Return of the forgotten men, forgotten cities, and forgotten states

First things first: GET OUT AND VOTE. No matter where you live, it adds to Trump's national popular vote, and in this re-alignment election you never know whether your state will turn out to be a surprise.

For awhile Trump has been talking about taking care of the forgotten man and woman in America, and it's not only because he feels it's the right thing to be doing. It's also because, how else are you going to win over a large enough chunk of the other party's voters?

The ones who are hardcore partisans wouldn't defect in a million years. But the ones who have been taken for granted, abused, and told to shut up if they ask for anything in return for their votes, are more than open-minded -- they have been keeping their eyes peeled for something better to come along. Once Trump showed up, they knew -- he was it.

This far into the liberal vs. conservative culture war, the needs of the white working class had fallen by the wayside. Corporate raiders melt down their deeply rooted companies and ship the jobs abroad? Too bad: that's cheap foreign labor, and boosts the stockholders' bottom line. Immigrants (legal and illegal) are swarming the job market, the housing market, and the school market? Too bad: that's cheap labor, and extra demand for housing, schools, goods, etc., which means higher prices commanded by the sellers.

To harmonize with the identity politics orientation of the Democrat Establishment, the de-industrialization of the American economy is rationalized as a necessary part of multiculturalism.

Trump comes along and says, "The hell with multiculturalism, and the hell with de-industrialization."

Suddenly the Independents and Democrats in the white working class are going to vote Republican for president perhaps for the first time in their lives -- the first time since Reagan or H.W. Bush, at least.

Why does this particular group of forgotten people allow Trump to win the election? Because they live in places that were recently industrialized, and therefore large in population size. Maybe down from their peak circa 1970, but still large urban metro areas.

Trump is not flipping a handful here and a handful there in the rural parts of Michigan, but potentially the counties with the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th largest electorates from 2012 -- and the 4th already went to Romney then, leaving only Detroit itself still in the blue column.

In Ohio, he won't win the largest cities of Cleveland or Columbus, but Cincinnati is a definite possibility, along with the largish cities such as Toledo, Youngstown, and others. Throughout urban northeastern Ohio, traditionally a stronghold for Democrats, he will be flipping very large numbers of people in the dense formerly industrial region.

Likewise in Pennsylvania, it's not the great swath of sparsely populated red counties that he's gaining numbers in. In every good poll with regional breakdown (Axiom, Emerson, Trafalgar), Trump dominates northeastern PA -- Allentown, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, etc. This is the third-most populated region in the state, after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and also a de-industrialized region with lots of people still hanging on and looking for someone to rescue them.

We could even see the residents of the Philly suburbs give more to Trump than they did to Romney, although as overly educated suburbanites, they are not going to turn to Trump en masse like the white working class to their north. Still, we don't need to flip those counties -- just do better than before, so we don't get drowned there.

And something tells me that the people from the Philly area are in their own way a forgotten people -- the forgotten ACELAs. Philly has never had any glamor to its image, not even after crime rates began plummeting during the 1990s. Even if you've never been to New York, you've heard of which neighborhoods used to be bad but are now luxury-only. You've heard of the status prestige from residing "inside the Beltway" in the DC area. And all the striver parents dream of sending their kids to the great schools -- public or boarding -- of the Boston metro.

But who the hell in the yuppie suburbanite class sets their sights first and foremost on Philly? "Uh, well, the Liberty Bell is there, and uh..." No one knows any of the neighborhoods, the suburbs, the schools (even strivers forget there's an Ivy there), or the regional culture aside from the cheese steak (prole chow anyway).

Being at the bottom of the ACELA totem pole must give them more grievances against the DC - New York - Boston wings of the Establishment (political, financial, academic). What is Philly's special wing of the Establishment? Worse, up until 2000 they hosted a major Naval Shipyard -- military, violence, guns, brawn... ugh, so not ACELA. So of any major cluster of suburbs along the East Coast, they would be the most likely to resonate with Trump's anti-Establishment message. And they are a very large chunk of the state's population.

Up until now, the most glaring difference between who voted blue or red was population density. As the culture war ground on, it looked like either the rural, small-town, and minor-suburban people would invade the cities and major suburbs, looting and sacking them, or that the cities would keep gentrifying the land farther and farther away from the urban core, while still packing people in very densely in these exurban rings.

Trump's re-alignment involves saving the cities, to the extent they have been de-industrialized. From now on, perhaps the divide will not be between higher-density and lower-density, but industrialized and re-industrialized vs. non-industrial cities that rely on finance, IT, higher ed, and other airy-fairy bubble-prone sectors that do not require a solid base of working class employees.

Right now, Pittsburgh and San Francisco are in the same blue boat -- perhaps before too long, it will be Pittsburgh and Scranton in red, against San Francisco and Denver still in blue.

Keep this in mind during the re-alignment -- contrary to red state chauvinism that only sees forgotten men in rural Plains counties, there are legions of forgotten men in blue-state cities that used to power the nation's industrial economy. They too have been chewed up and spit out by the Establishment, and they are far larger in number than suburbanites in Nebraska. Leaving them on the table was not only suicidal in the numbers game of winning elections, but in the greater project of putting our broken country back in working order.

Tonight, these legions are going to defect from the Democrats (at the top of the ticket, anyway) in a stinging rebuke of decades of being taken for granted, robbed of middle-class dignity, and chastised for piping up about the corporate globalist trade deals that are sacrosanct among the party's elites.

By breaking the cuckservative taboo against courting any urban voters (aside from preening attempts to get ghetto blacks to worship Milton Friedman), Trump has made it possible and even likely to flip entire "safe" blue states in the Rust Belt and trans-Bostonian New England.

Tonight the forgotten men, cities, and states will all be remembered by the elites -- too little, and too late.