Americans voting their pocketbooks will send Trump to the White House

Republican presidential nominee and businessman Donald Trump is being touted by some conservatives as the answer to preserving our constitutional rights as judged by the Supreme Court. But that talking point won’t win him the presidency — his agenda for job creation will.

{mosads}Republican base voters who prioritize constitutional issues like religious liberty and the right to bear arms will help elect Trump, but they can’t put him over the top in November. Instead, Americans will elect the Republican not because they give a damn about the Constitution but because they want more job opportunities and are fed up with business as usual in Washington, D.C.

In a Gallup survey released last month on “the most important problem facing this country today,” Americans listed the economy as their top concern, while “unemployment/jobs” and “dissatisfaction with government” tied for second place.

These same Americans are the ones who will put Trump over the top on Election Day, including registered Democrats and millennials discouraged by persistent unemployment, underemployment, stagnant wages and mounting debt — all of which limit freedom and opportunity in America.

Trump, in a Washington Post/ABC News poll of registered voters conducted ahead of the first presidential debate, is trusted more than Clinton by a 7-point margin to tackle the economy.

As Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said Tuesday during the vice presidential debate, Americans want to see the economy “off to the races” again. Voters are convinced Trump is the one more likely to make that happen.

The Dixiecrats and everyday Americans being squeezed dry paycheck-to-paycheck while the Clintons cut lucrative deals with Iran, President Obama vetoes cuts to his pension benefits and members of Congress rake in at least $174,000 annually are the ones who — for better or worse — will take Trump at his word and not by his record and vote to send “The Apprentice” star to the Oval Office this November.

The cry for jobs has fallen on deaf ears for years as unemployment numbers coming out of the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly fail to reflect the real state of unemployment in the U.S.

Civil rights activist Charles Evers endorsed Trump earlier this year because “jobs are badly needed in Mississippi.”

Meanwhile, U.S. manufacturing employment fell in September for the third consecutive month and the number of involuntary part-time workers is up to a whopping 6.1 million people.

A Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey in August found one in five manufacturing firms in the Empire State have slowed down hiring people because of ObamaCare costs, while one in six service-sector respondents said the same.

This means election of Donald Trump will be less of a love affair with the business tycoon and more of a middle finger to D.C. elites long out of touch with anyone outside the beltway bubble.

While visiting family earlier this year in New England, I told a TSA agent that I was headed back to D.C.

His response? That D.C. is the only city in the country where Americans aren’t hurting.

A glance of my New England hometown appears to corroborate his sentiment, as businesses I frequented as a child have been shuttered or demolished altogether, and one of the few new businesses to pop up and flourish is a gun shop.

Surveying friends and family, it’s apparent: Unless someone paves the way for economic growth, young adults will be far less prosperous than their parents.

Too many are holding tightly to jobs they don’t love out of fear they won’t find a better one or to build up their depleted retirement accounts while siblings work part-time, if at all, and bunk with mom and dad long after they should have flown the coop.

Survey results released by salary website PayScale reveal almost half of Americans consider themselves underemployed, three-fourths of whom say they are working jobs they didn’t go to school for, while the remaining 25 percent say they are working part-time but desire full-time work.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s plan is green energy jobs, known to have failed under the Obama administration — this, even after she failed to deliver on a pledge to attract hundreds of thousands of jobs to upstate New York when serving in the Senate.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner wrote in a letter to employees after Microsoft announced its intent to purchase the professional-networking site that “Creating economic opportunity will be the defining issue of our time.”

That’s the truth this election cycle, and voters increasingly don’t believe career politicians are opportunity creators — a point Trump would do well to make Sunday night during the second presidential debate.

Bolton is a writer and former newspaper reporter living in Alexandria, Va.