Trump Voters

[Pine Mt Beagles]

Trump Voters on Drugs

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

Harrison Jacobs

Nov. 23, 2016, 9:39 AM LINKEDIN
Jonathan Drake/ReutersPresident-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.

, Trump's outsider campaign was perfectly primed to capitalize on the so-called Oxy electorate's concerned about foreign influence and loss of status.RUSSIA,,ELECTED TRUMP.

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.
Brain Dead Republicans.

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 combined with the percentages of people who are in poverty, unemployed, disabled, in single-parent families, living on public assistance, or living without health insurance.Prime Trump voters.

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.

Courtesy of Shannon Monnat

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.

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.

Trump,,said over and over ,he loves the Uneducated.

Even in the Ohio counties that The Economist pointed to as evidence of its analysis — Knox and Jefferson — the overdose death statistics bear out. Jefferson County, whose margin of victory for Trump was 30 percentage points higher than Romney's compared with 14 points for Knox, according to The Economist, had an overdose rate in 2015 of 28.8 per 100,000. Knox's was nearly half that, at 15.1 per 100,000.

Renowned statistician Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, argued on Twitter that education levels were still the most accurate predictor of Trump voting trends and that linking heroin deaths with voting was a "spurious correlation." Many analysts have pointed to percentage of non-college-educated white males as the leading predictor of Trump performance.

Frydl said, however, that there was a "sea of correlations" uniting these communities across the US, noting overdose deaths rates, mortality rates, education levels, and race, among others. And while she said "correlation does not equal causation," the characteristics can help analysts understand why Trump’s campaign had such appeal.

Similarly, Monnat suggested that the rates of drug-, alcohol-, and suicide-driven mortality she looked into were not in and of themselves enough to explain why voters gravitated toward Trump.

People were unprepared for the opioid crisis and, "what's more, believed they had done nothing to deserve it," investigative journalist Sam Quinones wrote on his blog Monday. Quinones investigated the causes of the opioid crisis extensively in his 2015 book, "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic."

"The effects of opioid addiction ripple out far beyond addicts to affect entire communities," Quinones wrote, killing their "buoyancy of spirit" and leaving them open to the "foreboding that seemed to motivate many voters."

"And in comes Trump with a message of restoring pride — partly through white identity — that resonates there, because from Prestonsburg, Kentucky, America does not seem great."

Trump's attack on immigration and globalization was the perfect "one-two punch" in a place like Prestonsburg, Arnade said. It "punches downward" by scapegoating others, like immigrants and minorities, and upward at what the working class views as a "rigged system" pushed by politicians with "fancy educations."

Frydl described the movement from economic decline to opioid crisis to Trump support as "a nested chain of causality," wherein the anchor is the loss of industry and economy in the Rust Belt and Appalachia.

[bluemouse]

Since Trump has been in office less than thirty days all the crazy numbers of people killing themselves must have happen while Obama was in office. Your still a clown pinemooch

[littlewoody]

Since Trump has been in office less than thirty days all the crazy numbers of people killing themselves must have happen while Obama was in office. Your still a clown pinemooch

+1 PM loves Evil after all that came out on Obama and Hillary about pizza gate Libya stealing the money for Haiti . He's still Defending The Democrat party .

[Rabbithoundjb]

Woody PMB is a prime example of you just can't fix stupid