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Counting on Votes

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Counting on VotesDee Chadwell – As we adjust to the results of this charade of an election, we must face the depths to which this nation has fallen. We are no longer in a place where simply voting can change things. Something terrible is at the bottom of this pit we’ve fallen into, something that must be dealt with before we can count on our votes meaning anything. This is no longer a matter of politics; it’s a matter of life or death; it’s a matter of thought.

Thought is based on one thing: truth. If we cannot connect the dots of fact in a reliable way, we can’t begin to think, and thinking is all that separates us from lower forms of life, all that allows us to stay alive.

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A Dose of Discernment is Needed to “Drain the Swamp”

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Erik Rush – As many readers will concur, in general, American voters are not particularly discerning. Studies have been done detailing how questionable candidates have been elected to office simply because they’re glib, charismatic, or physically attractive. If a candidate looks good and sounds good, most voters will defer to that candidate, no matter how fundamentally insubstantial he or she may be.

Obviously, this has been a recipe for disaster, not just in individual cases, but as a long-term practice.

Exceptions to the widespread superficial assessment of political candidates have been instances in which significant numbers of voters have suffered due to the policies of a particular elected official or political party. Usually, this suffering has been economic in nature, but not always. In these cases, voters have tended to gravitate toward the candidate who promises to ameliorate that suffering. We witnessed this in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump.

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Trump Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are

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votersMark Patricks – During this past presidential election season, pundits and pollsters were tempted to draw a demographic picture of an average Donald Trump supporter and put them in a box that would be easy to categorize. The adjectives “poor,” “white,” “old,” “uneducated,” “rural” and “racist” tended to come up again and again.

Unfortunately for the pollsters and pundits, the spectrum of people who actually voted for Trump ended up being much broader and more diverse than they had anticipated. And in the end, there were also a healthy number of defectors from the Democratic Party who decided in this election cycle to support Trump.

Perhaps the biggest notion that pollsters miscalculated was the median household income of the Trump voter. Following the election, that number was judged to be $72,000 per year.

At first it was estimated to be much lower, but as state totals rolled in and Trump ended up winning over states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania that no Republican had managed to declare victory in since 1988 it became obvious that Trump’s message on jobs and the economy resonated not just with poorer voters but also middle-class ones, who in many cases have seen their inflation-adjusted incomes stagnate or fall over the last 20 years.

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Voters Want A Revolution. Here’s What It Would Take

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Jonathan Turley – Below is my Sunday column yesterday in the Washington Post on reforming our political system. We are certainly, as the Chinese curse says, “living in interesting times.”

We seem to be in the midst of an American revolution where citizens have arisen in collective disgust of the establishment and the status quo. For years, citizens have objected to a political system that is dysfunctional and detached. The two parties have largely ignored these objections and many have objected to this “doupoly” on power.

For many, answer of the two parties to the American people seems to be the same as Henry Ford to customers of the Model T Ford: “you can have any color so long as it is black.” In the United States, you can have any party so long as it is red or blue; Republican or Democrat. Yet, in 2016, the public has responded with a deafening rejection of the establishment.

The most obvious is Donald Trump who is the perfect personification of an angry electorate. On the democratic side, a 74-year-old Democratic Socialist has rocked the Democratic party, which overtly rigged a primary system to guarantee the selection of the ultimate establishment figure: Hillary Clinton. However, we seem to go this cathartic exercise every four years rather than seek some changes to break down the insularity of government. There is another way. Instead of just choosing some personality that matches our angry politics, we can really change the system . . . for the better. The Framers gave the public the power to solve our own problems, including the ability to circumvent Congress with a constitutional convention. We have the anger. The question is whether we have the answer.

Below is the column. There are a host of other changes that can be made to improve the system, including many that can be done without a constitutional amendment. However, there is a value in focusing on a few basics that could have a transformative effect on the respective branches of government.

Legal scholar says we need to change the system, not just who’s in charge

voters America is fuming. In Super Tuesday exit polls, as many as 95 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of Democrats said they were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the federal government. I’ve heard the same when speaking to audiences across the country. Conservatives and liberals alike talk about their frustrations with a dysfunctional political system that is unresponsive to their needs and disconnected from their lives.

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