My predictions:
Biden: Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada
Trump: North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania.
"This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country." You said it, Donnie.
Trump may shit on a gold toilet, but somehow he brilliantly tapped into the belligerent, armchair quarterback, tough guy aspect of Rust Belt blue collar. Collectively, the lunchbucket crowd tends to have a lot of respect for combative, outspoken, tell-it-like-it-is anti-establishment politicians and leaders. (Cite: NYS Republican gubernatorial candidate
Carl Paladino, who had cult-like support, and a solid majority of votes, in the traditionally Democratic Buffalo/Erie County area.) It's nothing new, and it doesn't matter whether the politician is a Democrat or Republican.
Blue collar culture in the Rust Belt has also been shifting, politically and culturally, over the past 30 years or so. It’s gone aggro, as an Australian might say. It grew a goatee, bought a black RAM 3500 with a Cummins DAYSUL, crew cab, long bed, and duallys, rolls coal on cyclists and Priuses, and tailgates you on the 90 or 94 even though you're doing 80 in the right lane, and the passing lane is clear. It wears t-shirts with angry, oddly specific I-was-born-in-October-don't-fuck-with-me-and-by-the-way-fuck-you screeds. Rear-wheel drive land barges and “classy” luxury coupes gave way to TRUUUUUCKS, bowling and firemen's olympics to guns and powersports, cottages on the lake to condos at Myrtle Beach, polka to bro country, and small starter houses in inner ring suburbs to 2,500 square foot tract mansions in distant exurbs where the local high school sports teams are proudly still named "The Fighting Redmen" or whatever.
I miss having a center right party in the United States. You know, so there's options aside from center left major party, far right major party, libertarian minor party, barefoot hippie minor party, lefty whackadoodle "People's Socialist Revolutionary Laborer" whatever minor parties, and paleoconservative lock-and-load minor parties.
If things turn out the way I think they're going to turn out, I really see the blue Northeastern states going their own way, in a sense. More like working towards a semi-autonomous "nation inside a nation" than seceding.
