Teachers and other adults must explain the 2020 election without making kids from Trump families feel attacked. Neither children nor adults are likely to listen if they feel attacked. Those children from Biden families deserve to understand that the more than 72,000,000 Trump votes do not represent a repudiation of their skin color or sexual orientation by almost half this country’s voting population — not that racism and other prejudices did not enter into the vote. There’s a soft smell of sulfur underlying some of that vote, something ugly that has crept into recent American rhetoric.

I have gotten pushback on this post from friends who think I let Trump off much too easy. I don’t mean to whitewash the recent past. But I do want America’s children to understand that Trump’s 72,000,000 votes do not translate to a version of “abandon hope all ye who enter here.” We are not a country filled with evil people. And so…

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The hoped-for Blue Wave turned out to be a trickle. Red states splashed one after another across the map, leaving shaken democrats in their wake. The Senate may remain Republican. The Presidency has been declared for Joe Biden — but that race was heart-stoppingly close. Those last battleground states? As of this moment in time, Pennsylvania voted 49.7% for Biden, 49.1% for Trump. Arizona went 49.6% Biden, and 48.9% Trump. Nevada lists 49.9% for Biden, 47.9% for Trump. And Georgia’s still not official on this Saturday night, with Biden holding 49.5% of the vote to Trump’s 49.3%.

Trump clobbered Biden in a number of states. Both the popular vote and the electoral college vote have gone against him, but he swept what’s left of the Old West and rural America. Still, Idaho (63.9%) has only four electoral votes and Wyoming (70.4%) has only 3 in a contest that demands 270. In terms of the popular vote, Biden is about 5,000,000 ahead, but both men have over 70,000,000 votes.

Readers of this blog should be clear I voted for Biden. If Trump had done something about the insane number of days now spent on standardized testing and related punitive evaluations, I might have voted for Trump. If wishes were horses and if I could turn my pumpkin into a coach… Because I think we have been getting education so wrong for so long, under democrats as well as republicans. But this post is not about that. It’s about explaining those 72,000,000 votes to our students in a way that can help them understand what happened without writing off half the country in despair.

Let’s start with the fact that a surprising number of people are single issue voters. I have a Catholic friend who was informed she HAD to vote for Trump because Trump was anti-abortion. Nothing else mattered, she was told. The phrase that stayed with me: “People just have to hold their nose and pull the Trump lever.”

Ummm… I honestly don’t know what to say about that, other than I would bet many of those who took that advice are not by nature prejudiced against people of color. They may even be fine with LGBTQ rights, although obviously some will not be. Abortion opponents learn heavily toward the Christian right and many trusted Trump more than Catholic Biden.

I should note that not all antiabortion voters are Catholic or even Christian, and that many Christians are not conservatives. But President Trump gave conservative Christians two-hundred federal judges, appointed for life, who appeared to support their views — including three Supreme Court justices. Conservative Christians had every reason to vote for Trump again.

Another big single issue was the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms i.e. keep your own guns. Here’s a fact that often gets overlooked in gun discussions: The rural and small town view of gun ownership is quite different from the urban view. Guns in urban areas are virtually always trouble. Those guns make many city-dwellers nervous, enough so that they will consider legislation to reduce or eliminate gun ownership. In a city, guns mean crime.

The rural picture bears little resemblance to the urban picture. Guns in small mountain towns mostly make people feel safer. Guns are a source of comfort when the county sheriff is the better part of an hour away. In some poor, isolated areas, cops are already effectively defunded, short-staffed and unable to get to distant townships or farms quickly. Guns are also a source of recreation. Many kids in states that went heavily for Trump go to the woods or the river to shoot tin cans and targets. Some go hunting. All across America, people still kill what they eat. (One fervently hopes they eat that deer or rabbit, anyway.) Guns to those people represent winter meat in the freezer, and one more way of making ends meet.

America is not only cities and their suburbs. Our country has many small towns scattered between long stretches of emptiness. People in the mountains of Montana may live over half an hour from the expensive grocery store that is only place to buy food anywhere within a few hours drive. One of the best ways to understand how Trump took Texas might be to drive across West Texas alone — feel the emptiness, the aloneness, and watch those oil wells all by themselves in the middle of nowhere. The rural vote is part of 2020’s close contest.

Some classroom questions for discussion: Are there any reasons why urban residents might have different expectations from their government than rural residents? Why might urban residents focus more on the interdependence of people and the need for government to provide solutions for people’s problems? How would population density affect demand for and view of government services? How might police response time affect your view of gun ownership? (Note how loaded this question can be for many students who do not regard the police as a source of protection.) Why might people in rural areas object to gun control legislation?

People in many more-populated areas also supported Trump. especially those who lived in areas that have seen manufacturing, mining and other traditional blue collar jobs disappear. A full 68.7% of West Virginia went for Trump, almost identical to the 68.6% who went for him in 2016. In 2016, he had gone to West Virginia and promised to bring back coal. Newspaper reports suggest people there think he tried, but believe the forces against reviving coal are simply too strong for Trump or anyone else to control. Trump’s opponents hammer home that coal combustion releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Carbon dioxide is implicated in global warming. On top of that, cleaner, cheaper energy sources do exist.

I am going to bypass the actual issue here, other than to say that we owe it to our children to do the best job we can to clean up the air and water — even if it’s bad for business and even if it inconveniences everyone. The party should be over, that party where we use up the Earth’s resources, heat up the planet, put out endless forest fires, clean up after the latest latest storm or hurricane, and fill the air with gunk. I am reminded of a few lines from “The Party’s Over” by Eliza Gilkyson:

We danced on the tables midnight til dawn

Til all the time was up and the good stuff gone

The house is a shambles, broken glass in the streets

Guttering candles, blood on the sheets

We burned all the kindling, passed the bottle around

Watched the last coals dwindling

And the ice melting down

We can and absolutely must do better. The fact that much of the effort to reign in recent excesses has been spearheaded by Greta Thunberg speaks volumes. What is arguably the most important issue on the table today has coalesced around a sixteen-year-old, autistic Swedish girl who has made climate change her life’s work. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, not to mention the remaining trees in Australia and the western United States, this work should go to the forefront of everything we are doing today.

But that doesn’t help West Virginia — and West Virginia needs help desperately. America’s mining and manufacturing industries are not merely hurting. In some regions, those industries have effectively been destroyed. If you are looking for a picture that brings this home, I’ll recommend the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand. Stu is working part-time in the local calculator plant because that’s all that’s left. (This is before the superflu.) All across our nation, hard-hit regions have their versions of that calculator plant — although I wouldn’t be surprised to discover all the real “calculator” plants are gone — gone to India, China, Indonesia, and other low-cost producers.

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington in another time. When I was young in the sixties and seventies, decent, blue-collar employment could be found all around me. Friends’ parents worked as longshoremen and machinists. They could afford a comfortable house, relatively new car and often even a boat or trailer. Men and women worked in hot dog, pickle, beer, dairy and other food-producing plants, many union shops with living wages. Most of those jobs are gone now. The Heidelberg Brewery closed when I was in college. Nalley’s new owner, Pinnacle Foods, moved the pickles and various other products to Iowa, where the current minimum wage matches the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.

Wages definitely figure into this election. Currently, the average hourly pay for a miner is $23.77 per hour (https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Miner/Hourly_Rate) which is a little more than three times the federal minimum wage. That’s not great, but it clobbers that $7.25 federal minimum — although the exact amount of the minimum wage doesn’t matter when no jobs can be found.

Some readers may not believe my minimum wage. States and cities have legislated higher minimums; workers in Washington state receive $13.50 per hour, for example, and higher yet in some Washington cities. Let’s look at minimums. In the absence of a law, the federal $7.25 holds. It’s worth taking a minute to study those minimums and compare the states with lower minimums to the Trump states on the election map. The majority of Trump states — all but 7 — have a $7.25 minimum wage. Of the seven that have a higher wage, Alaska comes in on top at $10.19, with Missouri second at $9.45. Three of those states have minimums under nine dollars.

I’d like to note the “tip credit” as part of the minimum wage. A tip credit allows an employer to apply tips to the minimum. So that employer in Mississippi does not have to pay $7.25 per hour. An employer can pay $2.13 per hour, with the employee filling in the rest of the day’s wages through tips earned. (https://www.minimum-wage.org/tipped)

Of the seventeen states that allow employers to pay $2.13 per hour to employees, using tips to get those employees up to minimum, thirteen went for Trump, a number expected to change to fourteen. North Carolina is expected to go for Trump. As of today, Georgia has still not been officially declared with a mere 0.2% difference in the vote. Only Virginia and New Mexico have that $2.13 wage but went for Biden.

Those 72,000,000 some votes for Trump have a great deal to do with money and security. Overall, financial hardship worked for Trump. That’s no surprise.

Trump promised to bring industries back to America. He offered hope to blue-collar workers who had seen their mines and factories close or move to states that did not have unions, states where workers could be paid $7.25 per hour. What happens when the grocery chain that paid a cashier $35,000 per year suddenly shuts down? One thing that happens is a large group of people who can afford their car payment suddenly are faced with a job search likely to end in their making about half or two-thirds — if they are lucky — as much as they had been making before.

Financial desperation worked for Donald Trump in many pockets of the country — the places where the mines and factories had been shuttered. That’s not universally true. Mines and factories have been going dark for a long time, all over this country. But urban areas feel those closures less because of their broader economic bases. The union worker who once filled the ice cream cartons may be able to find a job as a city trash collector that makes the payments on the house, car and boat.

Some small municipalities and less populated regions have simply been exanguinated over the last fifty years, however, in small cuts and bigger knife swipes. The shake mill went away, the paper goods factory went, and then the pickle factory, the hot dog factory, the steel plant, the glass plant, the boat building company, and so on. See “Coal’s Decline Continues with 13 Plant Closures Announced in 2020” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coals-decline-continues-with-13-plant-closures-announced-in-2020/, an article by Benjamin Starrow, describing how coal is naturally losing to cheaper natural gas and renewable energy.

Many of those former factory workers have become Trump voters. Trump assured them he would stop the flow of jobs to areas outside the country. He promised to bring back jobs from lower-cost producers like China. He made efforts in that direction, too, although mostly unsuccessful ones. It’s incredibly tough to compete with people who will work six long days a week for a small fraction of what an American worker does. Whether Trump succeeded or not, though, he told West Virginia that he cared that their lifestyle was being swept out from under them — and that unchanging vote tally tells us that they believed him.

We do have a genuine problem. When it’s cheaper to load all the cut logs onto ships for China and then bring back the cut lumber from China, the world’s gotten tough for the Americans who used to shape those logs into lumber and cedar shakes for roofs. That little shake mill in the small town by the lake probably doesn’t have a chance. Meanwhile, the logging companies are finding ways to reduce human staff by creating robots and other machines to take over for human labor. Trump’s message “Make America Great Again” resonates with the people who remember when the logs were processed locally, because they can still see in their mind’s eye that shake mill of forty years ago next to a lake filled with floating logs. They remember an easier time when their parents or grandparents never worried about the costs of new school clothes and supplies, when the start of the school year did not create a sinking feeling as adults juggled Walmart bills and car payments.

Some of those memories of a past, better time are obviously illusory. Especially for people of color and the LGBTQ community, MAGA sounds racist and threatening. But it’s not that simple. For many of the older folks who back Trump — and the group who voted for him are older than the democratic voters on the other side — MAGA has nothing to do with race. They would be 100% fine working beside black people in that long-gone auto plant that paid three times more than what they are making now. They have no problem with their LGBTQ neighbors. They would simply like their sons and daughters to be able to find a job and buy a house without going into deep debt for student loans.

Joe Biden’s promise to get rid of fracking appeals to people concerned about the environment. WE KNOW GRETA’S RIGHT. But Joe’s promise terrifies many other folk. That’s their JOB Joe is talking about. According to ZipRecruiter, “as of Nov 1, 2020, the average annual pay for an Oil Rig Worker in the United States is $75,511 a year.” Fracking is a version of oil field work. It pays well. If a person has spent years in the industry building up the fracking skill set, what comes after fracking shuts down? Welding may transfer to a livable wage, but other skills may be so specific that no easy transfer to another high-paying job exists. Like those former grocery clerks in the chain that shut down, they are simply screwed.

The effects of pervasive unemployment can be hard for many urban residents to understand — although in parts of Chicago, Detroit and other cities that pervasive unemployment and underemployment is understood too well, and its racial component cannot be denied.

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Beyond the day-to-day of managing groceries between weekly trips to the food bank, the challenge of keeping old cars running, and the usual problems associated with poverty, too, this country must grapple with licit and illicit drugs. Opiates are ravaging areas with high unemployment. Meth remains a common escape, especially in rural communities. “The sharp rise in opioid abuse and fatal overdoses has overshadowed another mounting drug problem: Methamphetamine use is rising across the United States.” See https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/25/656192849/methamphetamine-roils-rural-towns-again-across-the-u-s: “‘Usage of methamphetamine nationally is at an all-time high,’ says Erik Smith, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Kansas City office.”

Trump’s “tough on crime” rhetoric appeals to people watching the drug epidemic’s effects on households, as grandmas step in to raise kids whose moms are too high to manage. Growing drug problems frighten many and make law and order rhetoric appealing.. See “A grandma’s new role: Raising grandkids amid the heroin epidemic” by Wayne Drash and Andrew Iden, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/28/health/grandmother-heroin-crisis-huntington-west-virginia/index.html.

Civil disorder frightens the general public. Theft and looting make them believe something in the American fabric is fraying — and Donald’s promise to send in troops actually sounds reassuring to them. I’m sure many of my readers are thinking what I think: Tone matters and the bellicose tone coming out of the White House may have set off many of those angry demonstrations. I am hopeful that the new, conciliatory tone set by Joe Biden will calm my country down. The Trump White House too obviously made Republican states into favored children in a time of crisis — and us versus them is no way to run a country, a classroom or much of anything else.

But scared people have always gravitated toward “strong” leaders. That’s the history of the 1930s. That’s the history of the world. It doesn’t always lead to fascism. Sometimes it leads to Winston Churchill when it’s clear that Neville Chamberlain has no clue what is happening around him. But it’s dangerous. In the classroom, I might ask students to tell me the upside and downside of putting the strong, tough guy in charge. What are the risks?

Trump projects a forceful, confident image. He also has a talent for sounding like an everyday guy. He doesn’t go for the long, polysyllabic word. He uses “ordinary” speech, and sounds like someone you might run into at the hardware store or the auto show. Despite his wealthy background, he often successfully manages to come across as an Average Joe. I’m sure that attracts voters. People tend to like people who talk like they do.

I’ll add one last item to this list: the word “socialism” has been bandied about repeatedly during this election, often as if it is a synonym for another word I have heard a lot — communism. But socialism is not communism — not even remotely. Socialism is not … well, it’s not a lot of things that are being thrown willy-nilly into its definition. And a universal healthcare plan would not make us a socialist country. Every other developed country IN THE WORLD with a market-based economy has had universal health coverage for decades. Some of the people in those countries are living longer than Americans do with significantly better rates of maternal mortality.

The main impetus to this talk of socialism and communism seems to have been universal healthcare, fascinatingly enough. Universal healthcare? Instead of talking about Castro’s Cuba, we could talk about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Great Britain and Canada. The alternative to universal healthcare is what we have now, a system under which one catastrophic medical event can ruin a person or family financially.

I’m going off-topic, though. This is not about my opinions, it’s about why Trump gathered over 72,000,000 votes. Again, the word socialism scares many people. Trump presented himself as the anti-socialism candidate — easy to do since the democratic party gathers our socialists to it. Bernie Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist, as does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but because Bernie was trying to become President, he had no choice except to pursue that goal as a democrat. The U.S. has a true two party system. Democratic socialists must become technical democrats to be taken seriously.

Fear of socialism is not rare in the United States, especially among older people who remember Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Those regimes are not ancient history to older voters. Many equate the term “socialism” with Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. They fear government control of the economy. As Premier of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin is widely believed to have killed between 20 and 60 million people during his 30-year rule. Scholars will argue that body count forever. Mao Zedong’s China shares a similar brutal past. During the Great Leap Forward, famine and political purges killed … 36 million? Or 45 million? I invite readers to research this topic on the internet. In Mao’s defense, the source of most of those deaths was famine. But during the Great Leap Forward, jobs were assigned, salaries were set and people could not change locations without government permission.

Which brings this election to Cuba. Part of Trump’s Florida victory came from Cuban-Americans. In 1959, Fidel Castro took control of Cuba by force, and the Republic of Cuba became a one-party communist state, its industries and businesses nationalized. Cubans have been fleeing to the United States ever since. One of my favorite coworkers a few years back escaped by working on a cruise ship, getting off in Europe, flying to Canada, and going south to the U.S. from there. Many refugees left behind houses, family and possessions. They lost everything they had built. Some of them are voting Americans. Their children and grandchildren vote as well.

According to NBC News’ exit polls, “55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of ‘other Latinos’ backed Trump.” Trump’s Hispanic vote increased from 28% among Hispanics to 32% this time. What is this Hispanic vote? It’s partially antisocialism, but I’m sure some of the vote in this heavily Catholic constituency is antiabortion. Many Hispanics are business owners, men and women who trust Trump not to raise the minimum wage and to work to support small businesses. Some of them probably fear the democrats will shut down the economy to get control of COVID. Trump clearly had intended to prevent that shut down.

Commentators suggest the democrats lost at least some of the Hispanic vote because they took that vote for granted. I believe that. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Guatemalans are not Venezuelans, I know some Mexican immigrants who followed established legal channels to get into this country — and don’t believe that people who skip those channels should be allowed into the country. Those voters may even have decided to vote for Trump because they preferred his position on immigration. Hispanics are too diverse to be considered a voting “BLOC.”

Eduhonesty: This post is an attempt to help people make sense of what happened. People vote their convictions. They vote their pocketbooks. Sometimes they vote both.

I hope this post can be a plea for understanding. What I think my many Biden-supporting counterparts should take away from this election is the realization that large chunks of this country have become unhappy and even intimidated by the world they live in. If not for the administration’s obvious bumbling of COVID-19, I believe Trump might have been reelected.

Biden successfully gained ground among working-class men and women in this election by making the case that Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus had harmed the United States. He also successfully argued that Trump’s tax cuts appeared to have helped rich Trump cronies more than the poor. Trump’s own support of the Proud Boys and others enabled Biden to convince many that Trump was racist. Trump’s court picks have spooked the LGBTQ community and others. In the end, some workers also realized that Trump was further damaging the union cause, even as he promised to bring industry back to America — and for many Americans, unions have provided a path into financial stability that could only have resulted from organizing workers.

Yet at the end of the day more than 72,000,000 Americans chose Trump. If we don’t want them to choose him again in 2024, or someone like him, we must step up and help those working class Americans who feel uprooted and lost. Their livelihoods went away. Whole industries are gone and do not appear to be coming back. The benefits of globalization are multifold but the price of globalization has been paid in closed factories and human lives. When a t-shirt can be made for $0.52 in Cambodia and $4.40 in the United States, that U.S. t-shirt factory can be expected to fold. What happens then to the man or woman who had been sewing those shirts for decades? In various regions across the United States, people have been losing hope for a long time. Lecturing them about the benefits of making products in countries with cheaper labor only makes them angry.

Donald Trump sold hope to people whose hope had been fading, and he sold it well.

To stay strong, the Democratic Party must be able to honestly replenish this country’s hope. As democrats do what needs to be done, they have to answer questions essential to U.S. long-term stability. How will we enable those former oil workers to find new employment? What will we do for other workers displaced by globalization? How will we provide national healthcare while not taking choices in doctors and hospitals away from our citizens? How will we deal with the nation’s drug problems? What can we do to help less prosperous regions realize they have not been forgotten? How can we restore the reputation and health of America’s unions? How can we undo the hit job that has been done on unions across this country? How will we repair the post office? I don’t think I emphasized enough how vital unions have been in providing living wages to U.S. workers.

I have skipped the elephant in the room while writing this post — white supremacy and associated racism. Those elements played into this election in scattered droplets across the nation. I don’t want to diminish their importance in any way. The intent of this post was to present America’s students and others with additional reasons for the Trump vote, to help them understand that many Trump voters are not racist — and, honestly, I’m sure some Biden voters are racist.

Economic displacement and desperation, however, are perfect fuel for the fire where racism is concerned. Trump’s attempts to limit immigration appealed to racists, but they also appealed to men and women who were afraid of losing their jobs to newcomers who would work for less money and fewer benefits. As we attempt to end racism, I believe it will be vital to understand how poverty and hopelessness contribute to racial discrimination, sexism, and xenophobia.

P.S. Let’s be clear: $7.25 is not a living wage. If it helps, 50 weeks X 40 hours/week X 7.25 = $14,500 per year, except getting that forty hours can be extremely tough. At 40 hours, employers can be forced to provide benefits. So often, the real numbers are 52 weeks (no paid vacation or vacation at all in this scenario) X 28 hours/week X 7.25 = $10,556. Those numbers explain why so many students’ parents have two or more jobs, all part-time, none with benefits.

P.S.S. Able to move and waiting tables? Washington has a minimum wage of 13.50 and NO tip credit. You will get your full wages without having to use your own tips to pay yourself.