It’s the economy, stupid.
Via The Guardian:
Back in mid-March, while standing in a middle of a stage in Ohio, Hillary Clinton made a promise: “We’re going to put a lot of companies and coal miners out of business. We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people.”
The former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate was campaigning on her clean energy platform but may have come to regret that phrasing. Since September 2014, the mining sector has eliminated 191,000 jobs. About 7,000 of them were lost last month.
For many Americans the story of economic recovery that the Obama administration has been trying to tell – with 5% unemployment and 74 months of continuous job growth – is not one they are familiar with. It’s an issue that is driving them into the arms of Donald Trump.
“How can you say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us you’re going to be our friend?” a voter from West Virginia, hit hard by the downturn in the energy sector, told Clinton last week. “Those people out there don’t see you as a friend,”
Miners have, however, found a friend in Trump, republican candidate for president. A group of them attended a rally on Thursday waving signs that read “Trump digs coal”.[…]
“People don’t really want to hear that it could have been worse. Sometimes such statements anger people and make the president seem out of touch. It doesn’t resonate because they can’t observe that alternative outcome,” explained Lawrence Mishel, president at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’s progress in their weekly paychecks that resonates.”
“Wages are the unfinished business of the recovery,” the US labor department has noted repeatedly over the last few months as jobs report after jobs report have shown wage growth to be in the vicinity of just 2%. In addition to jobs, wages are one of the most important parts of this recovery.
In order for working class Americans to feel its effects, wage growth would have to be closer to 3% to 4%. When the US census last released its data about median household incomes in the US, it found that the average American was bringing home the same paycheck as Americans in 1997.