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From: TT
Published:
1 of 3 | Photo: Andrew Harnik / AP / TT
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden failed to attract the key Labor voters Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the last election.
Democrats’ focus on painting a dark picture of another four years with Trump, rather than focusing on politics, could be their downfall. That’s what the American expert Frida Stranne says.
And there is a reason why opinion polls are not correct.
– The main agenda of the Democrats has been to get rid of Donald Trump, paint a dark picture of him as president and not talk about their own visions and factual policies, Frida Stranne, a political scientist and researcher at Halmstad University, tells TT.
She may have played a role in Joe Biden not staying as strong as opinion polls predicted before the election, according to her.
The workers left
On several fronts, things have gone differently than expected among Democrats.
– For them it was a great setback that Donald Trump won Florida and Ohio, says Erik Åsard, emeritus professor of North American studies.
Ohio is a state where the group of low-educated whites, the traditional working class, is large. This is a group that is important to Donald Trump. In the 2016 election, Trump succeeded in reversing parts of Ohio that have voted democratically for generations, with promises to keep jobs in America’s factories and manufacturing industry. But when GM closed its giant plant in Lordstown, Ohio in 2018, many blamed Trump and accused him of betraying promises.
Joe Biden has seen his chance to win back the electorate and has invested heavily in advertisements and visits to Ohio. Opinion polls before the elections have also indicated that he had a chance. But that does not appear to have been the case. In northeastern Ohio, on the border with Pennsylvania, the area where Lordstown is located, Donald Trump is even increasing his support. In 2016 he received 54 percent of the votes and this year he gets 60 percent.
“Very strange”
The loss in Florida is another example of the failed plans of the Democrats. In the last elections, the large group of Cuban-American voters mainly supported Democrats and Hillary Clinton, but this year they turned to President Trump. He helped the president bring home the important state.
“It’s very strange, when you think about how Trump can get such strong support from these voters, given the way he’s talked about them,” Frances E Lee, a political scientist and professor at Princeton University, told TT.
He also emphasizes something else that he thinks stands out, namely the huge gap that exists between voters in the countryside and those in the cities.
– The president performs enormously in rural areas, outside the cities, while in the cities he does not receive the same support at all, he says.
Difficult to measure
This is also the reason why opinion polls, again, seem to have not predicted the outcome, according to Frances E Lee.
– Predicting an election with such a geographic division is very difficult.
TT: For a Swedish person, try to explain how Trump can have such strong support.
– His followers are convinced that he says exactly what he thinks and is honest, unlike other politicians. I have noticed that a very popular sign with Trump supporters if you go out into the field says “No Nonsense” and I think it gives an idea of what they consider important. They see Trump as a champion for those who fight from a disadvantage. If you do something outrageous, they just see it as consistent in not wanting to be part of the system.
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