"Out of touch" vs. "far detached"
Which presidential candidate is more out of touch?
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley reports on voter sentiment in Ohio, and in the time he spent in the state, he found voters debating whether Trump or Clinton is the candidate who understands their lives the least.
Ohio has picked the winner in every election since 1964, and this year, candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a dead-heat in that state in the final two weeks. Reporting from Cleveland’s steel mills, suburbs and inner city, Pelley and his team found a political identity crisis.
Wayne Townsend lost his job at the steel mill in Lorain, Ohio last year. He says Trump is the man to bring back jobs like his.
“I would rather have somebody who runs a billion-dollar business who says, ‘This is how you keep my jobs here in this country. Making the laws. Keeping jobs here in the country,’” he says.
For him, Clinton is too removed. “She seems so far detached from where we are,” Townsend says in the clip above. “She wears clothes that cost more during the debates than I would make in a year while I was working.”
About 30 miles away in east Cleveland, Lisa Tolbert feels it’s her duty to vote. But that vote won’t go to Trump, she says.
“I think Trump is so out of touch with everyday people,” Tolbert says in the clip above. “That’s not his life experience.”
60 Minutes producer Henry Schuster says the problem of relatability was felt around the state. “There’s a real struggle of, how do you know you’re being represented?” Schuster tells 60 Minutes Overtime.
Pelley and his team began speaking to Ohioans before July’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland. As Schuster tells Overtime, the crew saw few opinions change as the general election progressed. “We saw people harden their positions, not change their minds,” he says.
In the span of time that the team spent in the Buckeye State, they spoke with voters in diners, churches, union halls, and around dinner tables. But one conversation in particular stood out most to Schuster. It happened off camera, so it didn’t make the broadcast, but the tenor of discussion stunned him. It was at the Community Based Correctional Facility in Cuyahoga County, a state-funded program for low-level, non-violent offenders.
The men, all convicted felons, had learned that Ohio is one of 14 states that allows felons to vote once they have served their sentence. Schuster watched the men calmly weighing the candidates’ merits.
“It was probably the most civil discussion I’ve heard this election,” Schuster says. And that includes the candidates.