US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty
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We had better bear in mind what this approach has not done for the past four decades and will not do in the coming years. It will not significantly or permanently increase voter turnout for working-class people, especially African American and Latino voters. The rate of voter turnout has fallen for the past few decades and particularly for off-year congressional elections. Both Black and Latino rates of voter participation in off-year elections, long below average, have nosedived since 2010 and did not recover in 2016 despite the threat of a Trump victory.29 Nor will the off-the-rack centrist liberalism, much less neoliberalism, of the vast majority of Democratic incumbents and most-likely candidates win back those white, working-class people or those in union households who have been voting Republican for decades, much less the recent angry Trump converts. Politics as usual have failed! Who put Trump in the White House? The Democrats.
THE GREAT GOD TRUMP AND THE WHITE WORKING CLASS
Mike Davis
History has been hacked. Trump’s “impossible” victories in June and November, together with the stunning challenge of Sanders’s primary campaign, have demolished much of elite political wisdom as well as overthrowing the two dynasties, the Clintons and Bushes, that have dominated national politics for thirty years. Not since Watergate has so much uncertainty and potential disorder infected every institution, network, and power relationship, including the Trump camp itself. What was unimaginable recently has now come to pass: the alt-right has a foot inside the White House, a white supremacist controls the machinery of the Justice Department, the coal industry owns the Commerce Department, hedge funds dictate deregulation, oil makes foreign policy, and a wealthy school-wrecker is in charge of national education policy. Obscure Midwestern billionaires, like the DeVoses and Hendrickses, who have spent years transforming Michigan and Wisconsin into right-wing policy laboratories, are now cashing their support for the president elect into the kind of national influence once enjoyed by Rockefellers and Harrimans. Carbon has won the battle of the Anthropocene and Roe v. Wade has been put on the butcher’s block. Out of an election that was supposed to register the increasing clout of women, millennials, antiwarming activists, and people of color, a geriatric far right has wrested policymaking power on a terrifying scale.1
Trump’s victory, of course, may yet turn out to be the ghost dance of a dying white culture, quickly followed by a return to Obamian, globalist normalcy or, conversely, we may be heading into the twilight zone of homegrown fascism. The parameters of the next four years are largely unknown. Much depends on whether the Republicans succeed in incorporating the old industrial states of the upper Midwest into their midcontinental reich of solidly red southern and plains states. In this case, their gerrymandered electoral advantages, as the National Review recently pointed out, might override the popular vote for another decade.2 But whatever the scenario, the issue of the utmost immediate importance to the left is whether or not the Sanders coalition, including the progressive unions that backed him, can be kept alive as an independent movement bridging the racial and cultural divides amongst American working people. An extraordinary restructuring of political camps, cadre, and patronage is taking place in an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty, but we need to understand more clearly whether 2016 actually reflects, or necessarily anticipates, a fundamental realignment of social forces.
Breaking Bad
This is not going be an election on niceness.
—Donald Trump
The mainstream narrative, accepted by much of the right and the left, is that Trump rode a wave of white, working-class resentment, mobilizing traditional nonvoters as well as alienated, blue-collar Republicans and Democrats, some of whom were also attracted to Sanders. Political analysts, as well as Trump himself, emphasized the campaign’s affinities with European right-nationalist movements that likewise claim to fight against globalization in the names of forgotten workers and small businesses. Endlessly cited have been exit polls that demonstrate Trump’s extraordinary popularity amongst noncollege, white men, although the same polls indicate that he ran up his highest margins in middle-class Republican constituencies. (If the polls in Wisconsin and elsewhere are to be believed, moreover, a fifth of Trump voters had an unfavorable opinion of their candidate and held their noses when they checked his box.)3 In any event he flipped a third of the counties that had voted for Obama twice. However, until the US Bureau of the Census’s Current Population Survey releases its analyses of turnout demographics, political scientists can only speculate on whether changes in allegiance or changes in turnout were chiefly responsible for the results.4 (Although turnout was slightly higher than in 2012, one hundred million eligible voters stayed away from the polls.)
What follows is skeptical interrogation of this narrative using county-level vote data to compare the 2016 presidential campaign with the 2012 campaign in older industrial regions of the Midwest and Appalachia.5 A number of distinct voting patterns emerge, only one of which actually conforms to the stereotype of the “Trump Democrats.” The phenomenon is real but largely limited to a score or so of troubled Rust Belt counties, from Iowa to New York, where a new wave of plant closure or relocation has coincided with growing immigrant and refugee populations. Election punditry has consistently conflated blue-collar votes long captured by Republican presidential candidates with the more modest and localized defection of working-class Democrats to Trump. Several hundred thousand white, blue-collar Obama voters, at most, voted for Trump’s vision of fair trade and reindustrialization, not the millions usually invoked. I’m not suggesting that these substantial beachheads cannot be expanded in the future by continued appeals to white identity and economic nationalism, but merely that have been overinterpreted as the key to Trump’s victory.
The true “miracle” of the mogul’s victory, apart from his cunning success in manipulating negative media coverage to his advantage, was capturing the entirety of the Romney vote, without any of the major defections (college-educated Republican women, conservative Latinos, Catholics) that the polls had predicted and Clinton had counted upon. As in an Agatha Christie mystery, Trump eliminated his dazed primary opponents one after another with murderous innuendo while hammering away on his master themes of elite corruption, treasonous trade agreements (“greatest job theft in the history of the world”), terrorist immigrants, and declining white economic opportunity. With the support of Breitbart and the alt-right, he essentially ran in Patrick Buchanan’s old shoes.
But if visceral nationalism and white anger gave him the nomination, it was not enough to ensure that the big battalions of the GOP, especially the evangelicals who had supported Ted Cruz, would actively campaign for him. Trump’s stroke of genius was to allow the religious right, including former Cruz cheerleaders David Barton and Tony Perkins, to draft the Republican program and then, as surety, to select one of their heroes as his running mate. As the New York Times editorial board epitomized “the most extreme platform in memory,” its “retrograde positions [included] making no exceptions for rape or women’s health in cases of abortion; requiring the Bible to be taught in public high schools; selling coal as a ‘clean’ energy source; demanding a return of federal lands to the states; insisting that legislators use religion as a guide in lawmaking; appointing ‘family values’ judges; barring female soldiers from combat; and rejecting the need for stronger gun controls.”6 To ensure implementation of this agenda, Trump promised to recompose the federal judiciary with evangelical fellow travelers, beginning with the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
At the same time, Rebekah Mercer, sometime “queen of the altright,” whose family super PAC had been Cruz’s largest backer, seconded Trump her crack political team: pollster Kellyanne Conway, Citizens United head David Bossie, and Breitbart chair Stephen Bannon. (“It would be difficult to overstate Rebekah’s influence in Trump World right now,” one insider told Politico after the election.)7 This fusion of the two antiestablishment Republican insurgencies, subsidized by the Me
rcers and other hedge-fund billionaires, was the crucial event that many election analysts overlooked. They exaggerated the blue-collar “populist” factor while underestimating the equity acquired by the right-to-life movement and other social-conservative causes in Trump’s victory. With the Supreme Court at stake and Mike Pence smiling from the dais, it was easier for the congregation to pardon the crouch-grabbing sinner at the head of the ticket. Trump, as a result, received a larger percentage of the evangelical vote than Romney, McCain, or Bush, while Clinton underperformed Obama among Catholics, including Latinos.8 Against all expectations, Trump also improved on Romney’s performance in the suburbs.
But—and this is a very important qualification—he did not increase Romney’s total vote in either the South or the Midwest; indeed he fell slightly shy in both regions. Clinton, however, received almost one million fewer votes than Obama in the South and almost three million less than the president in the Midwest. (See tables 1 and 2.) Abdicating any serious effort in smaller industrial towns and cities, she focused almost entirely on major metropolitan counties and media markets in battleground states. (An astonishing 99 percent of campaign ad spending by both sides was targeted on just fourteen states, with Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania alone constituting 71 percent of national spending.)9
Furthermore, in contrast to Obama, she had no outreach strategy toward evangelicals and her position on late-term abortion, even if misrepresented, alienated untold numbers of Obama Catholics. Likewise, she ignored agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack’s urgings to invest campaign resources in rural areas. While Trump was factory-hopping in the hinterlands, her itinerary skipped the entire state of Wisconsin as well as major contested centers such as the Dayton, Ohio, area. The Clinton camp obviously believed that aggressive campaigning in the last weeks by the Obamas and Sanders, reinforced by celebrities such as Springsteen and Beyoncé, would ensure strong turnouts by African Americans and millennials in the urban cores while she harvested votes from irate Republican women in the suburbs.10
Table 1
The Regional Vote, 2016 vs 2012 (millions)
Table 2
Vote Margins for Clinton vs Obama (2012) Compared to Green Party Vote
Note: There were 10.7 million more eligible voters in 2016 than in 2012.
Her campaign refused to heed the dangerous signals from the Rust Belt, going “totally silent on the economy and any future plan that would be helpful to people,” was veteran pollster and former Clinton adviser Stanley Greenberg’s incredulous response. “She no longer ran on change, she ran on continued progress [the Obama legacy] in a change election. She lost the election in the final two weeks because of avoidable things that could have put them in the lead.”11 Her stupefying inattention to voter unrest in long-Democratic nonmetropolitan counties contrasted with the strategy urged upon Trump by his “pugnacious pollster” Tony Fabrizio. “From the beginning he assumed a lower Black turnout, a surge of white Catholic Democrats who voted for Obama but would move to Trump, and the exodus of older white women, 53 percent of whom ended up voting for Trump. Fabrizio pushed relentlessly to ‘expand the map’ into Wisconsin and Michigan as well as doubling down on western Pennsylvania.”12 In the event, Clinton’s huge popular majorities on the West Coast were worthless currency in the Electoral College while Trump reaped a windfall from his final few weeks of barnstorming the Rust Belt.
Clinton equaled or exceeded Obama’s 2012 proportion of the vote only in Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and California—the latter three, of course, proof of a tremendous Latino mobilization.13 In three key states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, an additional factor in her defeat was a smaller, less energized African American vote than in 2012. Her Achilles’ heel in Florida, despite massive efforts in the southern half of the state, was the desultory Black turnout in the Tallahassee, Gainesville, and Hillsborough areas, while in Michigan, the smaller vote in Wayne County made her vulnerable to the swing toward Trump in suburban Macomb County, the home of the original “Reagan Democrats.”14 The legacy of welfare reform and super-incarceration had come back to haunt her, especially amongst younger Black urban voters. Furthermore, in Wisconsin and Michigan she failed to rally Sanders’s youth support, and in both states Jill Stein’s vote ended up larger than Clinton’s margin of defeat.
But we should be cautious about dumping all the blame on Clinton and her troubled inner circle. If she had been the principal problem, then local Democrats should have consistently outperformed her. In fact, that seldom happened, and in several states her vote was significantly higher than that of the hometown Democrats. The malaise of the Democrats, it should be clear, permeates every level of the party, including the hopelessly inept Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the Midwest, in particular, the Democrats have largely been running on retreads, nominating such old inventory as former Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett (who lost to Scott Walker in 2012) and ex-Ohio governor Ted Strickland (slaughtered by Rob Portman in the 2016 Senate race). Writing recently in the American Prospect, John Russo portrayed the Ohio party as an entrenched clique of incompetent pols and expensive consultants, mutually addicted to failure, who have failed to create a modern party infrastructure or address demands for change from Sanders’s supporters and others.15
Meanwhile, the relentless and at times exclusive priority for the gifted team around Obama had always been holding on to the White House, not strengthening sclerotic state parties. East of the Rockies, as a result, Republicans have surpassed their 1920 benchmark in state legislative seats. Twenty-five states are now Republican “trifectas” (control of both chambers and the governorship) versus a mere six for the Democrats. Progressive initiatives by Democratic cities such as Minneapolis (paid leave) and Austin (sanctuary) face the veto of reactionary legislatures.
In addition, as Brookings researchers have recently shown, since 2000 a paradoxical core-periphery dynamic has emerged within the political system. Republicans have increased their national electoral clout yet have steadily lost strength in the economic powerhouse metropolitan counties. “The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated just 36 percent of the country’s output—just a little more than one-third of the nation’s economic activity.”16 Trump voters, the countryside against the cities, have become something like the American version of the Khmer Rouge. Parts of this “other America,” to be sure, have always been Stone Age Republican territory, dominated by big farmers, small industrialists, and bankers, and the descendants of the KKK. But the not-so-benign neglect of once staunchly Democratic factory towns and mountain coal country is a reflection both of the marginalization of the former CIO unions within the party and—here the stereotype is accurate—the preempting priorities of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. Digital America is blue and Analog America, despite being poorer, is red.
Finally, we need to acknowledge the bizarre framework of the contest. In comparative election analysis, the structure of the system is usually assumed to be unchanging between cycles. This was manifestly not the case in 2016. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United (2010) decision, this was the second presidential election with the dark money floodgates wide open, and, in contrast to 2012, the national party apparatuses lost control of the primaries to the shadow parties of Trump and Cruz and, in the case of the Democrats, to the unprecedented grassroots-financed crusade of Sanders. It was also the first election conducted after the gutting of key sections of the Voting Rights Act and the widespread adoption of “voter suppression” strategies by Republican state legislatures. As a result, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report, “14 states had new voting restrictions in effect in 2016, including strict voter ID laws, fewer opportunities for early voting and reductions in the number of polling places.”17 Poll closures were outrageously extensive i
n Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama.
And, as a horrified David Brooks emphasized, this was first “post-truth” election, surreally awash in Trumpian lies, false news manufactured in Macedonia, invading chatbots, “dark posts,” dog whistles, conspiracy theories, and a deadly drip of hacked email revelations. Of all the thumbs on the scale, however, including the interventions by Comey and Putin, the most disastrous for the ex-secretary of state was the mainstream media’s decision to “balance” reportage by giving equal coverage to her emails and Trump’s serial sexual assaults. “Over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues—all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.”18
The Mythic Blue Wall
Looking ahead to future presidential elections, the Trump strategy points to a red wall that could be bigger and more beautiful than the Democrats’ blue one.19
Clinton’s “blue firewall” cracked in Minnesota, was narrowly breached in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and totally collapsed in Ohio (and Iowa, if we consider it a Democrat-leaning state.) Whole swathes of 2012 Obama counties in northwestern Illinois, eastern Iowa, western Wisconsin and Minnesota, and northern Ohio and New York were won by Trump. The “margin shift”—the win or loss percentage of Clinton 2016 versus Obama 2012—was more than 15 points in West Virginia, Iowa, and North Dakota; 9 to 14 points in Maine, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Hawaii, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont. In southern Wisconsin’s former auto belt (Kenosha and Rock counties), where Obama had crushed Romney by huge margins in 2012, the Democratic vote was down 20 percent and the former UAW stronghold of Kenosha went for Trump. Even in New York, Clinton finished seven points behind Obama, thanks to a massive Republican surge in eastern Long Island (Suffolk County) and poor support from blue-collar Democrats in older industrial districts upstate. According to exit polls, she won 51 percent of union households, a poor showing compared to the 60 percent of Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump beat the union vote of the previous three Republican candidates and in Ohio won a flatout majority.