Yves here. Tom Ferguson, with Jie Chen, Paul Jorgensen, and now Matthias Lalisse, has built and maintained massive election databases for decades and perform in-depth analyses on the results. For instance, Ferguson, Chen, and Jorgensen analyzed why Ted Kennedy’s seat went to Republican Scott Brown, depriving Obama of a filibuster-proof Senate majority. The team determined via a granular analysis that the proportion of Republican votes correlated strongly with the number of foreclosures in that district.
The data-crunchers come up with a similar conclusion for the Trump win in New Hampshire. The vote for Trump correlated negatively with local household incomes. But that is not the entire story….
By Thomas Ferguson, Research Director, Institute for New Economic Thinking and Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Jie Chen, University Statistician, University of Massachusetts; Paul Jorgensen, Associate Professor and Director of Environmental Studies, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley; and Matthias Lalisse, Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Four years ago, the key takeaway from the New Hampshire primary was obvious. On the Democratic side, the left populist Bernie Sanders surprised the world by coming out on top, with his vote declining virtually in a straight line as town incomes vaulted upward. Figure 1, reproduced here from our earlier essay, said it all:
Figure 1: Lower Income Towns in New Hampshire Voted Heavily for Sanders; Richer Towns Did the Opposite Source: Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen, 2020
A more vivid example of a split-level political party could hardly be imagined.
Now, four years later, it is the Republican primary that highlights a dramatic economic bifurcation in a major political party. Donald Trump’s vote in New Hampshire is almost a mirror image of the 2020 Democratic outcome: As Figure 2 shows, yet again, as town incomes increased, the vote for the former president plunged.
Figure 2: Trump’s Percentage of the Vote Fell as Town Incomes Rose
The divide is actually more interesting than the figure suggests. A closer look indicates that slow growth over a long period of time compounds the direct influence of income. Teasing that conclusion out of the available data takes some effort, though.
Election returns from the Granite State’s charmingly venerable (to put it politely) voting units are typically reported by “towns.” These come in more shapes and sizes than even many hardened spectators of American elections can easily imagine. All the rabbit warrens turn the state’s electoral map into a crazy quilt of jurisdictions, archaic names, and imperfectly correlated census areas. As a result, timely and reliable contextual data for many voting units is sometimes exasperatingly difficult to locate. For a few small centers, important measures are simply unavailable, even from state websites that sometimes seem almost to flaunt their languidly paced updates.[1]
To approximate election unit growth rates over time, we turned to a stratagem that we have used in previous studies of Trump and American elections: analyzing proportional changes in population growth between 2010 and 2022 – a statistic that is typically available even for hamlets.[2]
Many New Hampshire towns show little or no growth over that stretch, but there are major outliers, too, so the graph of long-term change in town populations is a bit less stark.[3] But the association of higher Trump voting percentages with slower growth is clear and easily verified. Trump beat Haley in over 80% of towns experiencing negative growth. By contrast, he beat Haley in just over 60% of towns experiencing population growth of over 10%.
Figure 3: The Trump Vote Also Ran Higher in Slower Growing Towns; Faster Growing Areas Tilted More Heavily Against Him
These plots thicken – literally – when you inquire whether the two variables perhaps influence each other – if, for example, income’s effect on the Trump vote might not be constant but vary by town long-term growth rates. Effects of this sort defy easy graphical representation, and so we dispense with any here. But they are readily assessed statistically.
Again, the answer is clear: The combination of the two effects – low incomes and low growth – does indeed add up to more than the sum of the parts. As statisticians say, they interact with each other. Trump tended to do best in slower-growing, low-income towns. His vote fell off in faster-growing, high-income towns. Together the two variables and their interaction can explain about a fifth of the total result. In elections that is a substantial finding.[4]
We draw several conclusions from these results, though we begin with the standard cautions about the dangers of the ecological fallacy: aggregate studies like our’s should not be used to make generalizations about how individuals and subgroups voted. For that, you need data on individuals. For example, voter choices among particular ethnicities or income groups may well vary depending on whether they are scattered across many districts or concentrated in just a few.[5]
But even with that caution, our results suggest some important reasons why the rest of the Republican field fared so poorly against Trump. The financial profile of the Trump campaign has always stood out as a barbell – at one end a mass of small donations; at the other, a weighty golden throne of big money.[6] It was so in 2016 and 2020; and enough evidence is in already to know that 2024 is repeating that pattern, even before the many Republican holdouts who now appear to be reconciling themselves to his nomination finally decide to jump in.[7] By contrast the rest of the Republican field – even the millionaires – had no realistic prospect of winning without massive inflows of funds. They had to chase money and did, with DeSantis and Haley cashing in most heavily.
The focus on attracting major donors had predictable effects on their campaign appeals. The candidates were happy to join Trump in proclaiming global warming to be either a hoax or vastly exaggerated and insisting that “drill, baby, drill’ should be America’s energy policy of choice. Lines like those bring in plenty of money from entirely predictable sources. Trump’s disdain for regulation and government red tape are two more lucrative themes that rock no boats within the GOP. And all of them looked kindly on some kind of “wall” at the border. In this sense, the Republican Party still shares some common core propositions.
But in ways that matter most, it no longer does. The rift between Trump and the Republican Establishment on basic economic policy has always run deep, but now it has widened into a Grand Canyon. The New Hampshire results testify how little many of the also ran’s favorite economic themes – the perils of the deficit, cutting Social Security, or crypto – moved Trump’s core constituency. Large numbers of Trump voters count on Social Security to get by and simply cutting government expenditure can hardly rank as their first priority. Trump bluntly advised Congressional Republicans to leave Social Security alone and his campaign puts the famous MAGA – Making American Great Again – right up front. He talks constantly of rebuilding the industrial base, the virtues of Made in America, and – above all – the urgent need for higher tariffs and more aggressive export policies.
Election analysts underestimate the resonance of these appeals today at their peril, in part because conventional poll questions on trade are so poor. The New Hampshire results are consistent with careful studies of what actually moved individual voters from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy, when his emphasis on tariffs and economic nationalism stood out in the rest of the Republican field. While the very latest economic numbers look better and the state for sure benefited from programs that the Biden administration has now wound down, the overall economic news for most New Hampshire residents has been grim. As the New Hampshire Fiscal Institute summarized matters in September 2023, “Latest Census Bureau Data Show Median Household Income Fell Behind Inflation, Tax Credit Expirations Increased Poverty.”
Many critics of Trump pay little attention to the details of his actual economic record before Covid hit. They thus miss how his 2024 appeals are drawing force from cultivated memories of how the economy fared on his watch.
It is absolutely true that by historical standards, the time path of economic growth under Trump was not remarkable, even before 2020…. his overall economic policies powerfully reinforced the stark divides of America’s dual economy. But as 2018 turned into 2019 and inflation failed to take off despite story after story in the business press about the difficulties businesses were having finding workers…Wages were hardly rising…[but] in the short run incomes were increasing because people could at last get more hours of relatively low-paid work as employers became more willing to look at people they had previously written off. People were reentering the labor force and even long-term rates of unemployment were falling. It was also easier to find second and third precarious gig jobs if people wanted them … rates of unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics, and other groups fell to historically low levels before the pandemic (Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen, 2021).
Voters left behind by decades of globalized finance and production do not miss his message or that his Republican opponents had nothing to offer them.
Other than rhetoric about the “Other.” Here a look at the great arc of the campaign is instructive. DeSantis in particular quite deliberately tried to steal essentially all of Trump’s cultural clothes. He posed as a more effective Trump, someone capable of getting things done while hitting hard on virtually every hot-button cultural issue: He picked a quarrel with Disney and other favorite targets of the right, while filling his campaign with endless dog whistles drawn from hard right racial and gender memes, along with jeremiads about abortion, Covid vaccination, school libraries, and labels on bathroom doors.
But if you want that sort of thing, it is probably impossible to top Trump himself, who is still carrying on about “immigrants poisoning the blood of our country,” even as Democrats worry about the erosion of support among Hispanic voters.
The 2024 race for the presidency is indeed looking peculiar. The 2020 New Hampshire primary illustrated how tensions between big money and the mass base of the Democrats were bringing the Party almost to a point of collapse. But the Biden administration did not make the mistake Hillary Clinton’s campaign did in 2016: it did not ostracize the Sanders wing of the party. Instead, it brought its leaders into many, if far from all its councils, and accepted some of their policy proposals, especially when substantial numbers of big donors also favored them, such as its measures to abate climate change.
This year’s New Hampshire primary testifies to the disintegration of the Republican Party: traditional “country club” Republicanism is dead as a mass force, killed off by its efforts to use dog whistles as a substitute for economic policies that offer something real to the rest of the population in the face of a challenger who owns every dog whistle in sight but also has a forthright alternative economic policy.[8]
How all this plays out in November is anyone’s guess, even if it is true that the whole world really is watching. American politics right now is like late winter ice on a New Hampshire barn roof: It could slide off as easily on the left as on the right or slowly melt down evenly for a long time. The only thing we know for sure is that we do not know. The abortion issue still cuts heavily in favor of the Democrats. But we do not share the widespread confidence that “Team Transitory” has won the argument over inflation. In a globally warming, multipolar world, shocks of all kinds just keep coming, as the latest developments in the Red Sea illustrate. And foreign policy disasters on the scale of 1980, or a bigger border crisis, could restructure American politics in a flash.
Notes
Thanks to Gail Chaddock, James Kurth, and Pia Malaney for very helpful comments.
[1] Our election data come from the New York Times compilation. This was archived some days after the election, so it is nearly, but not quite, complete. But better data is not available in public. We checked the few other inventories we found, but they were inferior. We took town income data from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services. This presents U.S. Census data, but it compiles several options for some “towns.” We compared its various entries and tried to use the figures that most closely matched with the unit reporting the returns. In any case, it does not matter; we checked whether different choices mattered. They differ trivially. One omission is worth flagging: There is no entry for median household income for Dixville Notch. We had to omit it. Probably it is an outlier to the generalizations in this paper since its votes went to Haley – all six of them. Most population data came directly from the U.S. Census, but data for all towns was incomplete. We used New Hampshire state websites for particular communities to fill in most of the others. The consequence is inevitably that correlations and regressions differ slightly in the number of cases, depending on whether they refer to income, population change, or both together. The differences are tiny; they can’t materially affect our results.
[2] The economies of contracting population units are typically falling behind; rapidly growing areas are commonly the reverse. That is the logic of using population growth.
[3] Many towns fall between plus or minus 20 percent; the outliers are not that numerous.
[4] The correlation of the Trump vote with income is -.377 and R-squared = .142, with an is N = 234; for the population change between 2010 and 2022, N = 237 and the correlation = -.210, with an R-squared = .044. A regression on both variables and their interaction produces an adjusted R squared of .177 with all terms significant at an .01 level. We checked for spatial correlation, but our Moran tests indicated no adjustment was needed. It goes without saying that if we had more variables, the equation would improve.
[5] On the other hand, New Hampshire is, by comparison with many states, relatively homogenous, as we noted in our older essay on Sanders.
[6] For 2016, see Figure 8 of Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen, 2022 and the references there. We are finishing a study of 2020, but the shape has been obvious all along. See, for example, the discussion of private equity’s support for Trump in Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen, 2021.
[7] We will return to this question in the near future.
[8] The economic and political effects of Trump’s tariffs are highly debated, Our earlier analysis, however, appears to hold up very well, though the subject is too complex to treat here.
Photo: Trump at a rally in Rochester, NH on Jan 23, 2024. Credit: Liam Enea / Flickr (Creative Commons License)
42 comments
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I don’t remember Team Biden accommodating the Bernie supporters, quite the opposite really. More like an attempt at neutering whats left of the New Dealers and demanding their loyalty.
A Russian victory and a downtown in the economy would help finish off the elitist Democrats. A sort-of cosmic punishment I guess.
I’m wondering how well those (inverse) income correlations track with gun ownership. The Scott Brown election that you mention had that as a major factor, since Massachusetts outside the Rte. 495 urban-suburban conglomeration is both poorer and has much more gun ownership, with Martha Coakley (Brown’s opponent) having a rep as a strong gun control person (as well as tainted by her involvement in the bogus Fells Acre day care sex abuse prosecutions). It used to be all the Democratic state senators and representatives out here had A ratings from the NRA, because you pretty much had to if you were running for office.
Isn’t the gun ownership thing good for the democrats? The guys in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are up in some tree stand in the woods every Election Day.
it did not ostracize the Sanders wing of the party. Instead, it brought its leaders into many, if far from all its councils, and accepted some of their policy proposals, especially when substantial numbers of big donors also favored them, such as its measures to abate climate change.
While I’ve watched the planet heat up for my adult life, I don’t see
“climate change” as a concrete material benefit but more a narrative that benefits your kids or nudges the human condition in the proper direction. I walked too close to a tv set yesterday and so heard rachel the madwoman cackling about large job numbers so clearly the dems are going to stick with the line that everything is great but those dumb people are too stupid to know how great they are
tegnost: the dems are going to stick with the line that everything is great but those dumb people are too stupid to know how great they are
Homelessness in the US is approaching levels not seen since the Depression.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homeless-record-america-12-percent-jump-high-rents/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/12/15/homelessness-hits-record-high-after-12-jump-this-year-us-officials-say/?sh=4c79fa00463a
This is alongside the food price inflation noted here, average annual ‘health insurance’ prices for a family of four reaching $30,000 approximately, and much else.
So they can try this ‘are you going to believe us or your lying eyes’ approach. However, the dissonance between the party line and people’s actual lived reality arguably exceeds what the the old Soviet Union ever tried to get away with.
David Simon’s line in THE WIRE about Americans being “generally a stupid people. We believe everything they tell us” comes to mind ….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAxVaVsM9ng
But there are limits.
The correlations may be little different with very different lines, Just visual view but it looks to me you could draw any line you wanted through those Trump dots. Bernie’s line looks fine, but no correlation quoted.
Paper seems to be a justification of prejudices more than anything else.
The income graphs both look OK, but I don’t believe the data points in the growth graph support the plotted trend line at all. It’s entirely dependent on a small number of outliers, and in fact if you removed the one data point from the far lower right corner it would go in the opposite direction.
It would be a more interesting graph if you struck out the four outliers, expanded the -20 to 20 region and looked for trends there. It looks like there might be one, but the X scale is too compressed to tell.
I don’t take well to bogus attacks on authors, particularly when yours results from a failure to adhere to our site Policies, which stipulate that anyone commenting must read a post in full first.
Your comment about outliers is false, as shown in Footnote 3: “Many towns fall between plus or minus 20 percent; the outliers are not that numerous.”
Perhaps I could have phrased it better. I was not suggesting that the calculation or the regression line were wrong. I’m sure they’re accurate based on the supplied data. However, because of the way regression works (root mean square deviation) outliers tend to have a disproportionate impact on the result, with the consequence that the shape of the regression line in this case is heavily influenced by the outliers in question, to the point where it’s obscuring trends that I would consider more important (and from Footnote 3, it sounds like the authors would as well).
Granted dropping outliers can be a dubious practice in statistics at times, but when you’re doing a linear regression there is a good reason for it if you don’t want skewed results. They could have supplied another graph with outliers removed, shown them both, and let the reader decide whether it was legit to exclude them.
I don’t believe the critiquing the author’s choice of whether or not to include outliers constitutes a personal attack. I also object to you concluding erroneously that I have not read the post based on a misreading of my argument – as noted, Footnote 3 is saying the same thing that I am. I’ll accept blame for framing it in a way that’s open to misinterpretation, but you don’t always need to assume bad faith.
This is the equivalent of six blind men, standing at different parts of the animal, describing an elephant.
Can we get an academic who hasn’t had a raise in 7 years, rents his house and actually goes to the store to buy groceries, give us another peek inside the Trump phenomenon?
Insulting the writers is against site policy, which you should consider reading.
Michael Moore did that in October 2016.
Thanks for this post. It seems to confirm something I’ve been thinking about the uniparty elites vs their base. The latest example, imo, is Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer both in favor of the current immigration “reform” bill that would still let in 5000-8500 illegal immigrants a day. Which would continue to suppress working class wages. I’m starting to get the idea the uniparty works for the 1%, or in reality the .01%; the base voters in both parties would like some representation of their issues for a change, imo.
Yeah, it’s interesting to watch the smiley faced fascists in the uniparty try to find language and symbols to get the working class onboard with being metabolized directly into profits (via their disability and replacement by immigrants at a lower wage) while Trump is brooking for a renewal of the Hobbesian “social contract” from “The Leviathan”.
Both options are pretty bleak, but at least the Hobbesian vision has the people as the body of the State, while the uniparty sees them as its food.
The migrants suppress working class wages but they boost wages for doctors, dentists, social workers, teachers, ESL teachers, translators, nurses, physical therapists, hospital administrators, lawyers doing personal injury and worker’s comp on both the defense and plaintiff side, worker’s compensation administrators, pediatricians, obstetricians, police, prison guards, administrators, small business owners, construction companies that outsource their workers (the big ones) and landlords to think of a few. Open immigration is probably more effective than defense in terms of funding the PMC with tax dollars. And it keeps a lid on wages so that the overall standard of living for the mass of Americans corrected for inflation has not gone up for many decades. What is not to like?
Sorry to be the annoying, negative gadfly but: Democracy? Meaningful choice? How quaint.
“The US has no functioning democracy”\
“…an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” (Jimmy Carter)
Is it too disturbing to admit it? Is it less disturbing to go along and assume voting is not a waste of time.
Maybe George Carlin was right. Why waste our time legitimizing a fraud?
I am sympathetic to the need for social scientists to do social science, and some do it much better than others. This analysis is useful in my opinion if you keep front and center the warning that aggregate population studies do not explain individuals, a point Taleb has been making recently on X re BMI.
Taibbi’s coverage of Trump’s first campaign observed that Trump’s early appearances did a kind of A/B testing, like a standup comic working on new material, throwing away anything that fell flat and refining the portions that drew applause. Listening to voter feedback is a huge advantage over competitors.
re: “Listening to voter feedback is a huge advantage over competitors.”
I agree. I think the Dem estab’s decision not to have real primaries this year is a big mistake. They’ve decided to listen to only to themselves and not to the pesky Dem voters.
Haley says change Social Security. Nuff said. She’s also a huge warmonger and doubtful if the poor and struggling like that either.
In other words she’s playing to her funders and not the voters. This may work in Republican SC but not nationally. Reports here say that one reason for the poor Dem primary turnout is that TDS Dems want to vote for Haley in the upcoming Repub primary. Her base.
But the local Dem party leadership doesn’t like Haley either. A smarter Haley would pretend to be a populist and save the sellouts for later. Unfortunately for the never Trumpers they had to go to war with the Haley they have.
In any case the above demonstrates the limits of PR. You can lie about foreign policy since Americans are disengaged but they interact with the economy every day.
Hmmm, Haley winds up functioning as a trap which the Democratic Party seems primed to jump right into: imagining that running on The Beautiful Status Quo can win enough traditional Big Money GOP votes to offset the blue-collar votes they cede to Trump. Sad, and dangerous for all of us.
I said at the time that Sanders was the perfect opponent to Trump, had no weaknesses Trump could exploit in debate or perception management, both were peoples candidates. These numbers bolster that case.
Dunno what Biden said to Sanders to get him to roll over and play dead but it must have been some pretty good compromat. Supplied by Netanyahu, perhaps?
I sincerely hope Biden’s campaign strategy is run by the same people as are running his foreign policy. I’m so done with him.
So, not Biden- I get it. But what, then? Trump? Kennedy Jr? Write -in? No vote? This is NOT a criticism- an honest question. I dislike Biden and Trump, both, with equal fervor derived from different fact sets.
Johnny James notations above- pretty stark– and spot-on, to me!
Sorry to be the annoying, negative gadfly but: Democracy? Meaningful choice? How quaint.
“The US has no functioning democracy”\
“…an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” (Jimmy Carter)
Is it too disturbing to admit it? Is it less disturbing to go along and assume voting is not a waste of
time.
Maybe George Carlin was right. Why waste our time legitimizing a fraud?
I would add, by not voting, one is legitimately withholding license and consent.
Not voting–no way to run a republic based on a representative government, but it has been a very long time since any elected official has come close to representing me. Maybe JFK, when I was four years young?
And our local and state government have gone off the rails since 2016.
*Expletive*
Thank you. At this point, I would think picketing the polls in protest with a specific demand to enact legislation to override the Citizens United decision are long overdue. That’s for starters. If we continue to legitimize the Freak Show Kakistocracy, we give our implicit consent to be ruled by oligarchy. It’s kind of like Collective Stockholm Syndrome
It seems far too many informed people are still stuck in the denial phase, or lost in the forest for the trees. It is too disturbing to admit, even the glaringly obvious.
Regardless of how we vote, or not, nothing will fundamentally change as a result of it.
But voting makes us complicit, if only in some small way, because it conveys legitimacy.
Boycotting the election would be my choice as of now. Unless RFKjr can get his act together between now and November and stop sounding like another sleazy AIPAC candidate. But admittedly that has no meaningful effect without huge masses of people doing it. I didn’t vote in either the 2012 election (after voting Libertarian in 2008) or 2016 election. But it’s a symbolic action, basically.
I do believe we would benefit from a “None of the above” voting option for every national race.
Can’t think of anything that says rejection more than writing in Putin.
But look on the bright side of foreign policy where you can choose among Genocide Joe, Genocide Don, Genocide Bobby, Genocide Dean, and Genocide Nikki.
I’m choosing the lesser of two genocides.
I’m afraid that I think actively enabling genocide is an absolute disqualifier — and voting for Biden would make me, in some way, complicit in that genocide.
Yeah……I can’t wait for Gavin Newsome to step up. We need to fight for freedom and democracy.
ha. Gov. Hair Gel, not to be confused with former Texas Gov. Rick ‘good hair’ Perry. (Pace, Molly Ivins.)
There’s this story going viral. IMHO, this does not endear Newsome to regular folks at all.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/gov-gavin-newsom-goes-viral-for-shoplifting-at-target
an aside: saying it was “the governor’s fault” wasn’t even wrong. Former Dem Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill raising the dollar limit for shoplifting crimes to be considered worthy of arrest and serious prosecution. Newsom was only then Gov. Brown’s Lt. Gov at the time. The clerk never said which Governor, only “the Governor.” If Newsom had the wits of a simple celled organism he would have let this pass, registering it internally as a public relations political problem to handle. Did he do that? Nope. He broadcast it, painting himself as some sort of victim unjustly attacked by a low level store worker. Oh man.
Gavin ‘good hair’ Newsom. / ha
TBH, I thought this episode made Newsome look like a supercilious jackass flaunting his power by stepping on the little people, and that is in fact a very much an accurate description of what he is. I suspect that this is a far more common reaction than anything else among the public.
Interesting that no comment has included the situation in Gaza as a factor influencing their voting ( or not ) decisions. Genocide supported by US arms and diplomatic cover for Israel means nothing? The fact that so many have been displaced, killed by US weopons and are now facing famine doesn’t mean a thing? The policies of the Biden and his neocons that rely only on continued escalation and makes the next world war a possibility is not worth considering? A Palestinian American cardiologist who has lost nearly 100 members of his family has no impact? Oy Vey!
1. New England has a low proportion of Jews and Muslims. New Hampshire has fewer than 1,700 Muslims and 10,000 Jews, so <1% whereas in the US as a whole, Jews are over 4% of the population and Muslims about 1%.
2. Younger voters are far more agitated about the genocide. Average age in the US is 38. In New Hampshire, 43.
3. This is a Republican primary, or did you manage to miss that????
My comment was directed to the other comments, many of which have content going beyond the scope of the article, and are referring to the general election and considerations influencing voting choices. There is one individual’s comment that says he can’t vote for Biden because he is complicit in genocide. I feel the same way. I do admit taking the liberty of not restricting the expression of my views solely to the material presented by Ferguson et. al.
Your comment, by not being placed as a reply to other comments, is directed at the article, not them.
Not my intention, but I will be careful to follow the rules in the future. Thank you so much.
bill clinton and his country club GOP allies perpetrated the largest swindle of the american people and the country, in our history.
it was so recognized by the year 2000, that gore could not even carry his home state.
the democrats used to be the largest party in america, that ended in the year 2000, and its been all down hill since.
the elections have been rigged for sure since 2016, and we are about to have another rigged election, besides the coups since 2018.
you can’t have a modern first world country without manufacturing and a strong central government that police the markets and provides for the general welfare of its peoples.
i thank the authors.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/
“Popular movements against different elements of this post–Cold War vision came initially from the Left in the form of the anti-globalization movements and later Occupy Wall Street.
But, lacking the bargaining power to challenge international capital, protest movements went nowhere. The globalized and financialized economic system held firm despite all the devastation it wreaked, even through the 2008 financial crisis.
Today, by far the most visible anti-globalization movement takes the form of the anti-migrant backlash led by Donald Trump and other “populists.” The Left, meanwhile, seems to have no option but to recoil in horror at Trump’s “Muslim ban” and news stories about ICE hunting down migrant families; it can only react against whatever Trump is doing. If Trump is for immigration controls, then the Left will demand the opposite.
And so today talk of “open borders” has entered mainstream liberal discourse, where once it was confined to radical free market think tanks and libertarian anarchist circles.
While no serious political party of the Left is offering concrete proposals for a truly borderless society, by embracing the moral arguments of the open-borders Left and the economic arguments of free market think tanks, the Left has painted itself into a corner. If “no human is illegal!,” as the protest chant goes, the Left is implicitly accepting the moral case for no borders or sovereign nations at all.
But what implications will unlimited migration have for projects like universal public health care and education, or a federal jobs guarantee? And how will progressives convincingly explain these goals to the public?
During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, when Vox editor Ezra Klein suggested open borders policies to Bernie Sanders, the senator famously showed his vintage when he replied, “Open borders? No. That’s a Koch brothers proposal.”1 This momentarily confused the official narrative, and Sanders was quickly accused of “sounding like Donald Trump.” ”
“The Human Cost of Globalization
Advocates of open borders often overlook the costs of mass migration for developing countries. Indeed, globalization often creates a vicious cycle: liberalized trade policies destroy a region’s economy, which in turn leads to mass emigration from that area, further eroding the potential of the origin country while depressing wages for the lowest paid workers in the destination country.
One of the major causes of labor migration from Mexico to the United States has been the economic and social devastation caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S. competition.
When coffee prices fell below the cost of production, nafta prohibited state intervention to keep growers afloat. Additionally, U.S. companies were allowed to buy infrastructure in Mexico, including, for example, the country’s main north-south rail line. The railroad then discontinued passenger service, resulting in the decimation of the rail workforce after a wildcat strike was crushed.
By 2002, Mexican wages had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity increased by 45 percent.7 In regions like Oaxaca, emigration devastated local economies and communities, as men emigrated to work in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly”
…
Three retired men who had worked in near proximity had lunch in Nashua, NH yesterday. Two from NH, one from Ma near NH border. All own guns. We are not Biden fans, maybe common to our demographic.
We feel a lot of “blue” has migrated to south NH.
Relatively comfortable pensioners, we see economy as serious mess. To say we are not MMT would be accurate. Seeing a debt bomb.
All of us veterans, we did not talk Ukraine or Gaza.
We agreed that the larger towns go democrat, the reason all in congress are mid line pro war democrats. Some of it link to Ma immigration?
Between Haley leaning republicans and the big town dem machines Biden should take NH, and see the same more money for war faces in congress.
Three aging men….
your tax dollars has never payed for the budget. the only real debt bomb you need to worry about is, the private sector, and our trade deficit, those are real.