Yes, Chris, I am aware of those things. I will disagree on one point: that Clinton offered the status quo. That was a good rightwing claim to make about her but not true when it came to new jobs and investment in those areas. She intended/promised far more new, cleaner and higher paying jobs to the “rust belt”. Even in 2016, clean energy jobs were as prevalent as fossil fuel-based jobs and countless more could easily have been created, leading to a new-found prosperity to the region. Mountain tops that had been flattened off with explosives to easily extract coal could be great locations for wind or solar farms, idle factories could be re-tooled to build the needed equipment and parts and new income would’ve helped businesses throughout the region.

But she said one really stupid thing: “I’m going to eliminate as many coal jobs as possible.” or something close to that wording. Those few jobs were already disappearing and clean jobs in solar and wind now outnumber coal jobs by roughly 4 to 1. And pay better. If only she’d started out with the good part, then mentioned the already fading coal industry jobs would be gone, along with black lung and so many other related illnesses, things may have gone better.

Those “fossil fuel”-related jobs were all that many of those voters had left and to threaten to “get rid of them, I promise” is no way to win over people. And, yes, the neo-liberal Republican policies had done a lot of damage, already. I still don’t understand it when I see progressives or leftists say that Democrats are “neo-liberal”; I assume they just don’t know the definition of the term.