The revenge of the 'Oxy electorate' helped fuel T

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The revenge of the 'Oxy electorate' helped fuel Trump's election upset

Trump's tiresome overuse of the word 'sad' would be entirely appropriate applied to at least some of his supporters described here. Let's see exactly what he proposes for these people, if he even knows what is happening to them that is. Bet he doesn't.

Which 'carnage' was he describing? Which anything was he accurately describing?

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https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/president-t...l-address/

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◾Trump portrayed the U.S. as crime-ridden and promised to stop the “American carnage.” But the U.S. violent crime rate in 2015 was less than half what it was at its peak in 1991.

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◾Trump promised to “bring back our jobs.” Manufacturing jobs have been on the decline for decades, but Trump inherits an overall economy that has gained jobs for a record 75 straight months and has an unemployment rate well below the historical norm.

◾He said he would “get our people off of welfare and back to work.” But the welfare rolls have declined under President Obama, and they have dropped precipitously since President Clinton signed legislation in 1996 instituting work requirements and time limits.

◾Trump promised to “bring back our borders,” blaming past politicians for “refusing to defend our” border. But the U.S. Border Patrol budget has tripled since 2001, and the number of border patrol agents has doubled. Southwest border apprehensions have dropped 75 percent from the peak in fiscal 2000.

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Harrison Jacobs

Business InsiderNovember 23, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump won several states that had long been Democratic, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, as well as swing states, like Ohio and Florida, on his way to a seemingly improbable electoral victory earlier this month.

Chris Arnade, an independent journalist who has spent the past four years traveling the US to document the opioid crisis, was one of the few who weren't surprised. After traveling tens of thousands of miles in working-class communities along the Rust Belt and elsewhere, he found one constant.

"Wherever I saw strong addiction and strong drug use," Arnade told Business Insider, he saw support for Trump.

Official voting data has suggested a similar correlation. Since the November 8 election, Shannon Monnat, a rural sociologist and demographer at Pennsylvania State University, has dug into the results. She found that counties that voted more heavily for Trump than expected were closely correlated with counties that experienced high rates of death caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

Two other factors were strongly correlated with
Trump "overperformance," Monnat found: the percentage of white voters in the county and its ranking on Monnat's "economic distress index."

The index, which Monnat has used in her research for years, combines the percentages of people who are in poverty, unemployed, disabled, in single-parent families, living on public assistance, or living without health insurance.

Monnat wasn't surprised by the correlation.

"I expected to see it because when you think about the underlying factors that lead to overdose or suicide, it's depression, despair, distress, and anxiety," Monnat told Business Insider. "That was the message that Trump was appealing to.

"People are literally dying," she added. "There was such a sense of hopelessness that it makes sense they would vote for massive change." http://finance.yahoo.com/news/revenge-oxy-ele...23513.html



That correlation surfaced across the US, not just in areas of heavy Trump support like Appalachia and the Rust Belt, Monnat said. Even in counties with high mortality rates relating to drugs, alcohol, and suicide that Trump lost, he overperformed relative to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Historian Kathleen Frydl, who has closely followed the opioid crisis, noticed a similar phenomenon unfolding on election night. Traditionally blue counties that she knew to be hard hit by opioids were flipping to Trump.

After "recovering from the shock," she began comparing the drug-overdose death rate with voter performance in critical states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

What she found was striking.

Six of the nine Ohio counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2016 logged overdose death rates far above the national rate of 14.7 people per 100,000.

Nearly every Ohio county with an overdose death rate above 20 per 100,000 saw voting gains of 10% or more for Trump compared with Romney and/or drops of 10% or more for Hillary Clinton compared to President Barack Obama in 2012.

Only Butler County, home to Miami University, and Hamilton County, the jurisdiction for Cincinnati, did not conform to this pattern.

Twenty-nine of 33 Pennsylvania counties with overdose death rates above 20 per 100,000 conformed to the same pattern and/or flipped from Democrat to Republican entirely. (You can see Frydl's comparison of county vote totals and overdose death rates here.)

The phenomenon led Frydl to dub such voters the "Oxy electorate."

'A sea of correlations'

The Economist found similar voting trends, though it argued that combining life expectancy and public-health metrics, such as obesity, heavy drinking, and physical activity, was the most accurate predictor of Trump's outperformance of Romney.[/ quote]

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