Small states' outsized political power (Part I: History)

Observers have offered a dizzying array of explanations for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, among them:

• A collective action problem where unrelenting supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, along with anti-Trump Republicans, refused to support the Democratic nominee;
• Tactical failures by Hillary Clinton’s campaign alongside unprecedented negativity driven by an overblown email scandal and Russian-linked hacking
• Voters’ “primal scream,” expressing an “anti-establishment mood” that drove economically dispirited voters toward a bold vision of change
• The harrowing success of a pied piper who audibly played the notes of dog-whistle politics at a moment when the audience for white-nationalist tunes was growing and who duped working-class voters into misplacing their frustration

Each of these can boast of some combination of empirical support and intuitive resonance, but it is indisputable that the mechanics of the Electoral College amplified support for Mr. Trump and paved his path to the White House. In like measure, the swollen Republican majority in the House of Representatives results not just from deft tactics but also from the increasing heft of voters in less populous states. And the Senate is designed to preserve the equal power and relevancy of each state irrespective of population.

This piece is the first in a series that will examine the history, reality, and implications of one element of U.S. politics: the insulation of relatively depopulated (i.e., rural) jurisdictions from the electoral weight of urban majorities. Whether virtue or vice -- or some of each -- this is an enduring feature of national-level politics that complicates policymaking. This series will focus on economic issues, leaving space for others to address how these same phenomena shape “culture war” policies (such as abortion restrictions) with meaningful but nonetheless indirect economic effects.

History - Preserving the Power of States

The first iteration of the federal government, organized under the Articles of Confederation, protected states’ autonomy by requiring a supermajority to act and unanimous consent to amend its structure. In practice, this proved unworkable, and by 1787 a Constitutional Convention was underway to develop a new system. The resulting system is generally celebrated for elegantly balancing the competing interests of the diverse states, though among these compromises was the embrace of slavery at a moment when abolitionism was on the rise.

The Senate

The legislative branch (Congress) is composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state has two senators, no matter its population. Today, this feature is uniquely resistant to change even by constitutional amendment.

The Senate reflected the concerns of small states that their power would be swamped by that of more populous states. At this time, the U.S. economy was mostly an agricultural one. Because the population was more uniformly rural than it is today, the design of the Senate addressed the heterogeneity of the states’ geographic expanse rather than the rural-urban divide that emerged decades later.

Though senators were originally chosen by state legislators, a 1913 amendment established direct election of senators.

The House of Representatives

Critics of the proposed House of Representatives assailed its small size (65 members at the outset) and lengthy term of office (two years, a tenure modern observers say is too short). In Federalist No. 55, James Madison answered these criticisms and argued that the country’s growth trajectory would yield a House of some 400 members by the mid-1800s.

While Madison conceded that a legislature composed of thousands of representatives would be unworkable, the Constitution capped the House at one member per 30,000 people. A half-century before the telegraph, it was likely hard to imagine the U.S. population increasing ten-fold, as would have yielded even 1,000 House members.

Thus, the Framers took for granted that the House would grow alongside the population. While the states failed to ratify a proposed amendment, even that formula would have ensured one House member for every 50,000 people. The constitutional design reflects, and projects, a mostly rural population idealized by the yeoman farmer.

Over time, the size of the House has increased. However, House growth has been slower, and population growth faster, than the Framers apparently predicted. This table combines Census data with the history of the size of the House:

Year	U.S. Population	Size of U.S. House
1790	3.9M	65
1810	7.2M	141
1850	23.2M	227
1890	62.9M	330
1920	105.7M	435
1960	179.3M	436
2010	308.7M	435

Aside from some slight fluctuation at midcentury, the size of the House is the same as it was 100 years ago even as the population has tripled.

Finally, each state is guaranteed at least one at-large House member, as is the case for seven states. Because of quirks of district apportionment (discussed in later posts), the most populous House district is more than 1.8 times more crowded than the least populous district.

The Electoral College

The Electoral College, the convoluted mechanism by which the president is chosen, merges the arithmetic of the Senate and House to apportion electoral strength to the states. 

Each state selects a number of electors equal to the state’s congressional delegation: its senators plus members of the House. (The District of Columbia also gets the minimum number of votes, currently three.) Since the makeup of both the Senate (by design) and the House (by inaction) convey outsized power to residents of low-population states, the Electoral College magnifies these effects.

The Electoral College stands apart as the most-revisited aspect of the Constitution, impacted by Amendments XII, XXII, and XXIII. Despite this consistent attention and revision, the system is not significantly altered from its original form. The appetite to reform the system when defects appeared, but not to fundamentally alter it, is viewed by some as evidence that its purpose was to protect slavery. In modern times, the Electoral College’s distortions accrue to the benefit of one political party, making reform unlikely aside from questions of inertia.

Next -- Part II-A: measuring the effects in the Senate

Trump's America and the "fallen world"

As America enters the era of a Trump presidency, I cannot help but take a glance back for a post-mortem on the rhetorical moves that enabled this outcome. These words are written as the media evaluates the now-President’s rhetoric in his inaugural address as dark, and even “apocalyptic.” This pessimistic language echoes Trump’s campaign rhetoric, which painted a portrait of a hobbled and deeply troubled America. Many commentators have noted Trump’s appeal to rural voters, and those who identify with the values of the rural. What is it about this chiaroscuro portrait of a country burdened with trouble that resonates with these rural people?

A recent New York Times analysis seizes on a philosophical underpinning of rural thought that may explain the appeal of Mr. Trump’s dark rhetoric. In his piece “Why Rural America Voted for Trump”, Robert Leonard states that it took this explanation from a long-term Republican political operative and Baptist minister, J.C. Watts, to understand the difference between the psychology of the political parties (in a neat conflation of evangelical/Republican and godless/Democrat):

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good.

This difference is not fully explored in Leonard’s piece, but it is a part of a worldview common to many of the branches of evangelical Protestantism that are popular in rural places. Watts’ explanation focuses on a religious view of people’s fundamental nature as flawed sinners, savable only through the grace of Christ. This is the underpinning of many conservative arguments about personal responsibility that situate blame for bad actions squarely in the personhood of the actor, instead of allocating blame to structural or historical contingencies. Because evangelical Christianity is more popular in rural places (and non-rural places that embrace rural values), evangelical rhetoric is a powerful tool for garnering the support of such rural people.

Not explored in Leonard’s piece is the affinity between Trump’s rhetoric of a benighted country and the broader worldview created by this conception of humans as inherently bad. Christian commentators frequently refer to a society run by those unwilling to acknowledge their sins as evidence of a “fallen world.” Multi-ethnic pluralism, tolerance for lifestyles and practices considered sinful, and economic failures can all fall into the umbrella of proof that God has withdrawn his favor from the United States. At its most extreme, this rhetoric of the fallen world produces messages like the shocking “Thank God for IEDs” signs waved by the Westboro Baptist Church, who believe that all the evils that befall the United States are signs of God’s disapproval of American’s unwillingness to recognize their sins and repent. At times, evangelicals reference 2 Corinthians 4:4 to stand for the proposition that the material world is actually ruled by Satan. This is a very old concept, that would likely have been familiar to early colonists intending to start a new society in the Americas.

Many on the left found it hard to locate actual evidence of the ailing America described by Trump in empirical observation of the country. Indeed, by many metrics, the United States has been on a modest upswing the past eight years. However, to evangelical Christians, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump, this rhetoric from Trump’s inauguration speech describing the country as a trapped in a cycle of despair and degradation is in fact somewhat tame:

[M]others and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

From the evangelical standpoint, this rhetoric is boilerplate description of the consequences of living in a society alienated from God’s grace. Criticisms from the left and from the media that Trump’s tone was too negative, too pessimistic to succeed as political rhetoric ignored the fact that such descriptions would be familiar to any person raised in contact with evangelical worldviews. Trump’s speech, playing to this, closes the loop with a pronouncement that “...we will be protected by God.”

Trump’s campaign rhetoric was not merely successful with white rural evangelicals because he tapped into their conception of the world as a fallen place, governed by sin. He also made nods to rural evangelical views of urban spaces as particular sites of degradation and distance from God, describing them in florid (and heavily racialized) terms over and over in his campaign as riddled with crime and drug addiction. Situating this characterization of the mythic ‘inner city’ in a broader discourse of an America drowning in sin, the appeal to evangelicals becomes more apparent.

Many pundits questioned how a thrice-married, sexually lascivious New York billionaire could connect so strongly to rural evangelicals in rural places. Trump’s theological bona fides remain fairly thin: See his brain fart in naming a single book of the Bible. But perhaps when analyzing his pessimistic rhetoric in the context of evangelical views of a sinful, degraded world, we can better understand how Trump captured the votes of evangelicals by aligning his view of America with theirs.

"row crops, minerals, things we need"

I'm watching "Hunger Games, Part I" tonight.  Former students  have told me that it's not only seriously good dystopian fiction, but also a metaphor of sorts for rural-urban tension.  And they're right.

From the very beginning one sees that District 12 --heroine Katniss Everdeen's home--is depicted much like Appalachia, including explicit references to "coal."  Plus, the residents of District 12 are shown wearing the sorts of clothes (and downtrodden demeanors) associated with the Appalachia of Lyndon B Johnson's era (and even dating back to the Great Depression--not a lot changed in the intervening years)--the era and the place that (partly) inspired and are photographically associated with the Great Society programs of the 1960s.  Indeed, the terrain is also reminiscent of central Appalachia, as are the rural pursuits (hunting deer, squirrels, quail; climbing trees) that hone Katniss's survival skills.  (Further, I cannot help think how similar District 12 is to another Jennifer Lawrence milieu, southwest Missouri in Winter's Bone; read more here).  The place is in dramatic contrast to the uber urban and technologically advanced capital city of the future, its denizens garbed and coiffed in high fashion.

The quote in my headline is taken from the rulers of this dystopian future when the citizens of District 11, home of Everdeen's young black ally, begin to revolt upon her death.  That is, the leaders plot how to calm the hoi polloi from Districts 11 and 12.  One asks the president if he has ever been there, and he replies to the effect that these places matter because they supply "row crops, minerals, things we need."  Sometimes I wish the leaders of the United States realized that rural places (of some stripes, at least) matter to our nation because they supply food and other stuff that comes from the ground--like timber and the fruits of extractive industries.

If more urban dwellers--especially those with political, economic or social clout--realized and acknowledged that rural and urban are interdependent, rural folks might not feel so neglected and/or maligned.

A "rural Princess Leia"

That was a headline I simply could not resist.  It quotes this New York Times story about Vivian Howard, a celebrity chef with her own television show, "A Chef's Life."  Kim Severson's feature about Howard tells of the woman's 2005 return to Deep Run, her hometown in eastern North Carolina, after working as a waitress and selling homemade soup out of her apartment in New York City.  Howard and her husband opened their restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, a few years later in nearby Kinston, and Severson suggests that Howard has become a hometown hero, helping to revitalize the area, in part because so many people come from out of state to eat at Howard's restaurant.  (As Howard points out, however, if the rising tide in Kinston had lifted all boats, there wouldn't be a need for a soup kitchen--to which Howard contributes--and a food pantry).

Here's an excerpt from Severson's feature that includes that magic Star Wars inspired phrase:

to many of the show’s three million fans, and to the guests who travel hundreds of miles to eat at her restaurant, Ms. Howard is a rural Princess Leia. In the wake of an election that laid bare the nation’s political, cultural and economic divisions, her life has a particular resonance with the kind of people who see her story as theirs.

Another segment of the story also gets at the rural-urban divide--and, indeed, the urban-over-rural hierarchy.  Regarding the restaurant:

At first, they served fancy city food. She remembers the day her sister pointed out that three of the four desserts had vegetables in them, and that didn’t mean carrot cake. 

Severson quotes Howard:

I was cooking down to people.  I didn’t feel like these people had anything to teach me. 

Ultimately, Howard chose to "embrace the local dishes she had grown up eating."

She could elevate the wild muscadine grapes, the slow-simmered butter beans and the “tom thumbs” — air-dried pork sausages whose casings are made from pig appendixes. In the process, she elevated herself. She came to consider the people in her town as guides to a stronger, simpler way of living.

As this quote suggests, the story is heavy on rural nostalgia, but it is nevertheless well worth a read in its entirety--not only for its feel-good value but because of what it might teach us about the current cultural and political rift between rural and urban.  I love this quote from Howard:

What I came to realize was that much of rural America feels forgotten and misunderstood and, frankly, hopeless.  Urban folks are afraid of rural folks, and rural folks are afraid of urban folks. On our show, we try to bridge the gap.

I don't know that I would choose the word "afraid," but I think Howard is on to something with that observation about rural and urban being in different orbits these days--with some feeling quite a bit of despair about that state of affairs.

Rural and urban are mostly talking past each other these days, with plenty of disdain flowing both ways across the rural-urban divide.   

The NY Times returns to the "scene of the crime"--um, I mean "election": rural Iowa

The New York Times today published this story, "In Iowa, Trump Voters are Unfazed by Controversies," the latest in many media outlets' return to "rural" areas to talk to voters about how they're feeling regarding the Trump transition--especially given that Trump garnered a high level of support from rural voters.  (See more post election coverage on the rural vote here, here and here).  The dateline for this particular story, by Trip Gabriel, is Monticello, Iowa, in the east central part of the state, near the Mississippi River and Illinois, and not far from the University of Iowa.

Gabriel's home base there is Darryl's Diner, which has a "Table of Knowledge,"--actually two of them, one for Democrats and one for Republicans.

Gabriel had spent time in Iowa for the New York Times in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign (meaning, of course, 2015).  He had gone to Monticello, in Jones County, because it was the first stop in Hillary Clinton's campaign in Iowa.  With hindsight, Gabriel reflects, the early media chase of HRC all looks rather silly.  Gabriel observes:

The Iowans I interviewed largely went about their lives outside the political hothouse social media. They did not follow hour-by-hour developments of the presidential transition. Indeed, on Wednesday, several were unfamiliar with the reports that Russia was holding compromising information on the president-elect, which Mr. Trump addressed in a news conference.

Many were hazy on specific policy details about how, say, House Republicans were seeking to replace Medicare with a voucher system. These voters feared an outbreak of European-style terrorist attacks by Muslims in the United States, maybe in their own communities. And overwhelmingly, Trump supporters did not want their hard-earned money redistributed to people they regarded as undeserving.

One resident of Monticello observed that some of his neighbors had voted against "their own self interests" by supporting Trump, who was "against T.P.P. [Trans Pacific Partnership], which would help exports of ag commodities." 

Gabriel also reported from other places around the state, including Des Moines County, in the southeast part of Iowa (not the same area as Des Moines city, Iowa).  There he talked to Sandy Dockendorff, who seeks to be chairperson of the state Democratic Party.  Gabriel quotes Dockendorff:  

It was all about making fun of Donald Trump — he would never be president and how horrible it would be [but] the only one talking about jobs was Trump. 

Interestingly, I have seen thorough analysis indicating that Clinton actually talked about jobs more than Trump--and in those terms.  Nevertheless, before I read that analysis, my overall impression of the Clinton campaign was the same as Dockendorff.  She also notes that "rural Iowans were critical of Democrats for opposing job-creating projects like oil pipelines."  

Another recent NYTimes story, this one a few days ago out of Covington, Louisiana (population 8,765, but part of the New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner Metropolitan Area), featured interviews with--again--mostly "good ol' boys," middle-aged and elderly men, offering opinions about reports that Russians had influenced the 2016 election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee and releasing emails and other information.    

Like many in Iowa, these Louisianans were firmly casting their lots with Trump, skeptical of what the mainstream media (a/k/a liberal press) had to say.  Here, from that story's lede, are three quotes from three different residents about the particular issue of Russia hacking the election:

“Sour grapes,” explained Bob Marino, 79, weighing in on the recent spycraft bombshell from the corner table of a local McDonald’s. 

“Sour grapes,” agreed Roger Noel, 65, sitting next to him. 

“Bunch of crybabies,” Reed Guidry, 64, offered from across the table.

Another resident, David Gubert, said, "If that's [hacking is] what it took, I'm glad they [the Russians] did it."

So there you have it.  Southern "rural" voters--at least the middle-aged white ones--seem to view things in a more one-sided fashion than the rural Iowans, though both seem unbothered by Russia's role in our election.   (Thanks to Campbell Robertson and Mitch Smith for reporting).

Postscript.  This NPR story on January 14 out of a rural part of metropolitan Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, features a youngish couple who voted for Trump, noting the wife, Jamie Ruppert, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.  She is a jobs-focused voter who was drawn to Trump's "Make America Great Again" mantra.

The strangest thing happened at the AALS last week

I have attended the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting for many of the 17+ years I have been a law professor, but I experienced something at last week's annual conference in San Francisco that I had never before seen or heard, something that came as a pleasant surprise.   Attendees were actually talking about rural people and places--including in a plenary session on the future of the legal profession.

For more than a decade now, I have worked to establish as a sub-discipline what I call "law and rural livelihoods" (I've taught a seminar by that name for eight years), and my Legal Ruralism blog is part of that effort.  One of my overarching arguments is that most legal scholarship implicitly embraces an urban norm--and that some legal scholarship is explicitly urbanormative.  Yet in all my years of attending gatherings of law professors, I have consistently been the only person in the room talking about rural people and places--I've literally been the only person using the word "rural."  I've often joked that I'm the "rural lady," perhaps analogous to SNL's "church lady," a character with a one-track mind who keeps showing up and making the same overarching point.  Over the years, this approach has attracted a lot of eye-rolling, ongoing marginalization.  But it has remained the case that rural people and places have been omitted from so many scholarly conversations about law--and from so many scholarly works on topics that, to my mind, have an obvious rural or spatial angle, e.g., reproductive justice, poverty.

So, imagine my surprise when, following the plenary on "Preparing a Diverse Profession to Serve a Diverse World," with key note by Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft Corporation (and, incidentally, my boss at Covington & Burling London in 1992 and later my client, from 1996-98, when I returned to Covington and he was in house at Microsoft),  Lauren Robel of Indiana University School of Law asked the first question, which was essentially "what about rural?"  She noted that she had recently been in southern Indiana, which is quite rural, and that shortages of broadband and lawyers are two challenges plaguing the region.  She also referenced the recent NPR story about the "epic" shortage of rural lawyers, a story that quoted me and mentioned the work I have done on the rural lawyer shortage.  After Robel broke the ice with a reference to rural Indiana, several others referenced "rural" in the ensuing conversation.  This was interesting in part because Smith had, early in his talk, referenced a small town in southwest Virginia where Microsoft has a server farm, but he had not used the word "rural."  As the conversation unfolded, however, the word became part of the discussion in a way that seemed, well, natural.

This was somewhat similar to what had happened the day before in a discussion session in which I participated:   Community Development Law and Economic Justice--Why Law Matters.  About a dozen scholars were invited in advance to participate in this discussion, including me.  Because I don't "do" community development law or work as such, I assumed I was invited to participate because of my work on rurality, including rural poverty, thus implicating issues of economic justice.  Once I got the ball rolling by talking about my rural-focused scholarship, several other participants mentioned "rural," including "rural and urban," as in referencing the prospect of intra-regional CED collaborations and such.  (Let me be clear that this usually doesn't happen; when I'm on a panel talkig about "rural," I typically remain silo-ed as such).  I commented that I thought much of the attention to "rural and urban" was racially coded (though it is not necessarily accurate to conflate rurality with whiteness, it is a common phenomenon), as a way to get at cross-racial collaborations, which I very much support (indeed, cross-racial cooperation among low-income folks is a big focus of my scholarship right now).  I also joked that I had not heard as many mentions of "rural" in my entire 17 years of attending law prof. conferences as I had in that 1.75 hour-long session!  Perhaps colleagues in this session--where I was invited to the conversation because I am a ruralist--were humoring me.

So, is this attention to rurality among legal educators the wave of the future?  or just a temporary dalliance, a moment of intrigue and curiosity, as we absorb the results of the 2016 election and the role that rural America apparently played in Trump's win?  I'm hoping for the former because mainstream (even liberal! highly educated! elite!) attention to rural issues and rural people might help us avert another electoral disaster in two years, or four.

Cross-posted to UC Davis Faculty Blog.

Op-ed on the rural vote in today's NYT

The New York Times today published an op-ed by Iowa journalist, Robert Leonard, "Why Rural America Voted for Trump."  Leonard rehashes a lot of the now familiar election post-mortem on the rural vote, but there are a few points I've not seen made elsewhere--at least not recently.

One is that it's not just the old-timer vote, it's the youth vote in rural America.  Here's a segment that is particularly haunting to me, where Leonard writes of:

a growing movement in rural America that immerses many young people in a culture — not just conservative news outlets but also home and church environments — that emphasizes contemporary conservative values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous.

As this excerpt suggests, the piece is strong on the culture wars and religion, though he also takes up other issues, such as rural disgruntlement over lack of investment in roads and other infrastructure to support nonmetropolitan areas.  

In state capitols across America, lawmakers spend billions of dollars to take a few seconds off a city dweller’s commute to his office, while rural counties’ farm-to-market roads fall into disrepair. Some of the paved roads in my region are no longer maintained and are reverting to gravel. For a couple of generations now, services that were once scattered across rural areas have increasingly been consolidated in urban areas, and rural towns die. It’s all done in the name of efficiency.

But again, the most potent and sobering part of this opinion piece regards a cultural divide between Democrats and Republicans, a divide increasingly aligning along the rural-urban axis.  Leonard concludes:

The Republican brand is strong in rural America — perhaps even strong enough to withstand a disastrous Trump presidency.

An unusual headline: on the settlement of a sex offender in a rural place

After the 2016 election, I decided it would be a good idea to follow a wider array of news sources and commentators on Twitter, to get out of my liberal blue bubble.  Not sure why, but one that came across my Twitter feed was the Grand Forks Herald, out of Grand Forks, North Dakota (home of the University of North Dakota and the third largest metropolitan area in the state).  The most memorable item I have seen on the news website until recently was this video of an ice-covered ship coming into the harbor of Duluth, Minnesota.  That was the most memorable item, anyway, until I saw this a few days ago: "Registered Sex Offender Moving to Rural Erskine, Minnesota."  You will no doubt--like me--want to know the population of Erskine.  It is 503, and Erskine is part of the Grand Forks, ND-MN Metropolitan Area.  Here is the story, accompanied by a photo of the man:

A Level 3 predatory sex offender will be living in the rural Erskine, Minn., area, according to a statement by the Polk County Sheriff's Office Thursday.

According to the state Department of Corrections, Lonny Jerome Cote, 61, has a registered address of U.S. Highway 59 Southeast in the Erskine area. He has a history of sexual contact with female victims between the ages of 4 and 14. 

Representatives of the Sheriff's Office and the Department of Corrections will be available at a community notification meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m., Jan. 5 at the Erskine Community Center, 105 Ross Ave.

I was surprised at this very public announcement of the location of the sex offender, and it reminded me of some cases I read a few years ago (when I started writing about rural-urban difference in relation to the law) about the old practice of banishment as punishment--effectively casting out members of society, typically into sparsely populated spaces, relegating them to the rural, if you will.  

Now this in relation to sex offender registries and rurality:  I know that information about the location of sex offenders is intended to be public, but I wonder how often it is so prominently displayed in newspapers, be they rural or urban.  In a rural community, of course, it may be harder for a registered sex offender to situate himself as far away from schools as the law requires--unless he is in open space, the countryside, and not in a small town. 

More on deaths of despair, this time from Chillicothe, Ohio

Here is the Washington Post story by Joel Achenbach about addiction in Chillicothe, Ohio, population 21,727, where the poverty rate of 24.3%.  Achenbach further sets the stage:

Chillicothe is a historic town in a transitional landscape. To the north and west are fields of corn and soybeans, a classic, flat Midwestern terrain. To the south and east are the foothills of Appalachia, with winding country roads that, when crossing a stream, narrow to a single lane.

The story introduces a number of women living in a halfway house recovering from addiction, and then this summary of what is happening:

These women are trying to survive an epidemic of self-destruction in small-town and rural America. Death rates have risen sharply among whites, particularly women, particularly those with a high school education or less — the white working class that played a key role in the November election. Last year, overall life expectancy in the United States fell for the first time since 1993, when HIV was rampant. 

Today there is no emergent virus running amok. Instead, Americans are dying from a rash of pathologies, sicknesses and addictions that experts call “diseases of despair.”

This is the most recent of a Washington Post series of stories about these deaths of despair, most of them focusing on white women.  One of the prior stories, out of Las Animas County, Colorado, is here.

Small-town Oklahoma newspaper still paying a price for Clinton endorsement

Manny Fernandez reports for the New York Times today from Enid, Oklahoma regarding the backlash that The Enid News and Eagle newspaper has suffered for endorsing Hillary Rodham Clinton for President.  The headline speaks volumes, "An Oklahoma Newspaper Endorsed Clinton.  It Hasn't Been Forgiven."  As Fernandez writes, the paper is a "red newspaper in a red county in what is arguably the reddest of states."  (See my prior commentary on Oklahoma voting here).  Here's what the paper did to cause such a fuss: 

The editorial board, in a gray-shaded column on Page A4 on Oct. 9, wrote that Donald J. Trump lacked “the skills, experience or temperament to hold office.” The headline and subhead read: “For U.S. president: Hillary Clinton is our choice for commander in chief.” 

Among the paper's 10,000 subscribers, 162 canceled their subscriptions, a far higher rate of retaliatory cancellation than those suffered by papers like The Dallas Morning News and The Arizona Republic, which also deviated from their long, Republican-leaning track records when they, too, endorsed Clinton.  Fernandez's report suggests that the response in Enid has been rather personal, as one might expect in a small-ish town, with its high density of acquaintanceship.  The executive editor, Rob Collins, explains that he has "talked a lot of people off the ledge," when they have called to cancel their subscriptions.  This quote from Collins provides a vignette of small-town relationships in this municipality of about 50,000, in nonmetropolitan Garfield County:

People knew my dad or know my mom and know my family here. A lot of people who were angry called expecting me to argue right back with them. Really, the only time I would raise my voice is when I would get cursed at or yelled at, which I don’t really like.  

I hope people can respect that we’re entitled to our opinion, too, and that that can be different from news.

In addition to the cancelled subscriptions, The News & Eagle has suffered other consequences:  

Eleven advertisers pulled their ads, including a funeral home that had a sizable account. Someone stuck a “Crooked Hillary” bumper sticker on the glass doors of the paper’s downtown office. A man left a late-night message on the publisher’s voice mail, expressing his hope that readers would deliver, to put it delicately, a burning sack of steaming excrement to the paper.

Fernandez notes the the paper did add one subscriber as a result of the Clinton endorsement.

The News and Eagle is owned by Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., whose holdings include newspapers and websites in 23 states.  The editorial endorsement, however, was drafted locally, by Enid reporters and editors.

I like this quote from Terry Clark, Professor of Journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.

There used to be a saying that the editorial page was the soul of a newspaper, and if that’s the case, we’ve got a lot of weak-souled newspapers in the country because they’re afraid to offend anybody.  This is an excellent example of the way American journalism ought to be — standing for something — and, man, it takes guts to do that in Enid, Okla.

This story is just one more reminder to me of how strongly so many folks opposed Hillary Clinton.  And that, I can't help believe, implicates attitudes about gender as much as anything else.   

NPR on mobile home "parks": the good, the bad, and the ugly in rural Idaho and suburban Minneapolis

Don't miss this two-part NPR series by Daniel Zwerdling here.  Part one features a mobile home park in Syringa, Idaho, on the outskirts of Moscow, home of the University of Idaho.  This manufactured home community has a remote landlord, which leads to problems for its residents, who typically own their homes but not the land on which those homes sit.  The residents pay rent to the landlord, in this case a man named Magar Magar, who lives hundreds of miles away in Vancouver, Washington.  A brief excerpt from the story follows:  

Since the 1980s, this community of roughly 100 houses has been plagued repeatedly by drinking water problems — including periods with contaminated water or no water at all. Rivers of raw sewage have occasionally gushed out of the ground and formed stinky ponds around homes. One resident has filled a cardboard box with videocassettes that he shot to document some of the incidents. Conditions in the neighborhood have become so bad that some people have abandoned their houses and moved out.

But some of these residents, who bought their homes for as little as $10,000, have no place to go except a homeless shelter if they are forced out of their trailers.  

As Zwerdling explains, state regulators have little leverage over these private landowners, and letters of demand from the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality to Magar went unanswered.  

But state officials lost their patience almost three years ago and took Magar to court. The Idaho Conservation League also sued Magar for allegedly letting Syringa's sewage system pollute a nearby river. And a legal aid clinic at the University of Idaho law school filed a class action lawsuit against Magar, on behalf of Syringa's residents. That suit asks the court to order Magar not only to fix the problems at Syringa, but to award financial damages to its residents.

A few days before the class action was to go to trial, however, Magar declared bankruptcy, thereby protecting himself, at least temporarily, from the suit.  

Part Two of Zwerdling's series is here, "When Residents Take Ownership, a Mobile Home Community Thrives."  The dateline for this one is Fridley, Minnesota, and it is a much more uplifting story, that of Park Place Mobile Home Park and its residents.  Zwerdling reports:

Five years ago, the residents banded together, formed a nonprofit co-op and bought their entire neighborhood from the company that owned it. Today, these residents exert democratic control over almost 9 acres of prime suburbs, with 80 manufactured houses sited on them.

Most of us don't think much about mobile homes--or when we do, our associations are entirely negative.  That makes me especially grateful for Zwerdling's reporting on what he explains are "an important source of affordable housing."  Two rural sociologists, Sonya Salamon (emeritus, University of Illinois), Katherine MacTavish of Oregon State University, and Michele Ely of North Carolina A & T have written a great deal about mobile home parks over the years, including this and this. I understand that Salamon and MacTavish are working on a book on the subject.