TV reporters have almost stopped blaming pollsters for trump’s victory and some are even accepting their appalling failure to see what was happening between the East Coast and West Coast elites where a lot of the population still lives in small towns and on farms where life has become more difficult every year for the past two decades as well as missing Trump failures.
Between closing coal mines and the loss of many small town main street businesses to Walmart, salaries and school quality (which was never what you'd call very high) have fallen so much that even with both parents in a two-parent family working one and one-half jobs each, they can barely keep up and certainly can’t pay for the college education of even one child.
Most families around here include two parents and several kids.
What's happened in small towns?
I live in Punxsutawney, PA which you may have heard of and will certainly see on TV news reports this February second as Phil the Groundhog makes his prediction on Groundhog Day. We have visitors from around the world each February, as well as a lot of drunken college students. There was even a movie about the town starring Bill Murray and although it wasn’t filmed here, the actor and some of those involved in the movie stayed in the town’s only real hotel, the Pantel (pronounced, for some obscure reason I don’t remember, “The Panel”) The movie did reflect the actual town pretty well.
Since the movie was made: The Pantel is today closed and up for Sheriff's Sale, several of the town’s locally owned businesses such as the big car parts store and a hardware store which covered an entire block, have made way, respectively, for NAPA and a parking lot for a chain pharmacy which is also used for a Subway fast food joint.
The downtown changes if you blink as local businesses try to open but quickly fail, and I can’t even remember now what was on the block now filled by a McDonald's and their parking lot but I think it included a stationary store. The local book/magazine store closed three weeks ago.
Today
Even 15 years ago there was a great bistro and a great local eatery in town -.today the latter's gone but there is a Wendy's, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, two Chinese buffets, (the Long John Silver's closed) and with an irony missed by virtually everyone here, a Domino’s Pizza next door to a Culinary School which produces cooks and chefs who make less after graduation than their parents made.
I personally worked in a coal mine here for a brief time until my writing business took fire and lived here off and on for most of my life (minus a wonderful 15 years in Boston where I attended various schools virtually every semester studying what I wanted.) But that was another century. American’s can’t do that now because the classes I took which cost $200 at Harvard night school now require even middle class parents to tell their kids they must take out loans.All that is the fault of both political parties and THAT is precisely what the Clinton team and the Democratic party forgot or, even worse, ignored.
Obama promises and failure
President Obama was a total failure when it came to implementing virtually all the campaign promises he made. Every candidate does that, but Obama's mistake was that he raised the hopes of the next generation very high and then let them down which was much worse than what politicians do which is ignore and NOT raise the hopes of the poor and exploited one more time.
Senator Bernie Sanders was flat-out cheated out of any chance to win the Democratic nomination and the probability is that he would have won easily against Trump so if you want to place the Blame for Trump on anyone, you don’t have to look further than the entrenched Democratic Party operatives who blocked the populist Sanders.
Populist political outsider Trump was able to leverage salesmanship and social media savvy into a campaign which ran roughshod over the Republican elite but Senator Clinton didn’t because she was the Democratic elite.
