Still With the "THEY"?

For a guy who claims that he doesn't believe in THEM, Uncle Ken sure talks about THEM a lot. Once more, for the record, I never said that THEY put Trump in office, I just said "they", no caps, no bold type, just regular "they". What do you call it when you mean other people who are not us? Be that as it may, I have already conceded that they did not vote for Trump to make the Republicans look bad, they voted for Trump because they liked him, or at least disliked him less than they disliked Hillary. Maybe it was not accurate to call them protest voters if, by "protest voters", you mean people who vote for a candidate whom they don't expect to win. What I meant was that they were protesting the way the country has been going down hill for decades, to the point that they were willing to put a guy like Trump in there if that's what it took to reverse course. He seems to be doing it too. I saw on the news today that Trump has been methodically cancelling all the executive orders that Obama made. Good for him! Trump may be an asshole, but I'd rather see an asshole doing the right things than a nice guy doing the wrong things.

I did not own a television in the days of George Wallace, I was too busy establishing my real life after completing my military service. Maybe I wouldn't have voted for Wallace if I had seen him making a fool of himself on TV, but all I knew about him was what I had read, and I was favorably impressed. There was a lot of anti-Black sentiment in Michigan at the time, since they had recently burned, looted, and pillaged Detroit. I didn't care about Detroit myself, but I figured if they could do it in Detroit, they could do it anywhere. I kept my guns close at hand during the whole summer of '67. They were legally carried, unloaded and enclosed in their cases, but I could break them out in a minute if need be. I finally put my guns away in the closet after deer season, figuring that they wouldn't attack during the winter. Voting for Wallace in '68 was a no brainer for me, and I didn't know why more people didn't do it. As it was, Wallace took five states that time, more than any third party candidate has done before or since. He took Michigan in the primary of '72, and everybody said it was because of the crossover voters. I still didn't own a TV at the time, and the internet hadn't been invented yet, so I got my information the old fashioned way, from the guys at work and the guys in the bars who, in those days, were pretty much the same people.

I understand that Obama brought in a lot of new voters too, but he couldn't seem to motivate them to vote in the congressional "off year" elections. Whether or not Trump can do so remains to be seen. I think that most people vote the same way all their lives, and the elections are largely determined by who does and who does not show up to vote on the big day.