LaPORTE
– Just because he didn’t win doesn’t mean John Gregg didn’t get it
right. In any other year, his campaign of inclusive, bottom-up populism
would have carried the day and kept both our base of white, blue collar
voters intact with younger and minority voters to help win Indiana’s
governorship. But not this year. The Trump tide cruelly swept away all
in its path. Take a look at the town of Kingsford Heights in
LaPorte County that was expertly profiled in a front page piece in
Sunday’s South Bend Tribune by veteran writer Virginia Black. The town,
consisting of blue collar workers, is a mix of both white and African
American voters that has reliably supported Democratic presidential
nominees for decades. The town is a good example of where
the Democratic presidential candidate’s message did not resonate with
blue collar voters with its happy-talk insistence on “building on gains”
of the Obama administration and which thought that focusing obsessively
on the many missteps and offensive talk by Donald Trump would somehow
carry the day.