Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
to add to the book, but we were thankful not to have been around when things threatened to get physical.
Yet our time in these communities also made us feel like bad local citizens. Our interviewees are far more integrated into their communities’ political lives than we are. The people we spoke with know their local politicians, sometimes intimately. They stay abreast of the concerns of their neighbors, to whom they talk regularly, while we do not. And they are certainly more concerned about the welfare of their communities. We, on the other hand, often know more about recent elections in Britain or France than those in Claremont, where we live. We rarely read our local newspaper. By any reasonable criteria, we are bad localists.
But although we often felt like bad localists, we also felt like better national citizens than these admirable localists. We not only know more about national affairs, we also recognize the inevitability and importance of compromises in a large, polyglot republic. Unlike some of the citizens we talked to, we understand that there is no unified “people.” Thus we accept the necessity of a constitutional order that is designed to frustrate fleeting popular passions. And that project is best led not by those who are hot-tempered or brash, but by the temperate, not by newcomers, but by those with broad experience in governance.
These differences spring, in part, from the nature of our communities. Unlike the civic identities and commitments of those we spoke to in Rhode Island, Iowa, and Kentucky, ours bear little relationship to city or county lines. In this, and other ways, we are typical of our class. Our friends and families are scattered across the nation, and they come from varied racial, religious, and ideological backgrounds. In addition, we have lived in many different places. During one especially itinerant period, we lived in four states over a four-year period.25 As a result, we have extremely weak ties to the places we grew up in and to the various places we have resided. These social characteristics orient us toward our national political life and away from local citizenship. It is the national government, after all, that superintends the only political community that always matters to us. And we expect it to manage our nation’s diversity in reasonable ways. By way of contrast, local politics in places like Johnston, Ottumwa, and Elliott County are an extension of their neighborhoods—they are realms marked by trust, social homogeneity, and a shared sense of the public good.
Political expectations nurtured in small, sociocentric communities do not scale up well into our national political life. In small, homogeneous towns, for example, it is less unreasonable to believe that citizens are a unified “people,” or that political amateurs with common sense can become capable representatives, or that strong executive authority benefits the public good. Even political norms shaped by honor cultures work better in local settings marked by social trust and familiarity. It is in larger, more diverse polities, where deliberative norms are essential, partly because conflicts run deeper, necessitating negotiation and compromise.
Trump supporters are sometimes unfairly maligned for holding a naive view of how politics should function. Drawing on public opinion research, Jonathan Rauch argued in the Atlantic that a large majority of Americans have “a severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work.” They regard, Rauch continues, the “contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful,” since “obvious, common-sense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking.”26 While we are broadly sympathetic to Rauch’s lament, it also suggests that all politics are national in character. In the places we studied, the expectation that politics should be marked by little contentiousness is much less unreasonable. Many of the critiques of American populism, therefore, see all political life primarily through its national expressions. At the local level, politics have a somewhat different character.
When we turn our attention to the upcoming election, we doubt that the communities we studied—and many of his new working-class supporters—will reject Trump. Whether they will become partisan Republicans in time is harder to guess (see chapter 6, “Democrats No More?”). On the one hand, they are watching Fox News more, largely because they find other news sources hostile to their president. And they are doing so at a time when they are questioning their past allegiance to the Democratic Party and at a moment when the party is drifting further to the left. On the other hand, they also adore Trump far more than they like the Republican Party and its platform. At least for now, the majority of citizens in these communities remain registered Democrats.
Democrats, of course, might decide that they simply do not need these communities anymore. They could just focus on driving up minority and youth turnout in metropolitan areas in key battleground states. In the concluding chapter, we argue that is a strategic mistake. But even if it is not, the Democratic Party still has to ask itself a more fundamental question: what kind of party does it want to become? Does it want to rehabilitate the party of the New Deal, a broad-based working-class party made up of citizens of all races? If it does, there may still be time to reverse its political course. But the hour is getting late.
ONE
Three Democratic Communities
Donald Trump’s election as president shook the political world like an earthquake. In its aftermath, social scientists, like good seismologists, reviewed previous political tremors in search of hairline fissures that might help them understand the gaping new fault line opened by Trump’s victory. Some pointed to the Tea Party elections of 2010.1 Others looked for clues further back, including Ross Perot’s surprise success as an independent presidential candidate in 1992 and Pat Buchanan’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996.2 Perhaps these smaller events could help us understand Trump’s shocking triumph in 2016.
And yet those early tremors were hardly felt at all in the three Democratic strongholds we studied: Johnston, Rhode Island; Ottumwa, Iowa; and Elliott County, Kentucky. The Tea Party movement had no effect in either Johnston or Elliott, and caused only a minor rumble in Ottumwa. Neither did Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan perform notably well in these communities. The only hint of the impending earthquake was in Elliott County, where Barack Obama suffered a sharp dip in support in 2012.
Stronger harbingers appeared during the 2016 Republican primaries. In Johnston, for instance, town officials were overwhelmed by citizens seeking to change their party registration so they could vote for Trump in the Rhode Island primary. Even so, few citizens in these Democratic communities imagined that Trump could actually carry them in the general election, much less do so by such wide margins.
The main reason these communities had been unaffected by political surprises that rocked so many other places is due to the enduring power of the Democratic Party, to which the citizens of the communities we studied have stalwart loyalties. This attachment has traditionally been nurtured by the sense that the party is the defender of the white working class and by strong local party organizations. This chapter highlights the depth, nature, and history of these partisan loyalties. In so doing, it sets up the central mystery this book attempts to explain: why do these Democratic strongholds—and others like them—admire Trump?
One-Party Towns
The Democratic Party rules Rhode Island. Republicans control only ten seats in the state’s seventy-five-member House and five seats in its thirty-eight-member Senate. “There are so few Republicans [in the state house], they barely give them parking spaces,” quipped one political observer.3 Outside the state legislature, Republicans are not faring much better. Currently, only two mayoralties are held by Republicans. Democrats also control every statewide office.4 According to Gallup’s 2014 survey, Rhode Island is the third most-Democratic state, just slightly behind Maryland and Massachusetts.5 And while Rhode Islanders occasionally elect a Republican to the Governor’s Mansion and Senate, they are always moderates like Lincoln Chaffee—a politician derided by conservatives as a “RINO,” a “Republican in name only.” In a state where Democrats enjoy a three-to-one advantage in voter registration, electing RINOs is the best Republicans can do.
Yet there are some Rhode Island towns where even RINOs stand no chance. A short drive from the state house in neighboring Providence, Johnston is arguably the most Democratic town in the state. Like much of New England, however, Johnston was solidly Republican prior to