5873

Among the pundit class, you also have George Will and Joe Scarborough.

A poll from May puts the number of young GOP voters ditching the party at 250,000

Plus there has been fair amount of analysis on 538 showing a shrinking GOP. If you were hesitant about Trump before the election, and didn’t vote for him or only vote for him as anti-Hillary, I think it is just as easy to disassociate with the Republican as it is just to declare your opposition to Trump.

I’ve always lived in heavily Democratic places and voted for many Democrats. Over the last 3 cycle, I voted for one more Republican than Democrat totally. So I don’t know if this will change my voting much. What it does change is my campaign contributions, zero dollars to Republican candidates as long as Trumpites are in charge.

5874

I can see young voters leaving Trump, but I no longer have a lot of faith in polling numbers, strange what a terrible job with one political election will do to your trust. 538 was real close with their figures there.

Also, do the young vote? I know someone above joked about that but I think that is a real concern.

I had forgotten about Will, but it’s not like George Will is going to vote/donate to the Dems.

I think when you take Trump out of the picture many of the so-called defections will gravitate back to the GOP.

5875

Silver was the only one I recall saying Trump had a decent chance of winning. And people laughed at him for it.

5876

I thought he had Hillary winning from day one to the end. But I have tried forget everything connected to that evil day in November.

5877

Iirc he had Trump at around 30% leading up to the election. But I don’t blame you for wanting to forget that.

5878

Yeah, he was the only (major) forecaster that had Trump higher than like a 5% chance.

5879

The swing-o-matic which I think is on the 538 site showed all along that a tiny change in white/minority turnout ratio would flip the key industrial states, and that is exactly what happened.

5880

”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.

Despite broad consensus about coal’s bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

“I am optimistic that you can make a good career out of coal for the next 50 years,” said Sean Moodie.

Coal jobs are preferable to those in natural gas, they said, because the mines are close to home, while pipeline work requires travel. Like Sylvester, the Moodie brothers are taking mining courses offered by Consol’s recruiter, GMS.

Bob Levo, who runs a GMS training program, offered a measure of realism: The point of the training is to provide low-cost and potentially short-term labor to a struggling industry, he said.

“That’s a major part of the reason that coal mines have been able to survive,” he said. “They rely on us to provide labor at lower cost.”

5881

Nice.
So instead of training those people to do jobs that will actually exist, and wont’ suck, they’re being used as cheap labor while learning a job that is essentially guaranteed to be gone to automation in the near future.

5882

They gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid. Coal is coming back!

5883

They swallowed Trump’s crusty yellowed load like true believers. Well done, Fox and Friends. Well done.

5884

A recent poll published by the American Psychological Association finds 59 percent of Americans surveyed think this is the lowest point in the nation’s history that they can remember.

A slightly larger percentage, 63 percent, say they are stressed about the nation’s future, according to the poll.

Nearly three-quarters of Democrats, 73 percent, say they are stressed about the future of the nation, compared to 56 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of independents.

5885

Part of that is what’s driving a lot of other news problems in recent years. If you reject the facts, you stand a chance of altering them. So acknowledging that Trump was doing surprisingly well prior to the general election was not on for left-leaning organizations that didn’t want him to win.

Let’s say their private analysis said Trump-Clinton was too close to call or even had Trump leading. With any evidence on the other side to cite, the DNC would naturally claim they were ahead in a dominant way, to dishearten GOP voters. The possibility this strategy would bite them in the ass due to lots of voters disliking HRC almost as much as Trump and staying home as a result perhaps didn’t occur to them.

5886

If you’ve driven through the western part of our State, you’ve probably seen the MAKE COAL GREAT AGAIN billboards on businesses and even an eighteen wheeler trailer alongside the major highways. Trump made those people believe that coal is on the rise. When my son was at West Virginia University, I saw it the whole ride from west of Harrisburg, PA and Hagerstown, MD.

5887

Oh yeah, in central PA it’s a thing to be sure.

5888

How forgetful and sheltered those 59% must be.

5889

No doubt, I’m on record in a number of posts having blamed the media for imbalanced coverage. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s reasonable that if media coverage had taken him seriously as a candidate and more people had accepted the idea that he had a reasonable shot at winning instead of thinking his candidacy was a complete joke, then maybe more people would have gone out to vote and maybe there would have been fewer “not Hillary” votes.

5890

The irony of the coal states is that around the same time they finally realize Trump is not bringing coal back because coal is never coming back, he and Congress will have already cut the funding for all those empty retraining programs, and they’ll be left with no jobs and no training.

It kills me to read that these folks have their pick of dozens of career re-training options free of charge, and they’d rather choose to go back to work in the mines for $13 an hour (contract worker) when they used to make $30 (union worker). You can make $13 an hour doing a hell of a lot less dangerous jobs than coal mining, and you can often make more than $30 an hour in careers offered by the retraining such as electrician, nurse and natural gas pipeline construction. These folks don’t just VOTE against their own interests, they actively LIVE against their own interests. How do you change a mentality like that?

5891

President Donald Trump has told senior congressional leaders that he wants to name the forthcoming tax overhaul bill “the Cut Cut Cut Act,” two senior administration officials told ABC News.

Less than 24 hours before the bill is slated to be revealed, there is still dispute over the name, according to a senior congressional aide and a senior White House official.

The sources said it has been decided that the Ways and Means Committee will have the final say over the name.

Still, behind closed doors, there has been back-and-forth between House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady about the name of the bill, including multiple phone calls in the past week.

Ryan initially kicked the naming over to Trump because of his knack for branding, according to a senior Hill aide.

Trump has been insistent that the bill be called the Cut Cut Cut Act, according to the administration officials.

Ryan and Brady have pushed back on the name of the bill. However, Trump has held firm.

5892

They’re scared. They won’t ever admit it, but the same thing happened here decades ago with timber. There were so many that just waited around for logging and mils to come back, and it never did. When you talk to some of them, it was like defeat, a belief they couldn’t possibly do anything else, or they’d have to leave area. That second part is possibility, but the former, the complete lack of confidence and hope that they could succeed with something else.

We don’t much value in emotions and mental health that would come with the loss of an industry someone thought they would spend their entire life at. I grew up knowing I would change careers a few times and hoping I would have what I needed to be able to do that.