Mehdi Hasan Quotes

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic

It isn't only Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump's shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety - despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

I've got Democratic skin, but a Republican pocket.

When the economy is bad, the party in power is blamed. When the economy is good, people look at other issues.

In most countries, class, education, religion, and regions are better predictors of voting behavior than sex.

Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature is that they so frequently conform to type.

During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.

If Trump actually wants to help those who have been left behind, he must go beyond the ideological battles of the past.

Midterms behave very differently than presidential elections. Midterms, for a federal candidate, often times are a referendum on the president, where in presidential years, voters make two separate choices: one for president and one for a federal officeholder.

Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

Some of the most hard-working, generous people I've met in my whole life didn't really want to vote for him but did. My calling is to step onto the other side and humanise and portray the struggles of many Trump voters.

I do not think it is a coincidence that young people gravitated toward populist voices in the French election and that the two issue positions where Donald Trump and young voters seem to agree most - global engagement and trade - are rooted in populism.

The people who are voting for Trump are not voting rationally.

The primary effect of the campaign was to reinforce the party affliation of most of the voters. Individuals tended to expose themselves to the propaganda of their own party more than to the progaganda of the other party.

I don't think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.

The transition after the Vietnam War to an all-volunteer force created the world's finest professional military. But it also reinforced geographic and cultural divisions that reveal themselves in our voting.

The Democrats have failed to have a real robust message for working-class people in places like Ohio - these states that Donald Trump came in and won.

Paul Ryan is loved in our state because he's a conservative who has advocated for conservative policies, and Donald Trump coming out saying favorable things about Mr. Ryan's opponent doesn't add to the number of voters in Wisconsin that'll vote Donald Trump.

In terms of the conservative movement, I do think it would be foolish to deny that Trump has exposed certain aspects of that movement as less healthy than I thought or hoped.

I don't think you can understand Trump's relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.

While our corporatists burn incense at the shrine of the global economy, Trump went to visit the working-class casualties. And those forgotten Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin responded.

It's normal that elections make fierce partisans of many of us. It's normal that Mr. Trump would attract the usual right-wing buffoons to his banners. Normal, also, is that many voters may not be troubled by Mr. Trump's cruder statements when they hear him addressing their deepest economic and social anxieties.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.

My own students say they don't trust anyone who voted for Trump. How can you have a democracy with that?