READING, Pennsylvania — One day after the vice presidential debate between Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Republican vice presidential candidate, and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Democratic vice presidential candidate, the reaction coming from Sunny Hostin of ABC’s The View may be the perfect example of the divide between people who hold wealth and power in this country and those who will decide the election.
“I think Walz was the clear winner, I am surprised that some polls are saying something different,” said Hostin, adding that Walz “was willing to make a mistake.”
Hostin drew her assessment from a very different worldview than that of the electorate that will decide this election. It is not to say Hostin cannot believe the debate went this way, but instead to say she is far removed from how persuadable voters see it. Almost every neutral indicator showed that far more people believe Vance won the debate.
With this comment, Hostin also said she doesn’t know anyone who thinks differently from her. She showed utter failure to engage with a diversity of thought. People in her milieu of the major entertainment and news industry see their audiences as the lefties with whom they work and socialize, such as those on the liberal editorial boards at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Over 43 million people tuned in to watch the mostly cordial, substantive debate between Vance and Walz on Tuesday night. What Hostin, along with many coastal analysts, entertainers, and anchors, failed to do in their recaps was consider how the people who will decide this election viewed the debate.
Those who call the shots in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago will not decide this election. So, who will?
Brad Todd, a media strategist who co-authored The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, said it will be the people who are in our everyday lives but are unseen on national platforms.
“This entire election may well come down to a very small group of politically conflicted cosmetologists and truck drivers in just a few communities in Pennsylvania,” said Todd.
In short, people such as barbers, mechanics, union laborers, and small business owners who run one-man HVAC or plumbing businesses, whose votes are not influenced by lawyers and online influencers but by how their lives are going and how their communities are doing.
The blind spot in the media, and with Democrats and some Republicans, is it sees people in silos of race, whereas these voters see themselves as all having the same problems, struggles, and aspirations.
A few weeks ago, when Taylor Swift announced her support for Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential candidate, the buzz in the news was it was going to tip the election for Harris, especially in Swift’s home state of Pennsylvania.
While driving through the state, I stopped in and around Berks County, where Swift spent her childhood. After talking to folks and poring through the data, I found scant evidence showing Swift would influence the election. In fact, in 2020, Democrats led the county’s registration by 6,000 voters, but today, Republicans lead voter registration by 6,200 people.
That does not mean people do not like Swift’s music or her success. They love her. They are proud she came from here. However, just because she makes great music and is a good entertainer does not mean she has an influence on voters.
Several moments in the past few months were touted by our cultural curators in the press, corporations, Hollywood, institutions, and academia as game changers that would move the needle and garner enthusiasm for Harris
However, these moments, at least in Pennsylvania, actually worked in the opposite direction.
Take, for instance, when Harris was named the Democratic presidential nominee in July. Everyone was proclaiming it was a big burst of enthusiasm for Democrats, and indeed, in Pennsylvania, Democrats registered 40,000 new voters. However, it was Republicans who were even more enthused: They added over 75,000 new registrants, nearly doubling Democrats’ numbers.
The larger point is during this entire election cycle, in particular in Pennsylvania, the media has spent far too much time in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. To win this state, Harris must over-perform in the city of Philadelphia and drum up the margins in the small towns as much as she can. Yet the latter is a tall order for a liberal senator from California who struggles as much as Hillary Clinton did in 2016 with voters she continues to call “deplorable.”
The Republican Party has gone from the party of free trade and country club memberships to the party of work.
Harry Enten, a CNN analyst, said the latest polls show former President Donald Trump is on track to have the best Republican performance among union voters in 40 years. Enten’s forecast showed Harris is leading Trump among union voters by just 9 points, which he said is the “worst Democratic performance in a generation.”
By comparison, President Joe Biden won them by nearly 20 points, and in 1992, former President Bill Clinton won them by a whopping 30 points.
Enten also noted Trump is polling ahead of Harris by 31 points with voters who graduated from vocational and trade schools.
“This is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing throughout our politics,” Enten said, “in which Republicans, specifically Donald Trump, is doing very, very well among working-class voters.”
“The fact is, Donald Trump seems to have gone into a hotbed of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of movement in ways I don’t think a lot of people would have thought when he went down that escalator just back in 2015,” he added.
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Todd said Democrats shedding voters toward Republicans has happened as Democrats have become the party of the elite, climate change, and internationalism, while essentially abandoning their New Deal Democrat voters, whose lives are embedded in the ethos of hard work and the dignity to achieve the American Dream through it.
“The chickens are finally coming home to roost for the Democrats,” Enten said. “They’ve opposed fracking, pipelines, and tried to get rid of diesel and gas trucks, and you cannot do all of that and keep the support of working people for long.”