Blake Hounshell writes for the New York Times about a new report from the political nonprofit American Family Voices (AFV) titled "Winning Back The Factory Towns That Made Trumpism Possible." Like an earlier report on this topic from AFV last fall, the report uses "factory town" as a term of art to refer to places reliant on manufacturing and union jobs. These places have also become associated with widespread population health issues, including the illnesses associated with deaths of despair.
Here's the lede from Hounshell's story:
Should Democrats bother competing in the struggling factory towns of the Midwest?
A report released on Tuesday answers this question with an emphatic “yes.” But the fact that it is being asked at all speaks to the Democratic Party’s still-unresolved challenge of how to win back the more than 2.6 million voters it has lost in places like Ottumwa, Iowa, and Scranton, Pa., since 2012.
More than five years after Donald Trump galvanized the white working class in America’s fading industrial heartland, Democrats are still trying to understand what happened, and debating whether they should scrounge elsewhere for votes. Should they try to run up the electoral score in urban areas and inner-ring suburbs instead?
Basic electoral math suggests that they have little choice: It would be exceedingly difficult for Democrats to win a governing majority without holding onto their “blue wall” in the Midwest, and continued erosion in smaller communities might make that impossible in the near future.
Hounshell then goes on to discuss Democrats' efforts to take open U.S. Senate seats in two Rust Belt states, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and two in the Midwest, Iowa and Wisconsin, "all states that are dotted with places that have been hurt by the effects of global economic and technological change over the last few decades." And these are not a paltry number of voters. The prior AFV report noted, for example, that midsize and small manufacturing counties are 58% of the statewide vote in Wisconsin and half of the voting population in Michigan.
The recommendations in this report are based on polling conducted by Lake Research Partners that "shows a population buffeted by the rising cost of living and suffering from health-related crises. A majority, for instance, said they or a family member had a chronic health condition. Majorities also said they had personally struggled with disabilities, job loss, mental health problems or addiction."
This is perhaps the most striking paragraph, quoting Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist whose roots are in the region and who is the primary author of the report, who spent much of the last year immersed in the study. He commented that “probably the No. 1 surprise to me is how desperate people are for community.”
That quote reminds me of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, about the loss of community.
Also regarding Iowa, where there were primary elections today, is this piece about the decline of Democrats in Dubuque, in the northeast quadrant of the state, which was historically the most Democratic part. Elaine Godfrey asks, "Are Iowa's Democratic Days Gone for Good?" Here are a couple of paragraphs of that story that link it to the American Family Voices report, featuring references to the Simpsons, a die-hard Democratic family with deep roots in Dubuque:
After 60 years, voters in Dubuque County seem finished with Democrats. Nationwide, the trends are the same: Working-class voters without a college education are voting more in line with Republicans, while Democrats make inroads among more educated voters. The political winds that used to propel the Simpsons forward in each election are now blowing hard against them.
* * *
Last fall, 10,000 John Deere workers across the country, including many in Dubuque, went on strike for five weeks while they negotiated a new contract. One of Kelly’s cousins was on the picket line, and she told Kelly about men who went on strike wearing their bright-red trump 24 T-shirts. A decade ago, the thought of a UAW member in Dubuque openly supporting a Republican presidential candidate on the picket line was inconceivable. “Donald Trump wasn’t for you!” Kelly wanted to shout at them. “Not one of them should ever be wearing a Trump ’24 shirt. Because then we have failed them.”
Dubuque UAW members who swung to Trump didn’t do so because of his policy promises, though, Dan White, the former president of the union local, told me. Sure, they liked that he talked about keeping jobs in America, but mostly they really just appreciated the way he talked, and how he sounded like he was on their side. Fox News, talk radio, and social media helped reinforce that impression, Tom Townsend, the business manager of the local IBEW, told me. Many of his members have fully bought into the right’s portrayal of Democrats—that they’re all socialists who want to take their guns. They won’t listen when Townsend tries to tell them otherwise.
Changing the reputation that Democrats have in northeast Iowa right now will be a tough project.
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