Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
A volunteer walks past a campaign sign before a Donald Trump rally, October 16, 2023, in Adel, Iowa.
One of the most prevalent misconceptions in interpretations of American politics concerns why the votes of particular constituencies shift from one party to another. The white working class was once the backbone of the Democratic Party, and as late as 2008 gave Barack Obama 40 percent of their vote. In 2016, however, white working-class support for Hillary Clinton was just 28 percent. A comparable shift was seen among rural voters, who in 2008 gave Obama 45 percent of their votes, and in 2016 gave Clinton a bare 33 percent. In both cases, there was a bigger decline than the change in any other exit poll categories (however imprecise those exit polls may be), and big enough to account for Donald Trump’s victory. What prompted this shift? How did the worldviews of so many of these voters reverse so completely?
These conundrums are only conundrums if we assume that it’s their worldviews, rather than their world, that have changed.
In 2008, Republican John McCain led in polling until the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the biggest financial panic and recession since the Great Crash of 1929. At that point, less than two months before Election Day, Obama clearly demonstrated a greater familiarity with the causes and cures for the recession (remember McCain saying “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”?), and the polls shifted. Some Republicans have since complained that but for the Lehman crash, Republicans would have retained what they’ve argued was their underlying majority support, though that’s a lot like arguing that but for the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected either. Under capitalism, busts happen and invariably erode support for parties that greet them with laissez-faire cluelessness.
In 2012, even as the economic downturn persisted, Obama was blessed with being opposed by Mitt Romney, a private equity executive. Obama’s share of the white working-class vote declined from 40 percent to 36 percent; had he had a Republican opponent with less of a Wall Street taint, there’s every reason to believe it would have declined more.
In 2016, though, the bottom fell out of white working-class and rural support for Hillary Clinton. But before we get to the impressions conveyed by and received of Clinton and Trump, consider how the partially overlapping worlds of the white working class and rural America had changed between 2008 and 2016.
The most decisive change, as I’ve noted before, was the almost complete flight of capital from small-town and rural America. As surveys from the Economic Innovation Group have demonstrated, in the recoveries following the 1992-1994 recession and the dot-com bust of 2000-2001, the level of new business formation in counties with small population declined, but still existed. In the recovery following 2008, however, a flat zero percent of new business startups occurred in rural and small-town areas. Offshoring had begun to weaken their economies beginning in the early 1990s, but the shift to a postindustrial economy had been so accelerated and magnified by our trade policies that the economic world of much of the working class, and nearly all of it in rural areas, had been hollowed out by the time Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower. The one industry that did take root in these communities during these years was opioid distribution. Metropolitan areas, by contrast, grew and thrived, and the young people who’d grown up in rural America bettered their lives and hastened the descent of their birthplaces by moving to the cities.
Those cities, of course, were more racially diverse, more cosmopolitan and secular in their viewpoints, and were visibly waxing as the countryside waned. But those distinctions were nothing new, and the rural rejection of urban values is a feature of American life predating our revolt against the British. In the 1920s, politics turned on those distinctions, with a new generation of Klansmen rising against the growing numerical predominance of cities packed with Catholics and Jews, sundering the Democratic Party almost as much as slavery had in the run-up to the Civil War. It took the Depression and Franklin Roosevelt to subordinate those divisions to the need to restore the economy. Those rural/urban divisions had been exacerbated by the new media of movies and radio, which made the appeal of urban decadence visibly attractive to small-town youngsters.
Instead of backing policies that could constitute a resurrection of their economic worlds, Trump promises retribution against their enemies.
In the latter half of the 1990s, the book-reading public of rural and small-town America, most particularly their evangelical believers, created a thriving mass market for the Left Behind series of books, two of which topped the nation’s best-seller lists in the early days of George W. Bush’s presidency. In these books, the true believers were swept into heaven with the coming of the Rapture, while a violent war erupted between those left behind who’d become born-agains, and the evil secularists, headed by the benign-sounding leader of the United Nations who in actuality was the Antichrist. There was no small irony in Left Behind’s success: Its readers were disproportionately those Americans whom the economy and culture were in fact leaving behind, though in the book, it was they who entered the kingdom of heaven.
Which is to say that the kinds of rural rage that are increasingly the subject of newspaper feature stories (and which are ably dissected and contextualized in a forthcoming book by Tom Schaller and erstwhile Prospect columnist Paul Waldman) have always been with us and likely always will. But they’ve only risen to the level where they reshape the nation’s politics when they go beyond the obvious cultural rifts between rural and urban America and extend into the economic realm as well.
The rise of the populist movements of the 1890s was a revolt against the economic rise of the cities, even as farms and farmers struggled. When that battle was predominantly economic, its champion, William Jennings Bryan, commanded enough support to be the Democratic presidential nominee—three times, in fact. When it lost its economic dimension, Bryan was reduced to being the ridiculed champion of biblical fundamentalism at Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial over the permissibility of teaching evolution in high school science classes.
In assessing, then, the politics of rural America and the white working class today, what’s tipped it into Trumpism isn’t cultural rage, which has been an ever-present factor of varying intensities. It’s the economic abandonment of their towns and their livelihoods by American capital, and the decades of indifference to that abandonment shown by their governments.
Unlike their populist forebears of the 1890s, however, there is virtually nothing in Trumpism that addresses the left behind’s economic plight. Trump fulminates against China and calls immigrants “vermin,” but he, like the entire Republican Party, has condemned the Biden administration’s turn to industrial policy, which has resulted in a rush of factory construction in the regions from which private capital fled. Trump has called for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, whose tax credits are the only reason that factory construction has boomed.
Instead of backing policies that could constitute a resurrection of their economic worlds, Trump promises retribution against their enemies. Almost the entire Republican Party has followed suit: promising what is by now its white working-class base to wage cultural warfare rather than proposing policies that could revitalize its economic life. Fox News and other Republican media offer a steady diet of cultural and racial resentment with no attention to the economic ills, and remedies thereof, that have magnified that cultural and racial resentment to the point that American political fundamentals have shifted.
There have been only two instances in our history when the government did endeavor to lessen the gap between urban prosperity and rural penury. The first, of course, was the New Deal, whose programs of rural electrification and Southern and Western hydropower were specifically designed to revitalize and industrialize much of rural America. The second is Biden’s ongoing efforts to bolster reindustrialization, chiefly in rural America. The first was a clear political success. The political success of the second is yet to be determined.
