Photo by AK Rockefeller. “USA Industry.” CC BY-SA 2.0.

Today, a month after the election, I read a half-dozen new articles with the same arguments and explanations I saw on November 9, and key-word searches turned up dozens more appearing just this last week. They are all about the white working-class vote.

Voter suppression, Russian hacking and Wikileaks, Comey, media bias,  Jill Stein as the “Nader of 2016” — any one of them could have made the difference in a close election decided by some 80,000 votes in three states. But one factor stands out, because both movement and Democratic Party strategy depends on how it is understood: the role of whites who voted for Obama twice and either stayed home, voted  third party, or voted Trump this time. These are people who could — or could not, depending on your views — be part of a winning Democratic coalition, or part of an independent mass movement for radical change.

Nate Cohn in the Times made the point in a carefully argued conversation: “Democrats have to grapple with the fact that they lost this election because millions of white working-class voters across the United States voted for Obama and then switched to Trump. …  she lost this election because millions of white voters without a college degree decided to vote for Trump. This was an electorate that she could have and should have won, based on pre-election polls and probably her team’s own data.”

For the Democrats, this group is crucial: The Republican Party has for the foreseeable future virtually conceded to the Democrats decisive swathes of  minorities, youth, professionals and the most of the college educated. What the Clinton campaign got wrong: In this election, and for the foreseeable future, the competition between the parties is mainly over rustbelt whites, those swing voters in a few swing states.

The debate among progressives can be passionate and angry, because what is at stake goes beyond the next election and movement strategy. Our understanding of this group makes a difference to how we think we can bring about social change. But the debate is also about how each of us understands our world, ourselves, how we relate to each other and the values which define us.

Explaining the white working-class vote
There are three frames for broad explanations of the defection of white Obama voters to Trump, three which describe a whole spectrum of thinking and feeling.

1. At the one extreme is racism and misogyny: Trump primed the racism, xenophobia and misogyny of white voters. A headline in Salon.com: “It was the racism, stupid: White working-class ‘economic anxiety’ is a zombie idea that needs to die.” And a headline in The American Prospect: “It’s the Misogyny, Stupid!” (American Prospect, Winter 2017, text not online.)
2. At another extreme is economic “populism”: Trump’s populist promises and outsider branding pulled in people variously described as  those left behind by globalization, victims of neoliberalism, whites moved by “economic anxiety” and furious at their betrayal by the political class and the party and business establishments. (Do a search for these terms just in the last weeks!)
3. Between these extremes are writers who draw on both of these explanations. They include Democratic Party strategists whose frame is traditional coalition politics, but also left academics and activists whose frame is intersectionality (including Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined that term).

This is an argument that goes back to the beginnings of movements for change in the US, because it is shaped by our historic deep divisions of  race and gender. They go back to the origins of left and progressive movements in the US — and also to the origins of identity-based movements  in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Will class or race and gender define the movements? The Knights of Labor, the eight-hour day movement, the Socialist Party and the IWW focused on economic demands and working class power; feminist and black organizations built separate movements in particular struggles, and for equality and liberation. And there were some efforts at alliances and coalition-building between labor and other identity-based movements (“other,” because working-class solidarity was also the basis for a powerful identity).

The first of these perspectives, racism and sexism, seems obvious beyond argument to many liberals and progressives. After all, Trump was consistently priming his audiences with racist and misogynist messaging. And what besides misogyny could explain the visceral hatred of Clinton, when she not only was clearly the more qualified candidate?

In those days just after the election and before Thanksgiving, you saw in mainstream media and heard in conversation, how do you talk to the Trump voters at your family dinner? Students from rustbelt communities were talking about shutting down political talk at dinner, cutting off relations with their high school friends and that annoying uncle, mass unfriending on Facebook. (If we’re serious about “hope and change,” maybe we should talk to people outside the choir.)

The political writers on each side seem equally unwilling to talk to each other, simply not responding to each others’ arguments and data. Many who focus on the racism and sexism of Trump voters  are in denial about the economic and social upheaval in the rustbelt, and many who focus on that rustbelt decline are  in denial about racism and sexism.

One big unanswered question for progressives
I see one big unanswered question for the progressives who write off the white working class. If half of the electorate is racist and sexist, how can progressives ever bring about the profound changes that they have been fighting for? What if Clinton (or even Sanders) had won by the 1% she lost in those swing states? The country would still be split; Republicans would still control most state governments, and Republicans and blue dog Democrats in Congress would still block radical change. And that’s just limiting the perspective to electoral politics, without talking about “Our Revolution” or, what I think is most decisive, a mass social movement outside of but acting upon electoral politics.

Here are a few other considerations.

The “typical” Trump voter?
Is the “average” or “typical” Trump voter racist and sexist? Liberals don’t talk much about a “typical” Clinton voter (do a web search!) but we all know the typical Trump voter!

Yet some of the data can be surprising. Slightly more Trump voters surveyed in the exit polls think illegal immigrants working in US should be “offered legal status” than think they should be “deported to home country.” (You have to do your own calculations on the exit poll data to get here: the raw numbers of respondents were 5389 and 4841 respectively, or 53% in favor of legalization and 47% in favor of deportation.) True, 75% of Trump voters in these polls thought the criminal justice system “treats all fairly,”  but, surprise, 25% thought blacks are “treated unfairly.” And while 55% of these Trump voters were “not bothered” by his treatment of women, 45% were.

(Yes, you can say that the exit poll questions don’t tell us enough, are not random samples, and have too few respondents and are not weighted to assess who thinks what in the population. But then, people were using these and other polling data to lump all Trump voters together as racist and sexist. My argument here is that the exit polls show, at least, that these people are more diverse and complicated.)

Does Trump’s messaging tell you what his voters think?
Here’s a bad argument that underlies much of the debate. People argue from Trump’s racist and sexist messaging that Trump voters must be motivated by racism and sexism; after all, they bought his racist, sexist brand.

But this reasoning can just as easily lead you to a different conclusion. After all, Trump also made the economy a key part of his messaging — he promised to bring back manufacturing (even coal-mining!) and to renegotiate bad trade deals, he attacked China for unfair competition, blamed Clinton and the whole political class and “a few big corporations” for the decline. Why shouldn’t we think voters were responding to that message?

A lot of this (with a buried dose of antisemitism, conspiracy, and a quick reference to immigration) was in Trump’s last campaign ad, which leveled a powerful attack on “the political establishment,” a “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

The Sands Casino sign over the old ore crane of Bethlehem Steel. CC BY-SA 3.0 Photo by CyberXRef, Wikimedia.

Beyond the polls
Just looking at the voting and polling data can only begin to answer our questions — as we see, even a cursory look at the exit polls poses problems if you are looking for simple answers. Any decent organizer, journalist or social scientist knows you have to talk to people — and get to know them — if you want to understand them as political actors … and not just helicopter in to Youngstown to talk to one or two people on deadline. We need to know not just how they answer a few simple questions, but how they think and feel and what they will say unprompted without a pollster framing the questions.

I haven’t seen any in-depth interviews by the people who deny the relevance of rustbelt decline. But there is already serious journalism and academic research exploring the lives, thoughts and feelings of the white working poor. I’ll discuss some of it here next week.

These issues should matter to anyone interested in strategy for social change — strategy, which first of all considers who the real enemy is and what alliances are necessary and possible.

Where has the bridge taken these miners’ children? What do they have ahead of them?  Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, Hazard, KY, 1940.  FSA, Library of Congress. 

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mer and John for comments. Also, if anyone wants to see my calculations on the exit polls, email me for them at paul@consideredsources.com.