Oregon Jury Acquits Occupiers

What does the jury decision on the Harney County occupiers have to do with the 2016 Presidential election?    A lot.

For many people the decision of the Oregon jury to find the Harney County occupiers not guilty is incomprehensible.   

After all, they occupied the property amid TV cameras and the evidence is right there.   They made repeated statements to the press.  The were armed.  They barricaded themselves.   They shot off some 16,000 practice rounds.  They were together for weeks.  They travelled to the place from far away to do exactly what they did: occupy a federal facility and keep federal employees away from it.

Not Guilty

Open and shut guilty.  Right?

The jury apparently made a distinction between meeting and agreeing to take possession from the federal wildlife people versus  "conspiring" to do it.  They found a way to let them off.  They were charged with conspiring to do what they did.

The jury found something they liked here.

My take-away from the Oregon jury decision is to be very skeptical of the polls which show Hillary ahead in this race.   There is something big and surprising and largely invisible going on in America, and it is invisible to people who live in a bubble of respectable educated professional prosperity who access the long established respectable media.   A significant body of people are doing very well these past two decades, and especially under Obama.  Markets have rebounded in stocks and housing and the economy has come out of the disaster Obama found after the 2008 crisis.   The Democratic Party is a coalition of those educated professional people doing OK plus those people who feel subject to discrimination and barriers from being in that professional middle class: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, gays, women.   It may be a majority coalition, barely.

But it leaves some people out.  Truck drivers, construction workers, men working in the produce departments of grocery stores, police officers, car salesmen, industrial workers, people who work outdoors, blue collar workers.  We see these people in larger numbers in red states, the rural areas of blue states, and generally in states like Ohio and Iowa where manufacturing and agriculture are especially big.

  It is secret, so we don't know if it's real yet

White working people feel picked on, condescended to, and ignored by the government, which they think is run by rich people with fancy college degrees for the benefit of themselves and other rich people, with voting help from those minority groups who get unfair advantages and giveaways..  You hear it on talk radio, you see it in Trump rallies, and you can measure it in the polls.  The Democratic party, especially the party under Hillary Clinton, speaks of the value of education and the problem of discrimination against minorities so it is in effect defining itself against non-college educated white men, those gun-carrying, Bible clinging, xenophobic, coal mining, oil-drilling, tree-cutting anti-Muslim racists in fly-over country.

Those men realize it and they resent being abandoned so they do the logical thing: vote for the other party in overwhelming numbers.

  

Trump located that block of voters and gave them voice and a sense of solidarity and therefore political power.  The leadership of both parties were taken by surprise.   Trump took over the Republican Party and has forced the Democratic Party to face the political costs of having ignored those people.   Al Gore did not just lose Tennessee in year 2000.  He also lost West Virginia, a bastion for Democrats, consisting of highly unionized white working class voters.  It cost him the 2000 election.

Hillary Clinton will get blown out in West Virginia.   

She can afford to lose that state but the kinds of people she loses in West Virginia also live in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin and she cannot afford to lose more than one of those states.

Readers who primarily get their news from the NY Times and Washington Post and NPR need to read the tea leaves found in the vote by the jury in blue state Oregon.  Those jurors found something to like in those rural, blue collar, bearded, rough, gun-carrying men who challenged the federal government.   They gave them the benefit of whatever doubt exists in the difference between "agree" and "conspire."

Trump is a flawed messenger for the constituency he represents, but he has caught a big wave of white working class resentment against the powers that be.   In this case it is the federal government and its prosecutors.   The real and it  can appear to come out of nowhere.   This time it was a vote in a jury box that found a way to acquit these occupiers.  On November 8 there will be another vote.

Don't trust the polls.

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Here is this week's podcast on the Presidential Election.   Thad Guyer and I discuss the poll data and whether or not Trump is self destructing. (I think he is, but maybe not enough.)  I assert that he is stepping all over his message.  Thad has strong views on the USC/LA Times poll, which show Trump ahead.   Yes, ahead.   I get angry about Trump's Gettysburg Address. Thad makes the observation that there are some good things to come out of this long, long campaign. And at the 40 minute mark he discusses the duty to question the legitimacy of rigged elections.     Click Here for the Podcast