Summary
America’s housing crisis is influencing voting patterns, with tough housing markets shifting significantly toward Donald Trump.
An NBC analysis found that counties ranked in the top 10% for home-buying difficulty shifted 4.5 percentage points toward Trump, compared to a 3.1-point national median.
High housing costs in states like Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania turned many counties into political battlegrounds.
Experts argue that financial hardship and skyrocketing housing prices fueled economic discontent, creating a disconnect between Democratic messaging on economic progress and voters’ lived experiences.
Democrats have a problem and it is the economy. According to this Pew Research study from May of this year, people did not feel great about the economy, and those feelings are strongly partisan. When Trump was president, Republicans thought the economy was great, when Biden was president, they thought it was terrible. A lot of this might have been driven by pandemic related lock downs, but regardless Republicans loved the economy under Trump but hated it under Biden.
Ok, so does that mean that Democrats thought the economy was terrible under Trump but great under Biden? No, not really. Democrats don’t seem to be nearly as partisan in their opinions on the economy. 39% of Democrats rated the economy as good or excellent by the end of Trump’s first term, and 37% rate it as good or excellent today. It seems that Republicans are much more about partisan vibes: things are great when our guy is in charge, terrible when their guy is in charge. Everyone else seems to be much more negative on the economy in general, regardless of which party is in power.
That is bad for the Democrats. America is divided, but we’re not all divided in the same way. Republicans are remarkably unified. Everyone else is very fractured. There is no single block of non-Republican Americans that can rival and counter the Republican block. They are unified, the rest of us are not.
Me: oh boy i cant wait to unify against all the republican jerks that have been messing stuff up for literally my whole life
Harris: i promise to put a republican on my cabinet have you met my friend liz
Me: oh boy i can’t wait to die
Yeah, that’s the thing. There’s the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there’s everyone else.
I think the “everyone else” block can be broken down into a three main groups: leftists, progressives, and liberals. And it’s frustrating because people use these terms interchangeably, as though they’re all the same, but they are NOT. Leftists are socialists, of one variety or another. Progressives are social democrats, and Liberals are social liberals and neoliberals, which are center-left and center-right respectively. These three groups do not agree on some key issues, and they do not necessarily like each other.
The neoliberals are going to more closely align with moderate conservatives than social democrats or socialists because they just agree more with moderate conservatives on key issues. The Democratic party is a neoliberals/social liberal party. They are center-left to center-right. Therefore, socialists and social democrats should not look to the Democrats for representation. They don’t agree with you, they don’t necessarily like you, they will not represent you. Unfortunately, the US is a de facto two pay system, so progressives and leftists are essentially without representation, outside of a handful of independents, like Bernie Sanders.
Ftfy, there is no such thing as a good Republican, there was decades of bullshit from them that led us to this point and they’ll be fascist scum after Trump is gone. Anybody who can’t admit that simple truth is either too dumb or too cowardly to be given political power.