Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
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TRUMP’S DEMOCRATS
STEPHANIE MURAVCHIK
JON A. SHIELDS
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS
Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2020
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941758
ISBN 9780815738633 (pbk : alk. paper)
ISBN 9780815738640 (ebook)
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Typeset in Minion Pro
Composition by Elliott Beard
To our brothers and sisters
Valerie, Madeline, David, Lisa, and Bruce
Contents
Appendix. Long-Standing Democratic Counties that Voted for Trump
Acknowledgments
This book was made possible by many generous supporters. In the weeks after the 2016 election, Claremont McKenna College’s Peter Uvin and Hiram Chodosh stepped in to provide us with funds to conduct our initial fieldwork in Rhode Island. The following summers, our fieldwork was generously funded by the Randolph Foundation. George Thomas at Claremont’s Salvatori Center also supported our work in myriad ways. We are indebted to Brookings Institution Press, especially its editor Bill Finan. Bill gave our book the care and attention it needed as we scrambled to get it in print. Our copyediter, Olga Gardner Galvin, expertly and swiftly cleaned up our prose.
We are also thankful to many scholars who carefully read our manuscript and offered thoughtful suggestions, including Will Barndt, Zach Courser, Lily Giesmer, Susan McWilliams, Shep Melnick, Steven Teles, George Thomas, Jon Zimmerman, and Phil Zuckerman. We are especially grateful to Josh Muravchik, who line-edited the manuscript, greatly improving its clarity and cogency. We are also indebted to many research assistants at Claremont McKenna College, including Elena Castellanos, Richy Chen, Justin Coopersmith, Brooklyn Montgomery, Dylan Porter, Harrison Schreiber, Hallie Spear, Jensen Steady, and Michael Wirth. They enhanced our research with their insights and youthful energy. We also owe a debt to the community of scholars who have attempted to understand Trump’s supporters. Engaging and learning from their scholarship enlightened us and enriched our work.
Others helped us in more practical ways. Garrett Brown, our generous friend and accomplished editor, offered us needed counsel at nearly every turn. And Shep Melnick came to our rescue at a critical moment.
We owe a special debt to the many citizens who opened their homes, lives, and towns to us, especially Gayle Clevenger, Richard Delfino, John Dick, Tim Forsberg, Paul Giarrusso, Jeff Hendred, Linda and Roger Jarrells, Greg Kenning, Miriam Kenning, Myron Lewis, Matt Milner, Tony Passito, Jerry Parker, Joe Polisena, Alex Stroda, the Skaggs family, Dewey Smith, Stephen Ucci, and many others. This book would not be possible without their generosity. We hope they find the result a careful and honest attempt to understand their worlds.
And, finally, we are grateful to our families, who make all things possible. To our beloved siblings—our lifelong friends and kindest critics—we dedicate this book.
Introduction
Even by twenty-first-century standards, the 2016 election was unusually polarizing. Some Americans were elated. Others—ourselves included—were aghast. Paul Krugman, the longtime syndicated columnist for the New York Times, spoke for many of his readers when he confessed to feeling an overwhelming sense of despair as the final votes were being tallied. Before election night, Krugman presumed that whatever their partisan differences, the vast majority of Americans shared basic values. But the election exposed an “unknown country”—a foreign land where American citizens apparently disdained “democratic norms and the rule of law.”1
At the time, Krugman probably was not aware that the unknown country he supposed was crowded with bad democrats, was, in fact, full of his fellow Democrats. Almost one-third of the counties that voted twice for Obama went for Trump. And many of them had not just supported Obama—they had also been loyal to the Democratic Party for decades (see the table in the appendix).2 Some had not even supported a Republican president since prior to the New Deal. In fact, one county—Elliott County, Kentucky—had never voted for a Republican candidate since it was formed in the 1860s, the longest Democratic voting streak in the nation. Yet Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Elliott County—a place where the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans is similar to San Francisco’s.
It is true, of course, that voters sometimes cross party lines. We are accustomed to referring to Nixon Democrats in 1972 and Reagan Democrats in 1984. However, those elections were landslides. Nixon won every state except for Massachusetts, while Reagan won every state but Minnesota.3 Thus it is not surprising that Republican candidates won many loyal Democratic towns and counties in those years. The 2016