My dad. Immigrant, Minority, Veteran, Trump Voter [View all]

He wouldn't talk to me much about it before the election, and that gave me the strong hunch this is where he was headed.

He is retired Navy, and the whole issue with Hillary being careless with classified information was a big deal to him. He is an immigrant but he has long had a hardline attitude that anyone coming here needs to be like him and follow the law- even though his story includes a door opened to him that 99% of people don't get.

But what pushed him most was that he spent his career after the Navy working in textiles. He did maintenance on the machines and in the 90's when the plant he worked in closed he was part of the crew that was tasked to haul most of the machines to the dump. Knowing what parts had value he bought them from the scrapyard and started a business selling them to other plants. But more and more he found himself hired to scrap out closed places and he kept as many parts and machines as he could to keep the existing plants running on their older machines or get them parts cheaper. He didn't just watch the decline of textile manufacturering in this country, he lived it and fought it all he could.

Trumps populist rhetoric spoke to him and his experience there. He says that if the government does things right manufacturing can still be viable here- something we argue about- but he was willing to look past all the other flaws because he saw someone speaking to the battle he fought and saw lost on jobs here.

This is a man who is a swing voter- he voted for Clinton once, Obama once, Perot, and often splits tickets like this year he voted for Trump but Cooper for Governor.

We must as a party learn to connect with people like him on whatever is their core issue. Hillary just didn't have any message at all for those like him- at least not one that connected. Trump did.