Why Democrats Can't Win Trump Country
How Rural America Became Trump America, and Why It Won't Change Anytime Soon
Part 1:
A Lifestyle Disappearing
A few decades ago, back when MTV was the best babysitter a kid could as for, Democrats consistently won big in rural America. Their base of support was broad among blue collar, non-college educated white men, many of whom were union members. Today, Trump and Trumpublican candidates dominate this demographic. This polity has become so extreme in their ideology that they were easy bait for the Big Lie. About half think Republican leaders, even after the Capitol insurrection, should have gone further in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Beginning in the Clinton years, Democrats abandoned the blue collar union strategy, and since that time there has not been a political party fighting for them. A lot of coastal liberals cannot understand how these voters can consistently cast a ballot against their own self interest.
I am writing this to help you understand.
I was born and raised in Kentucky, and spent eight of my best years at the University of Kentucky. I was the researcher for the New York Times Best Selling book Mitch, Please! How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky (and America, Too). Now I work in Tennessee. These are my people. And just as much as I detest Trump and his demagoguery style of politics, I love his voters.
I’ve been to enough high dollar political fundraisers, with bigwigs wearing suits that cost as much as a coal miners car to know that I’d take these honest-as-the-day-is-long, hard working Americans over big money, D.C., and elitist types any day. Every day. You would too if you really got to know them.
I’m not talking about the Nazi flag waving, KKK hat wearing, White Christian America is the only America types. No matter what your pre-existing notions are, these people are far less common than you believe. If you want to get to know the wonderful people I am talking about, read Mitch, Please! You won’t regret it.
They aren’t backwards hillbillies who don’t know what’s good for them. Yes, they vote against their own interests, but understanding why takes more than a surface level analysis of headline political proposals. At the end of the day, the people in Trump country just don’t think Democrats care about them. It’s a message the Democrats have sent over and over again, and Republicans on talk radio and Fox News have been happy to amplify it during prime time.
You can think whatever you want about them, but I hope you’d at least want be informed first.
I know the last thing you want to read right now is another piece in defense of white men, but there is a good case to be made that they need defending. Set aside your wokeness for a moment, because you cannot make the America you want until you learn how to help the America you have.
It all starts with NAFTA
Maybe not NAFTA precisely, but the globalization trend that led to offshoring of good paying American jobs. However, NAFTA is a good focal point for discussion.
Fairly or not, the blame for NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in to law in 1994 which accelerated the removal of trade barriers—and the trend in globalization that has decimated the working class got laid at President Clinton’s feet. Trump made sure to drive this point home in his 2016 campaign, using Hillary Clinton’s statements about the Trans Pacific Partnership to pin her to the globalization associated with her husband.
Globalization has benefited everyone in the world, except the middle class in wealthy, developed nations. The United States has the largest such demographic, and the stories of jobs gone overseas are told around the meat smoker almost as much as stories about football and fishing.
There is a good argument to be made that Republicans should hold the blame for this, but relitigating impressions with roots that run back 20 years is not a strategy that will win you voters—at least not around here. If your political strategy is to ask people to give up their hobbies in order to dedicate enough time to studying policy that they understand complex economic developments, you’ve already lost.
Yes, for years Republican sucked up to business class donors and helped them eat away at their workers’ rights and livelihoods, but the blue collar, union loving Democrats never really stood in their way. In fact, I have heard many times in my life that Clinton is the worst of all politicians, because he switched sides and helped Republicans do this. When Donald Trump came along there was finally a politician who made these workers feel understood.
You can make a pretty good argument that Trump was just a showman, and didn’t actually do anything to help Trump country. It’s an argument I agree with, but it’s an argument you will lose. Even his meaningless reworking of NAFTA, into the almost identical USMCA, made Trump country voters feel like they had a win. Democrats have not been able to do this for a long, long time.
And it has weighed heavy on white men.
Wage growth in the United States has been almost non existent in the last 40 years. Fourty! The growth that has come has largely been from more women entering the workforce. From 1979 to 2019 middle class wages for women have grown by 28.8 percent. This is objectively a good thing, and nobody I know argues this. But, during the same time, wages for men have fallen by three percent. For poorer workers—many of whom are my Kentucky and Tennessee brothers—it’s even worse. Wages have fallen by almost eight percent. This trend is compounded when one considers that non college degree holders—the bulk of Trump country—have seen wages fall by 11.1 percent.
For many households in the United States, two workers are now required just to get by. The decline in men’s wages has made the traditional family home nearly impossible for blue collar workers. The woke side of you probably just read that sentence, threw up in your mouth a little bit, and said, “who cares, women don’t have to fill traditional gender roles. Let them work and quit complaining.”
You’re completely right.
Women shouldn’t have to fill traditional gender roles, it should be their choice. If they want to work, they should work. Women are every bit as capable and hard working as men.
All of this is completely true, and all of this completely misses the point. For many women, particularly in Trump country, filling a traditional gender role is what they want to do, and there is nothing wrong with wanting this. For many Trump country men, the idea of a wife who keeps a home and raises a family is their version of the American dream. Scream sexist all you want, but as long as the husband isn’t coercing or forcing the wife to play a traditional gender role, there is nothing sexist about it. A woman can be anything she wants—including a stay at home mom.
If you think this is disgusting and backwards, fine. But nobody from Kentucky is coming to Silicon Valley to tell women in tech they need to go home and raise kids. You’ll have just about as much luck coming here and telling Trump country women that they shouldn’t want to be stay at home moms.
The point is that this version of the American dream is now nearly impossible. Now, even women who would rather be stay at home moms are left with little choice but to work outside the home because men’s wages have fallen for a generation. Add in the cost of child care for families who need to have two working parents, and these families in Trump country are lucky just to be able to take their kids out for pizza at the end of the month, let alone live their American Dream.
I want to repeat the point to make it clear. There is a group of workers who are right now getting ready to retire whose entire working career has been in this 40 year span of stagnant wages. If you want to understand why Trump country thinks the world is waging war against them, this is the place you should start.
Their America is fading away, and the new rising America doesn’t seem to want them in it. It’s the perfect recipe for a smooth tongued demagogue to grab their hearts.
To understand why this was so easy, the two things you need to understand a few key things. First, the America Trump country knows is slipping into history. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is not the point. The point is they have been feeling left behind for years. The second thing to understand is that national (read, coastal) Democrats haven’t cared.
Part 2:
What is America?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. Honestly, sit and think about it.
For millions in Trump country the answer is a good paying 9-5, high school football on Friday nights, a saturday afternoon outdoors with family or friends, and church on Sunday morning. Yes, I realize I just wrote the one sentence version of country song—at least I left out the dog and the truck—but there is a reason Tuesday’s Gone has never gone.
For woke America, the America I just described is a relic from a museum. The trouble with that view is that it’s simply incorrect. Millions still live and love this life. But, while the love of this life has never diminished, the ability to live it has. The vanishing middle class 9-5, described in Part 1, was the foundation that everything in the life was built on. Once it started to crumble, the natural human instinct was to grip onto what was left more firmly.
But what was left started to go as well.
Prayer in schools has disappeared. The Ten Commandments cannot be displayed in pubic. In general, the Woke Warz have given Trump country the impression that they are not welcome in their own world. This is what happened when they watched Colin Kaepernick kneel for the National Anthem. The Anthem is a symbol of the America Trump country remembers. It is a sacred symbol representing all the brothers, fathers, uncles, and grandfathers whose lives were gladly given to keep the America they knew thriving. When that America was cast deeper and deeper into uncertainty, Kaepernick’s protest was seen as an insult not only to their lifestyle, but to those lost loved ones.
I had this discussion what felt like 1,000 times over the years, and even made the argument in my book that Kaepernick’s protest was the very definition of Christian love. In light of the sinful woman who bathed Jesus’ feet in her tears, I wrote:
Like the sinner in Simon’s home, Kaepernick was willing to uncomfortably face ridicule and scorn—particularly from conservative religious figureheads—so that he could try to help others. Just as the woman did not yield when Simon criticized her, Kaepernick did not yield when he became the focal point of rage from Donald Trump, Fox News, and corporate Christianity. He did not yield when he was run out of professional football. He did not yield when the NFL owners apparently conspired together to keep him from playing football ever again. Until Nike recognized Kaepernick’s act of love, the protest cost him millions, and he still did not yield…
Kaepernick chose to put everything on the line in an attempt to help thousands of other minorities whom he would never meet; minorities who face discrimination, brutalization, and all too often, death, by police officers who feel threatened because a stranger was born with dark skin.
This argument was one that I had success with in creating an understanding with those who were angry. Their anger wasn’t (at least for the vast majority of them) racism, it was anger about another building block of their America being chipped away. When they understood the protest through a different light, it was easier for them to see its qualities.
Yes, almost all the racists and white supremacists who worship Trump come from rural America, but it’s just plain ignorant to assume this means everyone from Trump country is racist. It might surprise a lot of woke America to learn that the movement against hate and police brutality is alive and well in Trump country. When they understand Kaepernick from a new perspective way, Trump country can warm up to the idea of protest.
The statues of confederate icons were another block seen as being chipped away.
Look, I get it. You’re thinking, “these were literal traitors who committed treason and fought a war against the United States, why do they matter so much?” And you’re right. It’s an odd place to pick a hero, but to Trump country, picking the Kardashians or Michael Jackson as a hero is equally as puzzling.
If you paid close enough attention you would have noticed the subtlety in Trump country’s objections to statue removals. They were not, except for the racist few, arguing that these confederate icons were good people, nor were they arguing that they deserved the pedestal they were on. They were arguing that this was yet another signal that their version of America was unacceptable. That chipping away at this block would lead to chipping away at another one, and another one, and another one.
Donald Trump understood this, and woke America never did. It’s why Trump had so much success arguing that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were next.
What this video looks like to Trump country is a man fighting for them, and their America, against a woke press mob who keep interrupting him and trying to make him look racist. While I have been on the side that Trump is probably racist—and his policies were certainly racially inequitable—since before he was elected, Trump country disagrees. They see him in this video declaring that neo nazis and white supremacists should be condemned. They see him talking about ordinary people who are tired of woke America—who almost never steps foot into Trump country, let alone helps them—chip away at their way of life.
I had discussion about statue removal nearly every day for what seemed like months. I argued that it didn’t make sense to venerate traitors, that statues are not required to document history, that the Sisters of the Confederacy, which worked to erect most of these statues, had been attempting to rewrite history. Most meaningfully, I argued that there was a significant difference between treasonous Confederates, and Washington or Jefferson. Woke America would be surprised by just how open Trump country was to these factual arguments.
Because, for Trump country, this was never really about the statues. It’s why at least 130 of these statues were removed within a few months of George Floyd’s killing, and Trump country didn’t revolt. It wasn’t about the statues, it was about their America.
Then the Woke Warriors literally came for Abraham Freaking Lincoln.
My argument lost all credibility, and the idea that the liberal mob was coming for their America was further cemented. Not only was Trump right, he was prophetic.
Even Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss aren’t safe. This is really puzzling and irksome in Trump country because the Obama White House featured Dr. Seuss to promote child literacy.
Show Trump country the pictures from the Seuss books the foundation decided to nix, and many will agree they are not right. Even Tucker Carlson knows this, which is why he refused to actually show these pictures during his rant. Despite the disingenuousness of Carlson’s propaganda , here we are, chipping away again at Trump country’s America. If this wasn’t a consistent pattern, chances are nobody in Trump country would care about some of the least read Seuss books disappearing.
But it is a consistent pattern, and it has been growing year after year. The growth of the pattern is why cancel culture antagonists, like Carlson and Trump were so easily able to turn some tool yelling about masks in Costco into a political martyr.
Bari Weiss, who felt like she was run out of the New York Times by woke warriors who didn’t want to tolerate free speech and expression of differing points of view, put it this way:
On the left, liberalism is under siege by a new, illiberal orthodoxy that has taken root all around, including in the very institutions meant to uphold the liberal order. And cancellation is this ideology’s most effective weapon. It uses cancellation the way ancient societies used witch burnings: to strike fear into the hearts of everyone watching. The point is the assertion of power. By showing the rest of us that we could be next, it compels us to conform and obey, either by remaining silent, or, perhaps, offering up our own kindling.
Trump country has already been shown they are not next, they are now. In their view, rightly or not, Trump is the only thing standing between them and the burning stake.
Woke America, when they don’t disregard these concerns altogether, tries to tell Trump country that the newer version of America will be better. That everyone will be better off, and progress will ultimately be appreciated, even by Trump country. But the last time Trump country was told this, corporate executives literally flew in from their elitist perches on a helicopter, and told their employees that their jobs were being moved south of the border.
Part 3:
Who is Fighting for Trump Country?
If you read parts one and two, you might be pulling your hair out thinking of all the things Republicans have done to hurt Trump country. Do everyone a favor and keep it to yourself. They already know this. Don’t insult their intelligence.
Trump country already knows Republicans have fought against the New Deal type of programs that helped lift millions out of poverty—like the Tennessee Valley Authority.
They already know that Republicans got in bed with big business like coal companies to strip workers of protections, and allow toxic pollution of their landscapes, natural resources, and lungs. They already know that Mitch McConnell was the driving force behind admitting China to the World Trade Organization by pushing for Most Favored Nation trade status. They already know that Mitch McConnell was the driving force behind scrapping the Trade Adjustment Act, which was meant to provide funding to retrain workers whose jobs were shipped overseas. They already know that the Keystone XL Pipeline and the fracking boom both make coal a less attractive and less economically viable form of energy.
This gets to one point I have yet to see my coastal liberal friends truly understand. Trump country already know all of this. They are not stupid. If you treat them like they are, or like they, as a whole people, are a fix up project, you’ll get nowhere. Laying out these facts for Trump country as though they’d welcome your help if only they had more knowledge makes any message that comes after less potent.
The problem Democrats face in Trump country is that they haven’t made helping those impacted by Republican policies a priority. This is particularly stinging because it used to be the case that Democrats stood up for these rural blue collar workers.
President Biden says all the right things about jobs and unions and wages, but unless he actually delivers the goods, it will just be one more reason to never trust Democrats again.
Look at Democrats from Trump country perspective. What are their priorities? Start naming the ones that are designed to help Trump country?
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I make a living as an economist, and even I’m struggling to come up with any.
So, once you’ve exhausted that single digit list, try to picture this all to real scenario faced by millions in Trump country.
At high school graduation you decide not to go to college. There are good paying jobs in the coal mines, in manufacturing, or in fracking. You can stay close to your hometown, marry your high school sweetheart, and live a decent life. You won’t have to pile on mountains of student loan debt, and you won’t have to live in a crowded city or suburb that makes it much more difficult to go hunting or fishing on the weekend.
A few years and a baby or two later you get laid off. The company tells you it is because of some environmental regulation (even if that isn’t actually true) that makes it impossible to keep all the workers, and you just don’t have seniority. Maybe your job got moved overseas, and you feel like Clinton sold you out. All the talk of the Green New Deal is the easiest (even if incorrect) place to lay the blame.
Many of these workers know Republicans are also largely to blame, which is why their vote shares for Trump were so much larger than for Republicans over two decades prior to Trump. But why won’t Democrats fight to help them anymore? Democrats still haven’t had any discussion about how the Green New Deal jobs help Trump country—and they really help could if Democrats put in the effort to shape environmental policy that way.
Instead, Democrats are fighting for a $15 minimum wage. Even though this would, on balance, be a good thing, there will still be some areas where it causes short to medium term pain. Those areas are almost exclusively in Trump country, where local mom and pop stores and diners have already been replaced by dollar stores and fast food.
Democrats are also fighting for student debt relief, even though only four percent of those making their student loan payments are in poverty, and median income for this group is over $86,000—far higher than most Trump country incomes.
To somebody who chose not to got to college, this is a huge giveaway Democrats are trying to provide for people who already have an advantage—a college degree. In fact, forgiving all student loan debt would be more expensive than doubling unemployment insurance or the earned income tax credit.
Democrats celebrated Cuomomania in New York like it was the Rose Bowl Parade. This gave Trump country the impression that liberals feel a moral superiority because, “Our governors aren't trying to get people killed from Covid.” Except that Governor Cuomo allegedly did get people killed, and then he lied about the numbers.
In all the discussion about renewable energy, has anyone proposed manufacturing solar panels in Trump country?
In 2014 I asked Mitch McConnell why, given the unfriendly economics of coal, he didn’t push to make Eastern Kentucky the solar panel manufacturing hub of the world? It was a region full of smart, hard working folks who were hungry to get to work now that coal was disappearing. I was politely told to eff off. Trump country knows this, but Trump appeared to fight for them. Democrats do not. They could step up where McConnell refuses, but so far, they haven’t.
Amid all the struggles of Trump country not one Democrat has made it a policy priority to bring help to rural America. Instead they are arguing about what bathroom people should be able to use.
I could keep this list going for a while, but the point is Democrats don’t care about Trump country. Even as a highly educated moderate it’s easy for me to see this. Imagine how much worse it looks for someone who didn’t choose to get a PhD.
Trump country isn’t broken and it isn’t backwards. Yes, those awful white power types do exist, but let’s not pretend Beverly Hills as a utopia either.
Trump country is a great place to live, and a great place to raise a family. When the pandemic shifted work to home offices, people fled to Trump country for more space for exactly this reason.
I marched for Black Lives Matter—several times. I wrote a book about the use of Christianity as a political weapon. I have loudly and consistently spoken out against Trumpism. I see how some Democratic policies, even when designed to help urban poor, can also help Trump country. I understand every objection you have right now. What I am saying is that you don’t understand Trump country.
They know Republicans don’t care about them. But they also know Democrats have left them behind; discarded them in favor of the woke Brooklynites. If neither party is going to fight to help Trump country, why not just vote for the party that hates abortion and loves guns. That is the choice Democrats have left Trump country with. That is why Trump was greeted as a savior.
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