Today ends my unpardonably long pause between updates. The reason, I am afraid to say, is that nothing terribly interesting or determinative has occured in all this time. When I last left you, Clinton and Trump were all but certain to win their respective parties nominations. The setup was made, the fix was in, and the days and weeks since then have really only seen conventional wisdom fulfilled.
It seems to me now fairly obvious that Trump will lose the election, barring some unforseen revalation regarding Clinton or some consensus-shattering event in the world. But as is their nature, improbable events are unlikely to happen. But I hear persistent murmurs amongst my friends and the commentariat in general that there is a factor I am neglecting in my ivory-tower pontifications. The theory runs roughly like so. Trump will win a large and certainly larger than usual share of white, blue collar, working class Americans in the large industrial states of the North-East and Mid-West. This is an unconventional election, they say. Trump is smashing your precious orthodoxies by the sheer force of his bloviating ultra-masculinity. The country is ripe for revolt, and Clinton is not the candidate to hold together the fraying Democratic coalition. As the Zen master said, time will tell. Perhaps I will be forced to eat crow come November.
But let’s get down to brass tacks. Which state could this put in play? The answer has to be Pennsylvania. That Trump would need to win Ohio is axiomatic at this point. No Republican pretender to the throne has ever been elected without Ohio, but to qualify as a real re-aligning based on the features and appeal of Donald J. Trump he would need to snag Pennsylvania. If it is to work anywhere, this is the place for it. And so, as I sit in a trendy cafe in Cronulla drinking too much coffee, take a trip with me to the Keystone State and its 20 electoral votes.
The title of this post is part of a quote from James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist and long-time associate. He noted that ‘Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between’. This isn’t some sort of pejorative slur against Southerners, or Alabama in particular. Carville was from Louisiana, a fact that is abundantly clear to anyone who has ever heard him speak. But what he means is that Pennsylvania is quite a diverse state. The cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, are quite liberal and solidly democratic based on their high percentages of African-American, liberal middle-class and suburban moderate voters. By contrast the tracts of country in between are overwhelmingly working-class, churgh-going and gun-owning. Many of these counties are in fact solidly Republican, or have been trending that way for years. But the Democrats run up huge margins in the urban centers which counteract the effect of the antipathy of those voters and keep the state in the blue column since 1988.
And there are a considerable number of voters. Pennsylvania gets 20 electoral votes, less than some but more than most. Trump winning the state would force Clinton to look for votes elsewhere, and coupled with a loss of nearby and demographically-similar Ohio would put her in serious trouble.
These towns and cities in rural Pennsylvania were once the backbone of the American Industrial juggernaut, churning out all manner of manufactued goods and raw resources. Glittering cathedrals to industrial might used to dot the countryside, pouring out the products that once were the foundation of the American economy. Wages were good, incomes rose, towns expanded and flourished on the back of good blue-collar jobs and lifted millions into the middle class. This spawned a generation of good Union-Democrats, a key part of the traditional Democratic electoral coalition.
But over the years many of the jobs were outsourced overseas, many were eliminated by advances in technology, and others by competition from states with less active trade union movements. The residents of many of these communities have watched as the contracts dried up, the steel-mills and foundries closed, the school districts decayed for lack of funds and whole generations became trapped in a cycle of unemployment. Those who could go to college genearlly never returned, businesses closed and populations plummeted. Once vibrant communities full of people who took pride in what they made through their own hard work and skill began to decay. I don’t want to give the impression this was just taken lying down. It is heartbreakingly easy to find reports of business-owners and workers who tried everything they could to keep things afloat. Every year competition rose and profits slumped. Even during the tech-boom of the 90’s and the good times of the mid-2000’s the magic never really reached some of these places. In spite of their hard work, and the promise that a better day would come, their wages fell further and further behind and the oportunities that used to be taken for granted were gradually drawn away. Anyone would be angry. You would have to be a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy, not to feel wronged. Now the country calls them the ‘rust belt’, a moniker many see as mocking the decay many have fought so hard to forestall.
This is what Trump is exploiting. His appeal to the good times is no mere reactionary xenophobia. He stands in front of shuttered industrial megaliths and tells the people of these towns, not without justification, that they have been sold out. And when he says he will ‘Make America great again’, what they hear is that he will make it a little easier. That the days when hard work would be rewarded with a good life might return. That they might once more be a nation which builds things. And after being ignored for so long, told that they don’t understand the sophistication of modern trade policy, that they should retrain as computer programmers or make wind-turbines, some say they have had enough. Then they will vote for someone who will put things back the way they were, fix what is broken, or else just set fire to the whole edifice of a consensus that has so calously disregarded them. These are the hypothetical Trump voters. Overwhelmingly white workers without college degrees who have not seen a raise in years. Another key factor is that these are not generally the most socially liberal of folks. The growing social liberalism of the big cities and the Megalopolis of the north-east can seem disconnected from the realities and harships of life when one is struggling simply to survive and not let yourself or your family fall into the poverty your grandfather climbed out of. Trump is not running as a right-wing free marketeer. A lot of his lies are straight out of the mouth of an old-school Union democrat, protectionism and economic nationalism. It is easy to see how this message might resonate. And, so the theory goes, capture their votes, and with it Pennsylvania and the Presidency.
But is this a realistic possibility? I am inclined to say no. For starters, recent polling has Clinton between 7 and 10 points up in the state. But more importantly is the turnout of different groups in the election. Although Trump may do better amongst white voters without college degrees in theory, there is currently no evidence of this. His numbers in many polls are in fact worse with this group than Romney’s were. And we all know how that worked out.
What is more, what he gains amongst the workers he may lose from the middle and upper classes. Republican presidential candidates usually win white voters with college degrees. Although these are fewer in number, a much higher percentage of them vote than their non-college educated countrymen. And Trumps stances and bellicose rhetoric have hurt him with this group. Even if he wins the angry, white workers by a large margin, unless voting trends and turnout change dramatically this will be overcome by African-American voters (not his biggest fans), the state’s growing Hispanic community (again, no Trump-backers they) and the white-collar educated Republicans turned off by this egomania, posturing and shredding of traditional pro-business Republican shibboleths. In order to counteract this Trump would need a truly spectacular increase in turnout in rural Pennsylvania. And I see no evidence of this.
This can change, of course. But waiting for it to happen seems an implausible path to victory. And orchestrating it requires a tremendous effort of organisation of which I believe the barely-extant campaign apperatus of Mr. Trump incapable. Registration campaigns, voter-targeting, doorknocking, calls and call-backs and all the other machines of a get-out-the-vote effort require money. And Trump, frankly, has no cash in his campaign funds to pay for anything remotely resembling what would be necessary.
The theory of the ‘angry white voter’ is a plausible one. It may one day come true. The conditions of resentment and systemic disadvantage that render the ground fertile for such an enterprise sadly seem destined to persist. But Trump, and the Trump Campaign in particular, don’t seem capable of taking the theory into practice.
And without Pennsylvania, Trump seems set to fail in his quest to redraw the electoral map in his favor.
The Bull Moose 