Here’s a piece worth including, if like me you are doing some weekend reading online.
A lot of us were shocked that Wisconsin, in particular, tipped over the way it did on Tuesday. It did so in defiance of its own recent historical pattern, and in defiance of the data coming from nearly all the reputed pollsters who polled it. I’ll admit I posted repeatedly that we/they/someone needs to get out there in those places that went a lot redder this time, like many parts of Wisconsin, and really do the field research. To talk and listen with these people, find out what their relationship is to politics and to their place in America. Why exactly did Clinton lose so badly with Wisconsin, and Trump do so well up there.
Turns out somebody’s been doing this field research, exactly this, since 2007. Prof. Kathy Cramer from the University of Madison visited 27 small towns and rural communities across parts of Wisconsin, to find out what they think and believe, societally and politically.
Excerpts from this article, which interestingly was published on Election Day, Nov 8… during the day, before we realized how Prof. Cramer’s subjects and multitudes like them would tip the election:
Part of it is that the Republican Party over the years has honed its arguments to tap into this resentment. They’re saying: “You’re right, you’re not getting your fair share, and the problem is that it’s all going to the government. So let’s roll government back.”
So there’s a little bit of an elite-driven effect here, where people are told: “You are right to be upset. You are right to notice this injustice.”
and a note about why “Make America Great Again” resonated as well as it did:
Well, holy cow, the people I encountered seem to me to be working extremely hard. I’m with them when they’re getting their coffee before they start their workday at 5:30 a.m. I can see the fatigue in their eyes. And I think the notion that they are not getting what they deserve, it comes from them feeling like they’re struggling. They feel like they’re doing what they were told they needed to do to get ahead. And somehow it’s not enough… They say (paraphrasing), it used to be the case that my dad could do this job and retire at a relatively decent age, and make a decent wage. We had a pretty good quality of life, the community was thriving. Now I’m doing what he did, but my life is really much more difficult. I’m doing what I was told I should do in order to be a good American and get ahead, but I’m not getting what I was told I would get.
Much more here, including how Bernie was an interesting contrast/similarity to Trump — how both candidates tapped into these voters’ feelings of injustice, abandonment, disrespect… but each of them did it with very different language, different locuses of blame, and different prescriptions. Trump’s vague “just trust me, I’ll bring The Jobs, lots of Jobs, Obama’s been killing you people” and Bernie’s clarion call to invest in job growth but also reform our government and stop the superrich’s predation on all the rest of us.
For me one of the more disturbing parts of Cramer’s work is a realization that for many of these Americans, politics is a politics of identity and resentment, rather than a politics of what competing candidates plan to do. This realization became so central to Cramer’s findings that she titled her book on the research “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin.” (published March 2016 by U Chicago Press.) The book goes into more detail about how and why voters in WI would support Scott Walker even as his policies, when implemented, would make their lives more difficult in many ways.
Not sure where the Democratic Party needs to go from here in terms of reaching these folks better, connecting and persuading some of them to vote in their better socioeconomic interests. I understand many of us feel anger toward this demographic. But enough of them did vote Obama, before, enough to give us eight good years of President Obama. Our next presidential candidate will need to win back some of them.
It may feel too early to start strategizing for 2018 and 2020 as we find ourselves continually alarmed by daily updates of what Trump and the GOP are doing as radical change agents. But we need to multitask. And Prof. Cramer’s work is worth diving into, in the meantime, for those who want to know more about this part of America’s population, what they think and feel about their lives and their political choices.