US after Trump - Millennials coming (part 1)

For those taking the long view perspective -that of generational changes in voters and workforce- the 2020 elections have a different meaning. Both candidates are over 70 years old -well into retirement age-. Both are white, anglo Saxon men raised in the urban states of the East Coast. 

Trump's "base" is a dwindling, less mobile, non-college-educated sample of what was the majority of America around 1950. They have been pictured in countless books since "Hillbilly Elegy"

and in many documentaries like 'American Factory, that explain how China took over jobs and even companies from the Rust Belt during the past 20 years, killing middle-class "union jobs" by way of technological revolution and global supply chains.

The reality is -or shall we better say will be- that the United States has become more diverse in the past 20 years and will become even more multicultural and multi-ethnic in the coming 20.

No matter how much (some) Trump supporters howl "they will not replace us" or wear MAGA hats, their hope for a return to 1950 is as futile as the fixation of equal old-timers in the Left with the politics of the 1970s.  

Neither 78-year-old Bernie Sanders nor 74-year-old-Donald Trump will be inactive roles within the next 5 years. 

Progressive governors and mayors have left the "blue" states with such heavy levels of taxation, public and student debt that a solid migration of millennials is changing the demographics -and politics of formerly known "red states" such as Utah, Arizona, and Texas.

Some move for increasing costs of living

Pandemics and remote work have made other Millenials more mobile and eager to escape expensive urban decay and stressful levels of social conflict

Progressives can't claim victory either: millennial migrants are turning more conservative as they become financially strapped with student debt and start their own small businesses away from the corporate rat race tracks.

It's time to look at how 2030 or 2040 US will look like rather than imagining that Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders' "retro" politics will dictate the future.

And those are indeed the good news.