 time is really the role of working class voters in this election, which although it's been given some attention, I don't think it's been given, you know, sufficient attention because without those working class voters and the remarkable shift that they made in their voting behavior in 2016, Donald Trump wouldn't be president of the United States. And there is a question as to the ramifications of that, I think for the future of the Republican Party, for the future of conservatism, which is I think our topic here. If you look at how Donald Trump was elected president, there are really three parts to his coalition. First, you have the social conservatives. And what's really remarkable about this election in one way is that the social conservatives stayed with the Republican Party even though the candidate was thrice married Donald Trump, who as far as we know never really spoken on the kinds of issues that are important to social conservatives. Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage. Yet if you look at the numbers, you know, you find if you go back to 2000, basically the percentage of religious voters, for example, you know, white Catholic voters, Protestant voters, evangelical Christian voters didn't really move. It stayed remarkably the same in all those elections. And in fact, evangelical Christians gave Donald Trump a bit more support than they had given George W. Bush, for example, which was, you know, very, very surprising. Now, the reason for that I think was the unexpected passing away of Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and Mitch McConnell's gamble. And it's interesting right now, given the tension between President Trump and the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that in some ways Donald Trump owes his election to Mitch McConnell and the gamble that he took when Justice Scalia passed away with about a year left in President Obama's term. Because, you know, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, somewhat unexpected nomination. Garland was older than we normally would expect in contemporary times a nominated Justice to be. We expect him to be late 40s, early 50s. He's in his 60s. He's a moderate and, you know, one would have thought that President Obama would have wanted perhaps a more solid liberal voice on the Supreme Court. But of course, if President Obama was trying to do is convince the Republicans to accept his nomination. And he was asking them to, you know, implicitly telling them, do you really want to take this risk? Right? Do you really want to risk the fact that you could lose the White House? You probably will lose the White House because no one really expected Trump to win. And everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. So do you really want to, you know, lose the White House and the Senate? And then if Hillary Clinton comes in, you're going to get somebody much younger and much more liberal on the court. But McConnell takes the gamble and rolls the dice with the election of 2016. And for social conservatives, the election then becomes about who will appoint the successor to Justice Scalia. And social conservatives right now are thrilled. You know, they're very happy with the choice of Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. Trump did what they wanted him to do. And of course, as we look to the future, I don't think social conservatives as part of Trump's coalition are going anywhere. Because we have Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court who's 84 years old. And by the way, if you think American politics is nasty right now, just wait to see what happens if Justice Kennedy resigns as many expect him to do at the end of this term. Because Justice Kennedy actually filled the seat that had been vacated by Lewis Powell back in the late 1980s. And some people trace the tension in American politics back to the Powell vacancy. Because as you may remember, as most Americans know, Robert Bork was the person who was chosen to fill that swing vote on the Supreme Court for Lewis Powell. Of course, Bork ultimately failed with Senator Kennedy giving a very famous speech about Robert Bork's America and what would happen if he went on the court. But we could argue that our politics has been in decline ever since our political discourse has been very tense since that. So if Justice Kennedy leaves, I'm sorry, Justice Kennedy is 81. Justice Ginsburg is 84. And of course Justice Ginsburg, I believe, has had two bouts of cancer. And there's many people that expect her to leave the court, perhaps in the near future. I suspect she'll try to hold out at least for another three years. And social conservatives know this. So a lot of it is about the court. Because many of the decisions that they're unhappy with, many of the things that have happened in the United States that they're unhappy with, same-sex marriage, for example, has not been the result overall of legislative choice, but rather of judicial choice with the Supreme Court making these announcements. So it's very important to them. Another group that's part of Trump's coalition are, let's call them economic conservatives. These are the traditional Republicans, right? Because in the United States, we think of the Republicans as the party of the rich, right? And the Democrats as the party of the poor. So these economic conservatives have long been Republicans. And if you look at exit polls in every election, economic conservatives, wealthier people tend to vote Republican. That's always been the case. In this election, it was a little bit different. If you look and just divide the electorate between those who make over $100,000 a year and those who make less than $100,000 a year, you find that those who make less than $100,000 supported Hillary Clinton, but those over $100,000 tied. They were equally divided between Clinton and Trump. So Trump didn't get those votes since ironic, given the fact he's a businessman. One would have thought that wealthier voters would have been attracted to him. But that part of the coalition, the traditional Republican coalition, because social conservatives and economic conservatives, that's the Republican party traditionally. And they weren't comfortable with Donald Trump. In fact, I think that's why many of us who saw this with particularly the never Trump movement and things like that didn't think Trump had much of a chance in 2016. The key is, and this is sort of my major point here, is that what Donald Trump needed was a third group. And the third group that he got were working class voters. And we all talk about working class voters. We don't have a wonderful definition for working class voters. But generally speaking, we're talking about, you know, generally white working class, so white voters who don't have a college degree. Those are the working class voters. And those are the kinds of voters who are in oftentimes a difficult situation with the modern economy, because of their lack of a degree. The first time I ever thought that Donald Trump could be elected president was in March of 2016. On March 15th, to be precise, because that was the date of the Ohio primary, the Ohio presidential primary. I live in Youngstown, Ohio, a place that has been economically traumatized. It's also historically one of the most democratic places in Ohio. If you look at a map of Ohio, look at a county map, Mahoning County, for which Youngstown is the county seat. If you color the counties red and blue based on how democratic they are or how Republican they are, historically, Mahoning County, where Youngstown is, is dark blue. Very democratic place. And even though working class voters, by the way, have been trending Republican over the past, at least the past two elections, they weren't trending Republican in Youngstown or in Mahoning County. And in fact, one of the things we saw in a state like Ohio or Wisconsin is working class voters weren't moving so much towards Republican Party, particularly working class voters who had labor history. And in Youngstown, labor and the Democratic Party are intertwined. Youngstown used to be a Republican place. They voted for Herbert Hoover. And then the unions came in and they brought the Democratic Party with them. Barack Obama gets roughly 65, 35, 65% of the vote in both of his elections. And that's normal. The Democratic candidate always gets 65% of the vote in Mahoning County somewhere around there. It's automatic. There was almost no Republican Party in, for example, a 2008 primary election. About 80,000 votes were cast in the Democratic primary in Mahoning County. 13,000 votes were cast in the Republican primary. The Republican Party didn't exist. Even in 2012, there was no Democratic primary. Barack Obama was unopposed. And twice as many Democrats showed up to vote in the primary as Republican voters. But in March of 2016, basically an equal number of Republicans and Democrats cast their ballot in the primary election. And those of us who watched politics there for years were stunned. No one expected this. Now we had heard rumors going forward. You had people coming in going to the local board of elections saying they wanted to switch parties. But what's really interesting is what they said when they did that. They didn't say they wanted to become Republicans because party affiliation is tough to lose. You inherit it from your parents oftentimes. So you're betraying your family legacy if you join the other party. And they weren't saying they wanted to become a Republican. They said, I want to join Trump's party. It was Trump's party. And in fact, the fact that many Republicans were rejecting Trump made him a more comfortable choice, I think, for these working class Democrats. They were willing to cross over and cast their vote for Trump because they knew he wasn't really a Republican. And that made them sort of comfortable with the choice. In the end, what we saw was Ohio going very strongly for Donald Trump, well beyond what the polls were showing us. The polls were showing us four or five points. It's more like eight or nine points that he wins. And you don't win Ohio by eight or nine points. You know, Ohio is a 50-50 state. I once sort of calculated the number of Democratic and Republican votes going back, you know, 20 years, 30 years. And the difference is minuscule. It was 1%, I think, over the last eight elections between the two. It's a close state. You don't win it that big. And one of the reasons he wanted so big was that he captured these working class voters. He didn't win Mahoney County. Mahoney County still went for Hillary Clinton. But it was in a couple percentage points. It was very, very close when it's never close. And the county right above Mahoney County, Trumbull County, which is all part of the same media market, did, for the first time in memory, vote Republican and voted for Donald Trump. So this was really stunning. Final thing I want to leave you with is the fact that I haven't seen a great deal of movement away from support for Donald Trump in Youngstown and in Mahoney County. The reason is they voted for him for almost one reason, and that is trade. You know, in, we just celebrated an anniversary in Youngstown. September 19th, 1979. I'm sorry, 1977. Black Monday, it's called. In one day, a mill closed down, a still mill closed down in Youngstown, and 5,000 people lost their jobs. Within 10 years, 40,000 people would lose their jobs. Traumatic event for an area. And they blamed it on international competition. I always told reporters when they would come to my office to ask me about politics in Youngstown, that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, is less popular in Youngstown than Osama bin Laden. And that's not an exaggeration. In fact, they see free trade agreements as a form of economic terrorism against them. And they finally got a candidate who said what they wanted to hear. And that is that these unfair trade agreements have cost you your jobs. I'm going to come in, negotiate better ones, and all your manufacturing jobs will come back. And so far, they're sticking with them. Whether they will into 2020, we'll see. But there hasn't really been a lot of movement, I think, since then. And I'll stop with that. Good. Thank you. Tell me this. Have some of the manufacturing jobs come back? And if they don't come back, will it support crumble? No, they haven't come back. And it's unlikely they're going to come back. I mean, we've had actually significant investment in manufacturing. Valerec, which is a French-owned company, invested a billion dollars in a pipe-making plant in Youngstown, taking over many of the areas where the old still mills work. They employ 500 people. A mill like that would have employed 2,000 people 20 years ago. So that's really the problem. So we don't know. We do know those jobs aren't coming back. Trump came to Youngstown in July and held a major rally. And the first thing he said when he gets up there on stage before the people of Youngstown is he was talking to his wife, Melania's, with him. And he says, we're driving here from the airport. And Melania's looking at the window when she asked me what happened. Because if you look and you're driving to Youngstown, you see the resting at factories, boarded up houses. And he said, I'm going to change all that. Your jobs are coming back. In fact, he said, I'm a real estate guy. Don't sell your house. He said, because your house is going to go up in value because of all the jobs that are going to come back. And so far, people were cheering.