Trump Democrats

In 2016, 200+ counties that had voted twice for Obama flipped and voted for Trump. The reasons are complex & nuanced. Here's why they're gonna vote for Trump again

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In a recent feature on DemocracySOS, we highlighted how different types of swing voters – small groups of voters, often passionate for a particular viewpoint – can have outsized influence in America’s “winner take all” political system. Swing voters like Florida Cubans, gun rights advocates in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, Jewish voters in Pennsylvania and Nevada, Muslim voters in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona. Each of these “groups of passion” are a key part of the complicated battleground landscape and the political calculus for how to win the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The truth is, if you are in the right state or district, and a member of the right group of swing voters, and the election is close enough, you can bring powerful politicians to their knees. That’s one of the defining features of our “winner take” electoral system.

Another fascinating and influential cohort of swing voters has been called “Trump’s Democrats.” Professors Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields of Claremont McKenna College, in an eponymous book by that title, tried to answer an intriguing question:  why did over 200 counties that had been Democratic strongholds, voting for Barack Obama twice, suddenly break for Donald Trump in 2016? Some of these places had an unbroken record of voting for Democratic presidents stretching back to the times of Reagan and Nixon. In 2016, even though Trump lost the popular vote, he managed to win some of the most loyal Democratic communities in the country. This was more perplexing than the usual “red versus blue” divide — this was a rupture within blue America itself.

The authors’ book is one of the more insightful analyses I have seen of why white working-class Americans left the Democratic Party for Donald Trump. The reasons are more complex and nuanced than you might imagine. To figure this out, Muravchik and Shields embedded themselves by living in three of these “flipped” communities, one each in Iowa, Rhode Island and Kentucky. These were not mere Tea Party repeats of the anti-government, libertarian GOP movement that surged in the 2010s. In fact in some ways, it was the exact opposite. These are small communities and towns where local politics and government are more important than national politics. Despite the fact that these communities had voted for Democrats for years, as we will see their local political culture already was illiberally “Trumpy” long before The Donald appeared on the political scene.

Local “boss Trumps”

As Jon Shields, one of the co-authors, said in an interview with the Un-Populist podcast: “One of the things that really struck us is that in these communities, politics is much more Trumpian in all kinds of ways…The local public officials reminded us of Trump in various ways. They were thin-skinned. They were brazen. They were tough. They were macho. They were the local daddies of their communities. They were there to take care of their flock.”

These local leaders were not particularly ideological, instead they practiced what the authors call a “friends-and-neighbors” politics. They were going to do particular favors or provide for particular constituents. In other words, this was a politics that harkened back to a sort of boss-centered machine politics, which has deep roots in the Democratic Party. It was “really about providing for and taking care of local constituents. Political leaders were expected to do favors for their constituents. We saw all of this in all kinds of ways.”

The other co-author, Stephanie Muravchik, tells the story about one county in Eastern Kentucky where an elected incumbent had held office continually for almost 30 years. Then he was charged by the Feds for corruption in an election. But this was not the usual kind of “money for votes” swap. The roads in this part of Kentucky need to be constantly refreshed with gravel, says Muravchik, so “the main way that he was able to show his friendship to voters was by providing loads of gravel to them at county expense. A lot of these people live on little far-flung farms in this rural district. They need to have little roads that connect their farmsteads to the main public arteries…he was dumping loads of gravel in the months leading up to an election.” The Feds came after him, and he pled out, agreeing never again to run for office in return for staying out of jail.

So this was a Mini-Me Donald Trump in a votes-for-gravel scheme. The art of the deal, indeed. Perhaps one might expect that kind of “you scratch, I’ll scratch” in a small rural town in Appalachia, but the authors found that a similar boss politics prevailed in Johnston, Rhode Island, a suburb of Providence. It’s a very Italian-American community where family nepotism and old-style machine politics are still practiced.

Says Shields: “The mayor there is Joe Polisena. He rules with an iron fist. Again, he’s like everyone’s daddy, right? People go to Joe. They need something done. They need a favor. Likewise, people in that community feel like if they don’t support the machine, if they don’t support Joe Polisena and other Democratic candidates, they’ll be basically shut out. They won’t be able to get any goods from the city, because they’ll be punished by the mayor, who can be very vindictive.”

It’s a politics that uses retribution to enforce a type of personalized rule. Muravchik tells the story of one persistent local critic who, “when they would be paving roads, like county roads, the new asphalt would stop at this man’s property line and then start up again at the next property line. Only in front of his farm would there be no paving.” A rather Trump-ian approach to politics, for sure.

These were very different communities, one rural and the other suburban, one in New England and the other in Appalachia. Yet they practiced very similar styles of politics, even if the substance is regionally different. It’s about patronage, nepotism, wheeling and dealing, and spoils for the victors.

Patriarchal authoritarian boss-ism

The authors also indicate how it is a very patriarchal and even authoritarian style of politics. As Shields says, “It’s the kind of politics that grows out of a traditional family in some ways. It’s the sense that, ‘Well, there’s a patriarch who’s the head of the household but also the head of the community.’ They should provide and take care of their community. In exchange, they should get the loyalty of their constituents and their supporters.” Their loyalty is the main way that they pay back their benefactors. “Even if they have some misgivings or grumblings, or they think the mayor can be a little too iron-fisted or whatever, there’s also a sense that they should be loyal to that person because they owe them something.”

This sounds very much like the uber-transactional Donald Trump. Yet as Shields points out, “It’s a kind of politics that used to dominate the Democratic Party.”

Indeed, in some of the restaurants in these towns, it was not uncommon for the authors to find pictures of JFK or FDR. Some of these white working class communities had been pro-union for many years, working in the local meatpacking plant or some other factory. The authors observed that it was almost like going back in time, as if you froze the Democratic Party in 1960.

Local “honor culture”

The authors also describe a kind of “honor culture” that exists in these localities. Trump appeals to these communities due to the very qualities that those in the blue cities, college towns and cosmopolitan coasts find most repulsive. Muravchik says that honor culture is a way of understanding reputation and conflict in which “it is imperative that a person, particularly a man, demonstrate his toughness, his willingness to meet any insult…with a kind of fierceness and a willingness” to avenge or reestablish his reputation. As Mayor Polisena said, “Look, I have to be a street fighter when it comes to politics. I have to be tough, because that’s the only thing that people understand, is strength.”

So in 2016, Trump’s style and character was a strong component of his appeal, arguably more than his America First slogans of immigration crackdown, renegotiating trade deals or shrinking government bureaucracy. The strongman macho mentality carries over into foreign policy as well. Jon Shields observed, “For Trump, you’re either a strong person or you’re a weak person, and that’s how he divides the world…Of course you punch back. Of course you don’t let things roll off your back. That’s not how politicians behave in their communities.” The authors quote one man saying, “I think other countries are afraid of [Trump], which I think is a good thing. I hate to say it, but with Bush and Obama, they were pushovers. With Trump, he’s not a pushover. There’s no playing games with him.”

The authors label this as a new kind of “identity politics.” Trump clicked with these voters precisely because many of the things about The Donald that turns off most Democrats are the very things these Trumpy Democrats find so appealing. Trump’s paternalistic qualities were normal in these locations, like the familiar politicians they were used to. These voters felt a real kinship with Trump because they felt he’s one of them, and they’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s “all in the family.”

No wonder, then, that when Mayor Joseph Polisena retired, after four terms and 16 years, he was succeeded by…Mayor Joseph Polisena Jr.

Class over race…tied to place

The authors also push back on the notion that the dynamic they observed in these flipped communities was driven mainly by racism or white supremacy. Most of these localities had voted twice for Obama and then flipped to Trump. But the decisive flip factors were more connected to a peculiar type of localism, a politics of place rather than ideology, and more focused on class than race. In Johnstown, Rhode Island, the locals had a saying – “Johnstown First” – long before Trump showed up with “America First.” The authors were struck by the fact that these communities did not particularly think in racial terms, and their social identities were much more class-based and place-based. “I think we have to keep in mind that however much race plays a role, their politics aren't reducible to race either, that they have other social identities.”

Back to the future with party politics

This kind of illiberal paternalism is how politics in the United States used to be practiced writ large by both Democrat and Republican parties. Political parties were patronage machines. Sometimes that style of politics could be very effective and efficient in “getting things done,” but it led to vast amounts of corruption that “good government” and progressive reformers managed to chip away from the political edifice over time. Nevertheless this brand of politics survived in these Democratic communities studied by the authors. The authors say that it held on in those places where “there are fewer college-educated, good-government types who wanted to clean up this kind of politics and get rid of it.”

It’s interesting, because certain political scientists like New America’s Lee Drutman and Jack Santucci have lamented the loss of influence of political parties. They have issued a plaintive plea for “more parties and better parties” or “more parties or no parties” and other confused, simplistic anthems. It seems not to have occurred to them that “patriarchal boss-ism” was the type of toxic politics in the days of yore that made political parties stronger and more central to everything about political life. And it is still the politics that makes Donald Trump – as scary, crazy, demented, rotten and authoritarian a human being as has ever despoiled the Oval Office – politically viable today.

One misguided report from the American Political Science Association and Protect Democracy claims that factors contributing to the weakening of political parties include campaign finance laws, open primaries, nonpartisan elections and more, which of course were all reforms from “good government” advocates in years passed trying to rein in the substantial abuses of political party patronage machines. These political scientists have whitewashed American electoral history inside the gaze of their rosy-tinted glasses, but the tale of Trump Democrats from Muravchik and Shields debunks their arguments. The story about Trump’s political rise in these flipped counties is a good deal more complex and nuanced than simply the “decline of political parties” or “us vs them.”

Meanwhile, most of the 200+ locations the authors studied in 2016 remain loyal to Trump today and will vote for him this November. “Trump is the character who shepherded all these communities into the Republican column,” the authors conclude. “They see him as one of the greatest presidents in American history.”

Let that scramble your brain, as you contemplate what kind of political hurricane is about to wash over the nation this November. And if you want to listen to a podcast interview with these two fascinating authors, here is a link to the UnPopulist website.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776