defecting to the other party. Clinton, whose approval ratings were the lowest in recent memory from the start of this election cycle, never publicly reassured voters and addressed the content of the leaks when their topics were of utmost importance to them.

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** Click here for my collection of articles on unemployment, full employment and the way the unemployed are counted.

Related:

https://www.rimaregas.com/2016/11/hillaryclintons-loss-a-complicit-msm-broken-trust-trade-jobs-and-racial-justice-on-blog42/

 

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