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by ericd 3504 days ago
This ignores the many white men for whom there is no economic hope, because their towns and regions are dying. Many of these white men are living off of disability because their jobs left and aren't going to be coming back. Many are addicted to pain killers and other drugs to help distract them from the reality of their situation. That is an existence without much hope, a slow, depressive sinking into despair.

With that in mind, I think you can imagine why the drum telling them about how privileged they are and have no right to complain might inspire more than a little anger.

Have the same empathy towards poor white men as you would to anyone else, and encourage your friends to, for everyone's sake.
1 comments
noobermin 3504 days ago
Can we stop this tired meme? The median income for Trump voter at least in the primaries was higher than the nation's median and higher than Clinton's or Sanders'[0].

[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...

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ericd 3503 days ago
That article has very suspect figures. It says that all the major candidates had supporters with median incomes above the national median income. Which tells me that the population they're polling isn't representative.
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wool_gather 3503 days ago
That's not cause to suspect the analysis. Yes, the sampled population may not be congruent with the nationwide population. There's a reason for that: these are exit polls at the primaries. Only those who showed up to vote in those primaries can be polled.

The article links to its source data: http://www.cbsnews.com/elections/2016/primaries/republican/v...

The VA results there, for example, also show that the majority of respondents for both Republican and Democratic primaries are over the median state (and national) _age_.

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ericd 3502 days ago
Right, that was my point - primary voters are not representative of general election voters, and so conclusions about general election voters should not be drawn from primary voter data.
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wool_gather 3502 days ago
Okay, fair enough, I didn't quite realize that's what you were arguing against.

I need to hunt down the demographic info for the general exit polling; this is one of the big questions on my mind.

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ericd 3500 days ago
Sorry, I probably wasn't expressing clearly. Yeah, that'd be interesting, haven't seen anything about that yet.
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