Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly said Democratic blue collar workers have flocked to Donald Trump because he’s the only candidate who promises them a future.
“This guy’s a rock star. He’s a rock star right across the board,” Kelly said of Trump. “The blue collar guys — they actually love this guy. Because they’ve lost their jobs. They’ve lost their towns. They’ve lost their schools. They’ve lost their churches. They’ve lost their future. He’s the only guy standing up for blue collar America right now. He’s the only guy standing up for American workers.”
Kelly said that media descriptions of Trump’s blue collar supporters as “uneducated white men” was insulting.
“I don’t know where they came up with the term, ‘uneducated white men.’ A lot of the friends I have are high school graduates and they’re good blue collar people. And they went to vo-tech schools where they learned a trade,” he said. “It’s like the ‘deplorables,’ the irredeemables.”
What bothered Kelly the most about Hillary Clinton calling half of Donald Trump’s supporters racist, sexist, mysonginistic, xenophobic, Islamphobic, “you name it,” was her audience laughing at all of the blue collar voters she called “deplorable” and “irredeemable.”
“She said it and she was so condescending, but it was the laughter in the room that offended me more than anything else. You know what, dammit, these guys work double shifts, and make enough money so they can buy tickets for concerts and movies, and buy these peoples’ CDs, and they’re sitting back laughing at them. That really rubbed me the wrong way,” Kelly said.
The parties are transforming: “I look at the Democratic Party as the party of the elite. They aren’t the party that my mom and Dad belonged to. My grandma and grandpa, they were Irish Catholics, and they believed that the Democrats were the working man’s party and the Republicans were the rich people.”
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