MINORITY PROTECTION
SIMON BARBER: Beware the tyranny of coddled voters in the US boondocks
‘Minority protection has now morphed into something dangerously akin to minority rule’
There are two Americas. One vibrant, dynamic and heavily Democratic; the other stagnant, troubled, backward-looking and now all but exclusively Republican. The latter elected Donald Trump. That may sound a deplorably broad generalisation until you look at the map of November’s presidential election results broken down by counties. Observe an ocean of Republican red swamping small islands of Democratic blue. Trump looks at the map and sees in it validation of his fatuous claim to have won a historic landslide in spite of coming second by nearly 3-million votes. The truth is different. Those blue islands are mostly the densely populated counties that are the engine rooms of a full-employment American economy, encompassing the country’s largest cities and their teeming suburbs. Hillary Clinton may have won in only 472 counties to Trump’s 2,584, but her counties are responsible for 64% of GDP.In the previous election that put a Republican in the White House, the 2,397 counties that went...
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