How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump

[KamaAina]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-voters.html

The manufacturing executives had gathered in an Atlanta conference room last year to honor their senior United States senator, Johnny Isakson, for his tireless efforts on their behalf in Washington. But as the luncheon wound down, Mr. Isakson found himself facing a man from Coweta County. The man, Burl Finkelstein, said trade policies with Mexico and China were strangling the family-owned kitchen-parts company he helped manage, and imperiling the jobs it provided. Mr. Isakson politely brushed him off, Mr. Finkelstein recalled, as he had many times before.

So when the Georgia primary rolled around this month, Mr. Finkelstein, along with many others in his town, pulled the lever for Donald J. Trump, who made him feel that someone had finally started listening. “He gets it,” Mr. Finkelstein said in a recent interview. “We’ve sold ourselves out.”

As the Republican Party collapses on itself, conservative leaders struggling to explain Mr. Trump’s appeal have largely seized on his unique qualities as a candidate: his larger-than-life persona, his ability to dominate the airwaves, his tough-sounding if unrealistic policy proposals. Others ascribe Mr. Trump’s rise to the xenophobia and racism of Americans angry over their declining power.

But the story is also one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.

[Katashi_itto]

1. Just as dem party voters know DNC has sold them out to.i

[pampango]

2. "This is absolutely a crisis for the party elite — and beyond the party elite, for elected officials

and for the way people have been raised as Republicans in the power structure for a generation,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. “If Donald Trump wins, he will change what it means to be a Republican.”

While wages declined and workers grew anxious about retirement, Republicans offered an economic program still centered on tax cuts for the affluent and the curtailing of popular entitlements like Medicare and Social Security.

Most of these voters had long since given up on an increasingly liberal and cosmopolitan Democratic Party. In Mr. Trump, they found a tribune: a blue-collar billionaire who stood in the lobby of a Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name and pledged to expand Social Security, refuse the money of big donors, sock it to Chinese central bankers and relieve Americans of unfair competition from foreign workers.

The Democratic Party is also reckoning this year with a populist insurgency, driven in part by economic pain and growing anger against Washington and Wall Street. But while Senator Bernie Sanders trails Hillary Clinton in delegates, Mr. Trump’s unlikely campaign has become a seemingly unstoppable force, one that Republican lawmakers, donors and activists are only now fully confronting.

... an increasingly liberal and cosmopolitan Democratic Party.

The definition of 'cosmopolitan': familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures.

'Cosmopolitan' is certainly does not something one would use to describe Trump's base.

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. Look at the collection of imbeciles that are/were his competition

Not one of them fit really for any public office. The GOP long ago cast aside anyone with any intellect, diplomatic skill, decency or knowledge.

"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"

[hollowdweller]

4. In a song