West Virginia was one of Señor Trumpanzee’s best-performing states. He buried Clinton-- 489,371(68.5%) to a pathetic 188,794 (26.4%). She didn’t campaign there and she didn’t have a message for West Virginia’s working families that might lead them to believe life might improve for them if they voted for her. Today you hear some people-- who identify themselves as “progressives”-- saying that West Virginia’s poor deserve Medicaid cuts because the state voted so overwhelmingly for Trump. Take that you awful resident of a state that backed Trump. It’s pretty disgusting, like all forms of collective punishment.The biggest county in the state is Kanawha, home of the state’s biggest city, Charleston, where Bernie’s Save Our Health Care rally drew a couple of thousand enthusiastic West Virginians Sunday night. Trump beat Hillary badly in Kanawha-- 43,464 (58.0%) to 27,985 (37.3%). She was the wrong candidate. And folks there told Democrats that in the primary. Bernie won in the primary. In fact, he took every single county in the state-- 123,860 (51.4%) to 86,354 (35.8%). Trump got more votes than Bernie did in Kanawha, but not many more. Trump got 13,936 votes and Bernie got 13,480 votes. Close-- a lot closer than Trump/Clinton.Other counties in West Virginia showed that people were hungry for a populist message of hope and more people turned out for Bernie than for Trump. Some were very close, like Brooke County, where Bernie got 1,966 votes and Señor Trumpanzee did nearly as well with 1,963 votes. And, no, that’s not because the Republican field was so strong; quite the contrary. Ted Cruz was the runner up in Boone and he only got 176 votes. Hillary came in second and she got 1,489 votes. Across the state, the Republicans were much more unified behind Trump, while Democrats preferred Bernie but with virtually all counties giving Hillary far better numbers than the other Republicans competing. In Brooke, for example, this was the score:And I just grabbed Brooke County randomly because it’s a couple of miles from Pennsylvania to the east and Ohio to the west. Let’s look at some other West Virginia counties that looked at the candidates and went to the primary and picked Bernie over both Hillary and Trump.
• Boone: Bernie- 2,410; Trumpanzee- 1,388• Braxton: Bernie- 1,321;Trumpanzee- 861• Calhoun: Bernie- 803; Trumpanzee- 480• Clay: Bernie- 754; Trumpanzee- 568• Fayette: Bernie- 3,585; Trumpanzee- 2,683• Gilmer: Bernie- 643; Trumpanzee- 433• Lincoln: Bernie- 1,510; Trumpanzee- 1,193• Logan: Bernie- 3,201; Trumpanzee- 1,665• Marion: Bernie- 5,324; Trumpanzee- 4,035• McDowell: Bernie- 1,473; Trumpanzee- 760• Mingo: Bernie-2,425; Trumpanzee- 1,161• Monongalia: Bernie- 8,096; Trumpanzee- 5.971• Randolph: Bernie- 2,492; Trumpanzee- 2,206• Wayne: Bernie- 2,898; Trumpanzee- 2,662• Webster: Bernie- 837; Trumpanzee- 423• Wetzel: Bernie- 1744; Trumpanzee- 1.096
And, no, these are not all college towns. This is a cross section of West Virginia counties, where people were eager to hear a message that would left their families’ lives. They heard it most convincingly not from Clinton and not even from Trump, but from Bernie. Monongalia, for example, whose county seat in Morgantown, is the third biggest county in the state. Bernie killed Trump there. Mingo is smack up against Kentucky in the southwest corner of the state-- "the bloodiest county in America,” where Obama only got 8% of the primary vote in 2008. The is coal county, as are Logan and McDowell, both right next door. And all 3 gave far more votes to Bernie that day than to Señor Trumpanzee. They wanted change… but most of them wanted good change, not bad change.No, these people don’t “deserve” the misery Trumpcare is going to bury them in. This is ground zero in the opioid epidemic. These desperate folks need help-- the kind of help Bernie promised, not the thin tissue of lies Trump spouted off to them only to be served the nightmare of Trumnpcare now.And, by the way… even though Bernie crush Hillary in the primary, Wassermann Schultz had the rules all fixed up nice so that he only won one more delegate than she did. With friends like that behind the curtain, who needs a message? And who needs to bother campaigning? No wonder so many Bernie primary voters, pulled their levers for Trump rather than Hillary in the general election! They recognized Wassermann Schultz was fucking the country-- and after she got fired from the DNC, Hillary gave her a job in her campaign. The crooked monstrosity is still in Congress too-- help Tim Canova beat her in the Democratic primary here.Ready for some tears?A lot of desperate Trump voters-- who couldn’t connect to Clinton and didn’t trust something about her for some reason-- may be starting to feel a little buyers’ remorse. Not the dyed-in-the-wool racist scum… that part of his base would rather die from lack of healthcare than see a black president’s policies make life better for their own families, but enough of them to make a difference if the Democrats don’t run another establishment corporate shill next time. Look at those poor Carrier workers in Indiana, for example. Do you think some of them got suckered by the breezy Trumpanzee lies tisane their jobs? They’re learning what Trump’s word means now. CBS News just reported that Trump’s lies are coming back to bite his voters in the ass as 600 of their jobs head south to Monterey, Mexico, along with millions of dollars then-Governor Pence paid Carrier to keep the plant open. 600… that’s a lot of families who just figured out that working people can’t count on Trump or Pence or the GOP.
A promise made before Christmas is fizzling before the Fourth of July.In December, then-President-elect Trump told hundreds of workers at the Carrier manufacturing plant that he had worked out a deal to save their jobs.But it's not working out that way. A steady downpour today did little to wash away the fact that the jobs of 600 union employees are going south."They're going to Monterrey, Mexico," said Robert James, president of the local union.Reynolds said he felt betrayed, since Mr. Trump told workers during his December visit to the plant that 1,100 jobs would be saved."And by the way, that number is going to go up very substantially as they expand this area, this plant," Mr. Trump said. "So the 1,100 is going to be a minimum number."Blasting companies for moving American jobs abroad was a feature of the Trump campaign, and saving the Carrier jobs was touted as a sign of Mr. Trump's bargaining prowess."You're going to have a good Christmas," he said at the plant.But the truth is that 400 of the 1,100 jobs Mr. Trump mentioned were white-collar positions that were never going away.Only 700 union jobs were saved. Six hundred others will be lost, and Carrier is not paying a price. The company actually received a $7 million incentive package from Indiana to keep the plant open with a reduced work force."That is what he said was not going to happen," James said. "That's what he told all of us.""And a lot of these people voted for Mr. Trump" with the understanding that he would save their jobs, James added.Duane Oreskovic voted for the president, and is among those losing their jobs."I liked this job. This was a job that I actually wanted to retire from," Oreskovic said. "It's not going to happen any more."At the White House Friday, press secretary Sean Spicer said the job cuts here were long-planned and nothing new.The first round of layoffs will take effect next month, and the second in December-- three days before Christmas.
I know what you want to know now-- who won the primary in Indiana. Yeah, Bernie beat Hillary there too-- 335,256 (52.5%) to 303,382 (47.5%). Wassermann Schultz struck there too, of course. Bernie’s victory brought him 44 convention delegates… almost as many as Clinton’s loss brought her (47). And in Monroe County, where Bloomington is the county seat, Bernie beat Hillary 15,166 (65.3%) to 8,063 (34.7%) while Trump got fewer votes than either of them (7,259). In fact, Bernie beat the combined vote of all 9 Republicans on the ballot combined! And in Marion County, where the Carrier plant is, Hillary and Bernie were in a virtual dead heat in the primary-- but each of them beat Trump by around 10,000 votes. In fact, Hillary and Bernie beat Trump and Cruz 128,448 to 89,392.UPDATE: Marist PollThe new poll released this morning-- but taken before the CBO report was released yesterday-- shows that just 17% of Americans approve of the TrumpCare bill McConnell had to postpone voting on. Only 8% of Democrats, 13% of Independents and even just a sad 35% of Republicans like this quintessential Republican bill! Those are startlingly low numbers that will probably go down once people focus on the warnings of danger to society inherent in the CBO report. The poll also shows that independent voters are increasingly souring on the way Trump is handling the economy, a plurality of all Americans now agreeing that he and his team of plutocrats and misfits have weakened it.
