By Hunter Wallace

If you were a White working class male union member in the Rust Belt, why on earth would you support Hillary Clinton? The Clintons have been at the forefront of every rotten free-trade deal that has devastated the region for the last thirty years. Bill unleashed Wall Street in the 1990s and Hillary is Wall Street’s candidate. As president, Wall Street will expect Hillary to “move forward” on free-trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership like Obama has after dissimulating on trade in the primaries.

If Hillary’s job destroying energy policy on coal wasn’t bad enough, Sanders is trying to pull the Democratic Party toward endorsing a nationwide ban on fracking. Without fracking, parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania would be as depressed as Upstate New York.

“Labor leaders are nervous about Donald Trump’s appeal to unions’ many white, working-class members, and they are working to head off partisan defections. Unions spend heavily to support Democrats in elections and wield great influence over whether their members support those candidates. But labor leaders fear many of their members could be drawn to Mr. Trump. Merged Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling data from the first four months of the year show that among white union households, support is split evenly between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton, at 44% each, in a potential general-election matchup. “Everybody recognizes the enormous threat Trump poses” whether their unions have backed either Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders or Mrs. Clinton, said Robert Master, the Eastern region political director for the Communications Workers of America, which has endorsed Mr. Sanders. “There’s an element in that right-wing populism that is appealing to some of our members, there’s no question about that,” Mr. Master said. …”

Trump should do well with White working class union members. It is White middle class suburbanites in the Rust Belt who will decide the election:

“Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by 7 percentage points among middle-income voters in the Rust Belt, a key demographic he almost certainly needs to become president. Likely voters with annual family incomes of $30,000 to $75,000 in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back Clinton over Trump, 46 percent to 39 percent, the latest Purple Slice online poll for Bloomberg Politics shows. The findings should sound an alarm for Trump because they show he’s failing—at least so far—to dominate among the sort of voters thought to be more sympathetic to him. The poll also splashes cold water on suggestions that the real-estate developer and TV personality is well positioned to win in the Rust Belt. …”

The fate of the country will turn on how this slice on the population in places like suburban Des Moines, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia vote in November.