States With Truckers Voted Overwhelmingly Trump
There's a strong correlation between states that voted red and ones where truck driver is the most common job
Among the 29 states where truck driver is the most common job, all but three — California, Oregon, and Vermont — voted to elect Donald Trump president.
That’s an industry that may soon be decimated by automation, as self-driving vehicles are becoming more and more common.
There’s no one reason why Trump won an election nearly all analysts agreed he would lose, but a highly touted postmortem explanation, one cited by President Obama, is “economic anxiety” — fear of losing their economic status, or despair that they already have — among working-class Americans who don’t live by the coast.
According to the American Trucking Association, more than 3 million truckers are employed across the U.S., and there’s currently a shortage of labor in the industry. But semi- and fully autonomous cars are a rapidly growing industry of its own in the U.S. and across the world. The U.S. already saw the launch of its first autonomous semi in 2015 and its first autonomous taxis in 2016.
A 2013 Morgan Stanley study estimated that autonomous cars will be adopted far faster in cargo markets than for passengers, and estimated it would quickly save the trucking industry $168 billion a year, with $70 billion of those savings coming from labor. It speculated that fully autonomous trucks would be the norm by 2022, and while the industry would still need plenty of specialists, the industry would drastically cut its labor force.
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