I'm starting to read a new book, The Great Revolt. By reporter Salena Zito and Republican strategist Brad Todd, the book gives us a fresh slant on why Donald Trump won his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
The book is recommended today in an op-ed by Washington Post contributing columnist Hugh Hewitt, "Here’s how to crack the electoral code." Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio show host and author of the book The Fourth Way: The Conservative Playbook for a Lasting GOP Majority.
Zito and Todd have it that Trump won the electoral vote — though not the popular vote — by violating the political rules that were formerly agreed to by America's elites, whether liberal or conservative. Trump's iconoclastic style generated huge shifts among voters in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The affected localities in those states had gone fairly strongly for President Obama in 2012 and 2008; by 2016 they were going strongly for Trump.
The Americans who shifted their voting behavior in Trump's favor either had voted for Obama in 2012 and/or 2008, or had sat out those two elections.
Hewitt puts the overarching reason for the shift this way:
The key theme is status — a fundamental conviction that elites of the big four metropolitan powers of Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Manhattan and Washington wore a collective, fixed sneer toward their lessers between the coasts. Midwestern swing voters felt, to use the cliche from sports, “disrespected.”
In 2008, Obama had said of many of these voters (including many who voted for him):
They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Hillary Clinton said in 2016 that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” views.
Both of those comments typify why voting behavior shifted so rapidly. Obama's insensitive comment didn't hurt him in 2008 or 2012, but Clinton's equally insensitive comment did hurt her in 2016.
Though I'm a progressive Democrat who voted for Clinton in the 2016 general election (and Bernie Sanders in the Maryland primary), I come from "flyover country" stock in America's heartland, and I fully understand why so many people shifted allegiances from "blue" Democrats to Trump Republicans in the last election.
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As I continue to read, I'm finding the book quite perplexing. The main part of the book is organized as a series of in-depth interviews of and discussions about individual voters who switched from voting Democratic in 2012 and 2008 to voting for Trump in 2016. The first source of my perplexity is how these white voters (all I've encountered so far are white) could have supported Obama and then, in a radical shift, voted for Trump.
We read the words of the interviewees, and also the comments of the authors, which do offer some explanations. The two interviewees I've read about so far come from areas in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where folks lead increasingly hardscrabble lives because of recent economic changes. Many of the changes have to do with globalization, international agreements about trade and other matters, and similar things. But the interviewed Trump-shifters, as I'll call them, are not out-of-work. They're not poor. But they are aware that some sort of politico-economic tide that once favored people like themselves in communities like their own is swiftly running out.
However, a big part of the Trump-shift seems to have to do with the idea that these voters were reacting not just to their own adverse politico-economic fortunes but also to the disrespect that the voters sensed coming from America's plutocrats and elites.
These voters saw Hillary Clinton as being in the hip pockets of those plutocrats and elites, and they noted that she was unwilling or unable to do or say much to disabuse the Trump-shifters of their hostile reactions to her.
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At a deeper level, though, the fault line between blue-for-Democratic and red-for-Republican areas of the country seems to have lay squarely along the rift between well-educated Americans who work mainly with their minds and (often) less-well-educated (but not dumb) Americans who work mainly with their hands.
After the 2016 election, pundits who were in the first category hastened to speak of Trump voters in the second category in disparaging ways that implied they were "ignorant rubes." The Great Revolt shows, though, that they were neither rubes nor ignorant.
What perplexes me most is that progressive politicians and pundits have so far not seemed to be able to figure out what to do about this grievous phenomenon, which might be better labeled "the great divide" than "the great revolt."
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It's strange. The people who work with their hands were once the heart and soul of the Democratic coalition: unionized blue-collar industrial workers, farmers, tradesmen — people not very high on the economic totem pole, but ones who were usually able to eke out a decent living by working hard.
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| FDR |
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, many of them were without work. Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 in part because many of those who were suddenly hurting economically had broken faith with his predecessor, Republican Herbert Hoover.
My parents were married during the Depression. Neither of them had had a college education. My dad had nearly attended college, but when the right time came in the early 1920s, there was an economic downturn and my granddad, a baker who had learned his trade as a 16-year-old camp cook on a Montana cattle ranch, didn't have enough money for the tuition.
By 1935 or so, Mom and Dad had moved from Springfield, MO, to Washington, DC, so my father could join the United States Park Police. He was lucky to get that job. His getting it had depended in part on his having done well on some sort of written examination; he was a smart man. Though Mom was not terribly political, they were both Democrats and FDR supporters at the time.
As time went on, my father rose through the U.S.P.P.'s ranks all the way to chief. As one of the several chiefs of police in the Nation's Capital, he hobnobbed with members of Congress, foreign diplomats, and movers-and-shakers in general.
I never fully understood why Mom and Dad moved from being Democrats to becoming political independents and eventually voting Republican. Looking back, though, I realize it must have had something to do with the values they had brought with them to the East Coast from America's heartland. Somehow, even though their Washington social circles were filled with elite people of both major parties and from various foreign lands, they stayed "heartland" folks. By the 1960s, that fact seemed to lead to their breaking with the initiatives Democrats were propounding during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
My extended family continued to live in the heartland. Those relatives, I realized every time we visited them, simply had different "ways" about them than just about anybody I'd ever met in Washington, DC, or its suburbs. Once I was grown and out on my own, my parents hied back to Springfield to live in a house they built on land my Uncle Bowman and Aunt Tootsie (Mom's sister) had sold them, just down the hill from Bowman and Tootsie's house.
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I grieves me to say that some of those heartland values, at least in my father and mother's case, included an intensifying racial antipathy toward people who were called, back then, "Negroes." It seems to be the contention of the authors of The Great Revolt that racism and like forms of bigotry were not all that important in converting Obama voters to Trump voters in 2016. Yet it's hard for me to believe that there wasn't at least an undercurrent of ethnic bigotry within Trump's echelons. It's hard for me to accept as true what we're hearing so often now from Trump supporters — that they aren't racists, anti-feminists, homophobes, etc.
My dad, as a policeman and as a hunter, always had guns around our house. Second-amendment rights were not front-and-center back then, but today I'm sure he would be an NRA member.
Dad believed in individual initiative, not government handouts. Maybe that's another reason why he abandoned the FDR fold.
I'm also having trouble reconciling what I'm calling "heartland values" with the "Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared" designation — one of seven Trumpist "archetypes" that Zito and Todd pick out — of a number of their interviewees. The first interviewee in that particular section of the book is a retired union representative from the area around Wilkes-Barre, PA. He's a dyed-in-the-wool blue-collar guy.
I have no reason to suppose my parents were ever union supporters. One of my mother's sisters did marry a man who became an official in the Brotherhood of Railroad Something-or-Others. But then again, Mom's father had gotten his lifelong job as a strike breaker. The job involved working in a railroad roundhouse in Springfield, MO, but as far as I know he never joined a union.
Dad was never a union member, as his police force was not unionized until after he was promoted to chief. His father was not a union member. He was a baker who at one time owned his own bakery in Milwaukee. Though he later was forced by economic woes to move to Springfield and go to work for another baker, he would still have thought of himself as "management," I imagine, and would not have joined what was then called the Journeyman Bakers Union. (See the history of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union here.)
Anyway, my feeling is that there is something about heartland values that lies deeper than such relatively minor differences as whether or not a person is, or ever has a chance to be, a union member. Donald Trump got elected in large part because those holding such deep-set heartland values got sick of electing politicians who didn't even understand them in any fundamental way.
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