"The Great Awakening"?

Salena Zito

Maybe Salena Zito and Brad Todd's new book The Great Revolt should have been called The Great Awakening.

The book profiles numerous voters in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Many of these voters voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, despite having voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. The specific localities the interviewees lived in — shown in darker shades of red in the map below — tipped those states into the "red" Republican column by large or slender margins in their statewide vote counts:

Here's the national electoral map for the 2016 presidential election:

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa had all been "blue" Democratic states in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. In 2016, they went "red."

The voters who swerved to put Trump over the top in these states in 2016 fit into seven categories, say Zito and Todd:

1. "Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared" - Trump voters who had worked a blue-collar, hourly wage, or physical-labor job after the age of twenty-one, and had experienced a job loss in the last seven years either personally or in their immediate families.
2. "Perot-istas" - similar to the group of voters who in 1992 propelled another iconoclastic billionaire candidate for president, Ross Perot, in his run for the presidency.
3. "Rough Rebounders" - voters who had experienced a setback in life and saw the same kind of vulnerability and recovery in Trump as they had experienced.
4. "Girl Gun Power" - women under the age of 45 who composed the one demographic group among Rust Belt Trump voters most likely to say "every American has a fundamental right to self-defense and a right to choose the home defense firearm that is best for them."
5. "Rotary Reliables" - college-educated voters in counties farther away from major cities than most of the forty-four mega-counties in the nation with populations over one million that preferred Hillary Clinton. 
6. "King Cyrus Christians" - evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and conservative Catholic voters.
7. "Silent Suburban Moms" - women who secretly voted for Trump, even though conventional wisdom said they would vote for Hillary Clinton in deference to her image as the woman who could break the "glass ceiling."

That's quite a diverse group. What, if anything, did those voters have in common?

Fair warning: I've covered only the first four categories so far in my reading. But voters in those four "archetypes" do seem to have a lot in common. They all seem to see Trump, for instance, as "telling it like it is" rather than being mealy-mouthed like (say the Trump admirers) every other politician.

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I'm particularly taken with the "Girl Gun Power" group, though. Conventional wisdom would seem to say that few women want to own and carry guns. But these authors show that that isn't so. Lots of women in Rust Belt states like these five have concealed-carry permits and walk around locked and loaded. Some of the women use guns for hunting. Many of them prefer target shooting. All of them carry firearms mostly for personal protection.

Said one of the "Girl Gun Power" interviewees: "It’s smart, it’s empowering, it reminds me I am in charge of taking care of myself and my family at all times." So it seems that feminism's narrative of female empowerment has coalesced, at least in some minds, with the National Rifle Association's claim that guns should stay legal, if only for reasons of personal self-defense.

Another of Zito and Todd's gun-toting interviewees said:

Protecting [gun] rights ... clinched her vote for Trump. "There really was no other choice. Remember, this vote was for us. How can you not continue to vote for yourself, your family, your community to move forward? I think many of us did in the past and we finally looked up and said, 'What is happening in this is more than politics, this is culture and values, and it is everything.' Politics was just the thing making the most noise, and while it is hard to remember every detail of that election, one thing not hard to remember is this was like …

[The interviewee] struggles with the description, as if there isn’t an adequate word to describe it. [The word "awakening" is suggested.]

"Yes, an awakening," she says. "There were so many emotions during that election and they still continue, hard to remember all of them, but yes, like an awakening.

That's why I say Zito and Todd's book could have been titled The Great Awakening. A lot of the voters who swerved from Obama into the Trump camp weren't so much in full-fledged revolt as — or so they felt — in a state of having been newly awakened to long-dormant concerns about "culture and values, and ... everything."

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Despite the above, Democrats can take heart if:

• Enough of these "swerve" Trump voters swerve back in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election, or
• Enough of them stay home and fail to vote in those elections, or
• Enough voters who prefer Democrats but who sat out the 2016 election show up at the polls in 2018 and 2020

My prediction is that — see "Closing in on Chaos" — no prediction is possible. I think the "Great Awakening" has moved our politics very close to a chaotic dynamics whose electoral outcomes are going to be at the mercy of a "butterfly effect." As I said before, some tiny, unforeseeable perturbation may make Democrats' dreams come true. On the other hand, an equally minute perturbation might boost Trump's Republicans into even greater power than they possess now, at state and local levels as well as nationally.