Analysis of Fetterman's win in Pennsylvania: the working class and rural vibes

This is from Trip Gabriel's story in the New York Times on Sunday, which was headlined "Democrats See a Blueprint in Fetterman’s Victory in Pennsylvania."  The subhead was "John Fetterman flipped a key Senate seat in part by attracting white working-class votes, including in the reddest parts of his state."  

“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party—you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.

Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.

In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

Gabriel quoted Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania:  

Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control.  He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.

The story continues: 

In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.

“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”

To be sure, Dr. Oz carried deep-red Armstrong County, whose biggest employers include Walmart and a coal mining company, with 71 percent of the vote. But Mr. Fetterman’s 29 percent share was 5.4 points higher than Mr. Biden’s support two years ago.

I've written a lot about Fetterman in the last six months, and my most recent post is here.  My August Politico piece about his rural efforts is here, and my Daily Yonder piece on the same theme is here.  

Postscript:  This is from a NYT piece titled, "How Democrats Can Create a Fetterman 2.0" by Michael Sokolove, who also wrote about Fetterman just after he won the primary.  Here's the bit most salient to Fetterman's rural strategy:

Rural voters in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in America, have been increasingly beyond the reach of Democrats. So why bother when you can just mine the deep trove of Democratic votes in the cities and close-in suburbs?

But Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor and an unconventional politician in almost every way, did not waver. And the results showed that he had substantially cut into the huge margins that Donald Trump ran up in Pennsylvania’s deep-red communities in defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and again four years later in losing the state, just barely, to Joe Biden.

* * * 

One lesson from Mr. Fetterman is that he showed up, repeatedly, in places that Democrats rarely visited. He began during his run for Senate in 2016, when he lost in the primary. After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, a job with few official duties, he traveled the state constantly.

The essay then quotes Jeff Eggleston, chair of the state's Democratic Rural Caucus: 

He has physically spent more time in rural Pennsylvania than any candidate I’ve ever seen,He got to know people. He spent time in our backyards. He made real, meaningful relationships, so people were willing to make a huge sacrifice in order to get him over the finish line.

And here's the bit most salient to his Working Class vibe:

Mr. Fetterman’s style and appearance are the first things that set him apart. Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia consultant who has run more than a dozen statewide races, including those of the two-term governor Ed Rendell, said that “you can’t discount the look” — his signature outfit is a Carhartt hoodie and cargo shorts. Mr. Oxman noted: “It’s an entry. He can talk to blue-collar people in a way that other Democrats have been failing at.”

Finally, Ezra Klein talked a lot about Fetterman on his podcast last week, including how Fetterman literally embodied a working class vibe.  (Same sort of stuff I wrote in my two essays above in Politico and the Daily Yonder).  There was a particularly memorable line about Fetterman not only being at the bar, but being in the bar fight.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

A literary depiction of the geography of the class culture wars: Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've been listening to Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole, which the New York Times reviewed in March.  I was intrigued by the socioeconomic class aspect of the review, set in that fateful election year 2016.  Here's what Hamilton Cain wrote in that NYT review, referring to Cole, the author, and Owen, the novel's protagonist:  

If economic class is the third rail of American life, then [author] Cole eases his hand out, gently, to touch it, his realism a meld of Richard Russo and Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney. Despite [protagonist] Owen’s modest upbringing, he’s a striver with scant chill. He’s liberal in his politics and passionate about Walt Whitman and Modigliani, stoking a sense of curiosity and discipline not always associated with his demographic.

And here's a quote from the novel, excerpted in Cain's review, that illustrates the role of place and culture in it.

“I explained that Cracker Barrel was cheap, and they were working-class people without a lot of money who nonetheless wanted the experience of a family outing,” Owen notes. “They loved the food and the décor not because they had bad taste, but because it was familiar to them. They’d grown up on actual farms, milking cows and pulling the suckers from actual tobacco. They’d eaten stewed apples and turnip greens and ham hock, and the tools on the walls had been the tools their fathers used, in a time that was not, at least in Kentucky, some distant yesteryear. It was recent and vivid, and the ache of its passing away therefore still present, like a phantom limb.” 

Cain's review tells us that the protagonist grew up in "a dot of a town" in western Kentucky.  In fact, there is not a lot of rural in this book--unless one believes, as I tend to do, that rural culture moves to town when rural folks move to the city.  This novel seems to support that thesis.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say this novel illustrates why "rural" is often conflated with "working-class white" in contemporary political discussions.  

The rural culture associated with the flyover states is alive and well, it seems, in places like Louisville, where the novel is set.  That's evident in this conversation between the two primary characters.  One is  Owen, who aspires to be a writer but for now is working as a groundskeeper at a posh Louisville university; that job permits him to enroll free of charge in a class, and he's studying creative writing.  The other is Alma, a professional writer who is writer in residence at the university, an immigrant from Bosnia.  You see here how her parents' attitudes toward education differed dramatically from that of the parents of Owen.     

You'll be able to tell who is who in this dialogue, which occurs at a juncture where they are becoming romantically interested in each other:    

As we walked on, she pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists and crossed her arms, shivering a little. Did you go to Princeton? I said.

Yep.

How was that?

She thought about the question a few moments. It was wonderful in a lot of ways, and also evil in a lot of ways. Going there as an immigrant is different than going as a legacy from some old-money family.

Was that where you always wanted to go?

I got into Dartmouth and Penn, too. I might’ve gone to Harvard, but they wait-listed me.

I didn’t ask where you got in, I asked where you wanted to go.

It’s hard to differentiate what you want from what your parents want at that age, you know?

I nodded as if I understood what she meant from experience, but I had no idea. When I was eighteen, all of my energy had been spent maintaining a clear border between what I wanted and what my parents wanted, defending its sovereignty against constant incursion.

No state schools?

She laughed.

Yeah, right.

So it was Ivy League or nothing?

Not even, she said. Cornell is a joke. Stanford would’ve been all right. I would’ve been okay with Stanford.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Why would I not be serious?

There was a finality to her response that made it seem like she’d rather talk about something else.

I always wanted to go to a highfalutin school, I said.

She smiled skeptically. Now you’re just playing it up. You don’t really say “highfalutin.”

I just did, didn’t I?

So what happened, why didn’t you go to a highfalutin school?

I explained to her that I’d wanted to go to a good school when I was young, but by the time I finished high school, my grades weren’t good enough, and anyhow, my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford the out-of-state tuition. I ended up at the University of Kentucky, barely managing to graduate with a degree in English.

Didn’t anyone tell you that you were capable of more?

My parents didn’t want me to go off and become a coastal elite. If they’d had their druthers, I’d have gone to Murray State, an hour from their house.

Their druthers?

Yeah, you’ve never heard that? No, she said, laughing. That’s definitely going on the list. 

When do I get to see this list? 

When the time is right, she said. So what’s wrong with being a coastal elite? 

Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. To them, it’s the worst thing you could be. I’ve wanted to be a coastal elite my whole life.

She looked at me as if she both pitied me and found me adorable—a look I was getting used to.

(pp. 87-89) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition (emphasis mine)

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Joe Biden as elite and/or elitist? That's the GOP's new "party line"

That's the line Republicans are pushing these days, as outlined in this Washington Post story by Toluse Olorunnipa, "Republicans lob accusations of elitism at ‘Middle Class Joe’ — a sign of the upended politics of populism."  Here's an excerpt:

President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself “Middle Class Joe.”

As my mom would say, surely "this is the pot calling the kettle black."  

How higher ed helped flip five states (and other economic spins) on the 2020 election

Here's today's story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Audrey Williams June and Jaquelyn Elias: 

Higher education has increasingly become a marker of partisan identification. Among white voters especially, a college degree has come to be seen as predictive of voting patterns. And counties with flagship institutions in them have increasingly swung toward Democrats in presidential elections.

What did the presence of a college in a county say about how that county voted in 2020?

To answer that question, we zeroed in on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the five states that moved from Donald J. Trump in 2016 to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, and looked at what happened in the counties that had colleges in them. Here’s what we found.

Trump won most of these counties.

In those five states, 136 counties include four-year public or private nonprofit colleges that have at least 100 students and, in normal years, in-person classes. Trump carried 87 of them, while Biden took 49, according to unofficial results.

This is but one bit of class-based analysis I've seen so far on the 2020 election.   

Here's a story by Benjamin Fearnow for Newsweek, "Trump Counties Make Up Just 29 Percent of U.S. Economic Output, 2020 Election Study Shows."  This story, too, focuses on the link between class and political affiliation.  Here's an excerpt: 

Counties won by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden make up 70 percent of all U.S. economic output—or gross domestic product (GDP)—a new post-election study finds.

Biden has repeated the phrase "there are no blue states or red states, just the United States" in several appeals to President Donald Trump's voters since being named President-elect Saturday. But the more than 75.6 million votes Biden won in the 2020 election led him to victory in nearly all of the country's top 100 most powerful local economies. Meanwhile, Trump voter counties make up less than one-third of the country's economic output, a Brookings Institution study said. The president's unsuccessful re-election bid hinged on his touting of the pre-pandemic economy. But his railing against urban areas as "crime infested" rather than centers of American wealth only allowed him to amass more rural county voters.

"Trump's losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy," the post-election analysis co-authors found.

Finally, here's a piece from the New York Times Upshot, "Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide."  Jed Kolko reports.  Here's the lede:  

Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides. Preliminary vote totals indicate that the partisan gap of urban versus suburban places shrank, along with the traditional Democratic advantage in heavily Hispanic counties. Whites and nonwhites are now in somewhat greater alignment in how they vote.

That makes the resilience of the economic divide all the more striking. In fact, the gap between red and blue counties in their education levels, household incomes and projected long-term job growth did not just persist; it widened.  

And here's a paragraph that hints more at the salience of both education and geography, in particular the exurbs--or certain types of them. 

More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016. Highly educated Republican-leaning counties, like Williamson County near Nashville and Forsyth County near Atlanta, have become rarer with each recent election.

Read the full story for more.   

The Washington Post ran this shortly after the election, "How independents, Latino voters and Catholics shifted from 2016 and swung states for Biden and Trump."  The story is by Chris Alcantara, Leslie Shapiro, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Brittany Renee Mayes.  I was intrigued by this graphic screenshot below) in particular, because it sums up so much about the incomes of voters for the respective candidates, and how those of differing income levels moved in some different directions in 2020, compared to 2016.  In particular, it shows that people with incomes over $100,000 moved into Trump's camp by 7 points and those with incomes between $50K and $99K, the income group that supported Trump by the widest margin in 2016, moved to Biden by 11 points: 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that "Counties that experienced more job losses during the first wave of the pandemic voted for Biden."  Here's an excerpt:

The counties won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Trump was strongest in his bid for re-election.

After the worst of the downturn in April, many of the most affected red counties recovered far more swiftly than blue counties did. By September, as unemployment fell nearly everywhere, blue counties were more likely to have higher unemployment rates.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

The working class and coronavirus (Part I): Higher education

Uneven access to higher education has been a persistent theme in media coverage since colleges and universities began to close down a month ago and, in so doing, sending their students "home," whatever that means.  This phenomenon is closely related to a long-time theme of my research and a personal obsession:  access to higher education and what keeps low-income students from achieving it.  And let me be clear at the outset:  while this blog generally focuses on working-class whites, this post is about the wider working class.   

There is so much to say on this topic, so I'm primarily going to collect sources, beginning with some early stories about what was happening with the elite higher education sector.  The first story that crossed my radar screen was this one by the Harvard Crimson published on March 11, 2020.  An excerpt follows:

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote to Barton and more than 6,000 other undergraduates on Tuesday morning that campus would not reopen after spring break, which stretches from March 14 to 22. 

Within hours, the email sent students scrambling to pack up all their belongings and make plans to vacate. But Barton and others say it hit one group of undergraduates particularly hard: first-generation and low-income students, many of whom depend upon Harvard for food, housing, and stability. 

“They've been evicted from their stability, they've been evicted from their homes, they’ve been evicted from their ability to live comfortably and safely,” Barton, who is an FGLI [First Generation Low Income] student, said. “There's already enough concern, and now they're concerned about being able to get home and have stable housing and food.” 

Some students must ship or store their on-campus belongings without financial support from Harvard. Others who planned to stay on campus must now book unexpected flights home and accrue additional costs. And those who rely on term-time employment must confront additional financial concerns as they lose their primary sources of income. 

Nicholas T. “Nick” Wyville ’20 called the College’s announcement “outrageous,” adding that he believes it will weigh most heavily on him and his fellow FGLI students. 

“Harvard prides itself on having a massive student body that is a large percentage on financial aid,” Wyville said. “I think that they forget that those are the same students who often come from home situations that are uncomfortable.” 

This Harvard Crimson story is rare in that it does mention rural folks and their relative lack of access to technology, especially broadband: 

Wyville — who hails from Anniston, Ala. — said online courses are not feasible for him and some of his peers from rural or low-income areas, where many homes do not have internet access. 

“It's not as if we can just like up and go to the library or the coffee shop every day,” he said.

Even before that Crimson story came this, on March 9,  from the Washington Post.  The headline was "Amherst College switches to online learning, as universities nationally scramble to respond to covid-19 outbreak."  Susan Svrluga and Nick Anderson report:

The announcement was a dramatic stroke from a small but nationally renowned school: A growing number of colleges and universities have announced temporary shifts to virtual classes in recent days in response to the uncertainty and rapid pace of changes with the covid-19 outbreak. Amherst took especially decisive action.

They quote Amherst president Biddy Martin:

We know that many people will travel widely during spring break, no matter how hard we try to discourage it.  The risk of having hundreds of people return from their travels to the campus is too great. The best time to act in ways that slow the spread of the virus is now. Let me make our decisions clear.

* * * 

It will be hard to give up, even temporarily, the close colloquy and individual attention that defines Amherst College.  ... Our goal is to keep members of our community as safe as we possibly can while ensuring that students can complete their coursework for the semester and the daily operations of the institution can continue.

The story reports on many other posh campuses, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Stanford shutting down early that week, well ahead of many other prestigious institutions and also some that are less so (e.g., University of Washington).

Next I saw this piece in the Washington Post on March 11 which, like the Crimson piece, made the point that these shut downs are a hardship on poor students who don't have much of a place to go--especially if scholarships are paying for their room and board. The piece is actually an op-ed by two Amherst students, and here's a salient quote:

These residential colleges are also undermining much of their own rationale for existing. They are meant to be havens for young people, home-like places with established routines and networks meant to foster learning. They are also sanctuaries for low-income and marginalized students who might not have stable homes to return to on short notice. Students without computers or broadband will be unable to access online courses once they begin. Perhaps worst of all, some international Amherst students may be unable to return to campus, when it eventually reopens, because of the Trump administration’s recently expanded travel ban.

To its credit, Amherst’s administration has set up a petition process for students to ask to stay on campus, and the student government is trying to reimburse some fees to help pay for travel. But the default is eviction. Communications from the school this week indicate that refunding the cost of room and board — but not tuition — is being considered.

Many similar stories have run in the last few weeks.  Here's one about the particular disappointment for first generation college graduates who won't get to have their live commencement ceremonies:

Administrators and college presidents are scrambling to figure out what to do about graduation this year. How can they acknowledge students' hard work and success, while still maintaining social distancing amid the outbreak of coronavirus? 

Many colleges across the country have outright cancelled graduations, others, such as Harvard and Miami University in Ohio, have scheduled virtual ceremonies. Some students have taken things into their own hands and created their own ceremonies — on a reconstructed campus — through Minecraft.

* * *

Celebrating graduation wasn't really about her, says Monica Ferrufino, who's finishing up at California State University, Los Angeles. It was really going to be for her parents. 

"When they cancelled graduation, it was exactly 60 days prior to our scheduled commencement," she explains. She knows that because her mother and father kept track, counting down the days, crossing each one off on their calendar. When she told them it was off, her mom cried. "My parents didn't get to finish high school," she says, "so for them, seeing their daughter graduating college was just beyond their dreams."

And finally, here's one from the New York Times early this week suggesting that college was the great "leveler" or "equalizer" before coronavirus.  Let me begin by challenging that starting proposition, which seems absurd in light of my own research into higher education access and books like Suzanne Mettler's.  Here's an excerpt from her 2014 editorial, "College, the Great Unleveler."

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where. 

The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them.

Ah, so elitism in the higher education sector is an extremely important part of the big story here.  And that reminds me of this important NYT story from nearly a decade ago.

But/and let's return to the New York Times story suggesting the contrary, that college is a great leveler.  Here's an excerpt, which is just a teaser to get you to read the rest of Nicholas Casey's story, which speaks to extreme socioeconomic (dis) advantage, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability and a range of other issues salient to an authentic intersectionality:

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary. 

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania. 

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app. 

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same. 

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

Bottom line:  much as so many in the United States resist this reality, class matters profoundly with respect to higher education access, as with respect to everything else.  And it's consequences are enduring, far beyond the Zoom-enabled classroom.

Oh, and something I learned from Nicholas Casey's story is about the existence of Questbridge, which helps low-income students connect with elite colleges.  Don't think that service was around back in the day I was making college application decisions.

Here's a story from April 6 in the Washington Post about student attitudes toward the widespread move to pass-fail grading. 

Postscript from Politico on April 12, 2020:  "'We're on the edge of the precipice': How the pandemic could shatter college dreams," by Bianca Quilantan.

Postscript from the Daily Yonder on April 13, 2020.

Postscript from Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times on April 15, 2020, "After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry:  Will Students Come Back?"

And from the Los Angles Times on April 16, 2020, a story about coronavirus's $558 million impact on the University of California system.

Postscript from the The Atlantic on April 24, 2020, "What if Colleges Don't Re-Open until 2021?," by Adam Harris.

Postscript from Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, "College Campuses Must Re-open in the Fall.  Here's How We Do It," a guest editorial in the New York Times.

Postscript from The New Yorker on April 28, 2020, "How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America," by Masha Gessen.

More to follow in this series on socioeconomic class and coronavirus.

More conflation of whiteness with rurality--and more divisive language about what constitutes the "real" America

The headline in the New York Times Upshot feature is "Are Rural Voters the 'Real' Voters?  Wisconsin Republicans Seem to Think So."  I worry that it is one more feature from the progressive media, no doubt well intentioned, that drives a further wedge between rural and urban people.  The story does this primarily by conflating whiteness with rurality, by suggesting that rural interests (broadly defined) are synonymous with white interests and therefore necessarily racist.

Here's the background:  Since Tony Evers beat Scott Walker in the Wisconsin governor's race last month, the Wisconsin legislature has moved to limit the governor's power.  Make no mistake:  I see this as a huge problem and, as many media outlets have labeled it, anti-democratic (with a small "d").  Here's what the Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Statehouse said after the 2018 election in which Evers defeated Walker:

If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, [Republicans] would have a clear majority.  We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.

Now this is obviously a silly thing to say because Madison and Milwaukee are, in fact, part of Wisconsin, and the votes of people there count for just as much as those in rural places, which I understand are often called "outstate" in the Wisconsin context.

Here's how Emily Badger responds to this current controversy in her Upshot story for the New York Times:

In much of Wisconsin, “Madison and Milwaukee” are code words (to some, dog whistles) for the parts of the state that are nonwhite, elite, different: The cities are where people don’t have to work hard with their hands, because they’re collecting welfare or public-sector paychecks. 

The debate over whether Trump voters, and by extension Scott Walker voters, were motivated by racism v. economic woes has been dominant theme of news reporting and opinion pieces since the 2016 Presidential Election.  I have a file folder inches thick collecting stories debating the issue, and the vast majority conclude "racism."  Most liberal elites seem to have concluded that rural voters, as well as working-class white voters, are motivated more by racism than by economic woes.  Indeed, I've seem some pretty dramatic expressions of that, such as a Tweet by Amy Siskind stating that the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017, proves that support for Trump was racially motivated, "Jobs my ass," she wrote. "The truth is marching in Charlottesville." I thought this was a problematic thing to say because it conflated all Trump voters with those marching in Charlottesville, thus rendering all who voted for Trump white nationalists.  It was also a problem because it dismissed the economic distress that many Trump voters are in fact facing.

In any event, Badger's story continues:

That stereotype updates a very old idea in American politics, one pervading Wisconsin’s bitter Statehouse fights today and increasingly those in other states: Urban voters are an exception. If you discount them, you get a truer picture of the politics — and the will of voters — in a state. 

I don't think I agree with Badger on the point that urban voters are being framed as the exception.  I think rural voters are struggling to be heard at all, to have their concerns taken seriously.  Republicans may leverage that concern into an anti-urban message, and that anti-urban message will resonate with many rural voters because they don't feel they are getting their fair share of the commonweal or that they are getting the government support they need.   In short, I'm not convinced that rural voters are hearing the dog whistle or, perhaps more precisely, if they are that it is disconnected from their own sense of not having gotten a fair shake in recent decades.  Plus, I've often observed a feedback loop between economic concerns and racism; I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. The more excluded and neglected rural and white working-class voters feel, the more likely they are to resent people they feel are getting more from the government than they are.  Many of those people are going to be urban, and some of them are going to be non-white.  Recall Arlie Hochschild's metaphor of the white man waiting in line for his turn, for economic opportunity and economic stability, only to see (or at least perceive) others cutting in line ahead of him.  Those "others" include women, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and--in the context of Louisiana--the brown pelican, which was protected by environmental laws. 

Badger's column continues:

Thomas Jefferson believed as much — “the mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government,” he wrote, “as sores do to the strength of the human body.” 

Wisconsin Republicans amplified that idea this week, arguing that the legislature is the more representative branch of government, and then voting to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor. The legislature speaks for the people in all corners of the state, they seemed to be saying, and statewide offices like governor merely reflect the will of those urban mobs.

For more on the rural-urban divide--and rural Wisconsin as "outstate"--see Kathy Cramer's book, The Politics of Resentment, which I blogged about here.  I don't recall Cramer, who did extensive field work for her book by holding focus groups all over the state, calling out the racial divide that Badger's piece would have us believe lies along the rural-urban axis.  But my memory might fail me on this point.  Another example of conflating rurality with whiteness in the midwest is here.

It's also worth noting that Sarah Palin surfaced the "rural America is the real America" argument back in 2008.  Remember Joe Six Pack?  Palin was to represent Main Street while Obama, the uber urban cosmopolite, represented Wall Street.  (Read more here on how the culture wars got construed as straddling the rural-urban divide during that election cycle.) That was just about 10 years ago, yet the extent to which we are now assuming all rural voters are white--and racist--has shifted dramatically in the course of a decade.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Is there anything we can learn from professional wrestling? (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final part of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses elite cultural superiority in their criticisms of Trump and professional wrestling, and what liberal elites can learn about communicating with the white working class from professional wrestling.

Are there any lessons to be learned from professional wrestling? Maybe not. Despite changes to the blood, sex, and violence that characterized pro wrestling during the 1990s and 2000s, the sport remains an oft-maligned curiosity to elites that many would say carries little to no cultural value. According to Common Sense Media, an organization that recommends media for children, WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (a leading pro wrestling show) is “crass, outlandish, and not recommended.” The organization further writes that, “parents need to know that this sporting event-meets-soap opera is brimming with non-stop physical violence, including body slams, headlocks, knees to the groin, smacks, punches, and kicks.”

It’s also quite tempting to dismiss any possible value in pro wrestling not only because of the violence inherent to the sport, but also because until relatively recently matches were replete with extreme racism and sexism. For example, the Mexicools were a group of unmasked luchadores who wore stereotypical Mexican attire like cowboy hats and bandanas and carried leaf blowers and rode in on lawnmowers in their first appearance. Women were also frequently confined to marginalized roles and hyper-masculinized if they dared to deviate at all from the oversexualized, feminine norm. Women in the ring existed solely for the male gaze, as either hyper-masculinized comic relief or arm-candy for male wrestlers.

Since Trump’s election, elites have written many negative comparisons between Trump’s presidency and professional wrestling in the opinion pages. To many elites, pro wrestling is the perfect analogy for Trump: low-brow, racist, sexist, violent, and possessing a shaky relationship with the truth.

To be fair to these commentators, over the years Trump has done much to earn this comparison: at first by sponsoring the wrestling contests, then by throwing thousands of dollars from the rafters in a dramatic stunt, and later by being a physical participant in Wrestlemania 23. All this involvement with pro wrestling earned Trump a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, making his election the “first time in history a WWE Hall of Famer would ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.”

Indeed, there are many reasons why comparisons between Trump and pro wrestling are likely deserved. For example, who can blame commentators for drawing comparisons when the biggest donor to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation was the WWE? Or when Trump posts GIFs of him bodyslamming the CNN logo on Twitter?

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

However, it’s pretty clear when one scratches the surface of these criticisms even a little that the real target of many of these opinion pieces are the white working class. Dripping with condescension, these critical pieces often bear the same hallmarks of arguments for cultural superiority that are frequently levied by elites at the white working class. Fans of pro wrestling are reduced to caricatures of racism, sexism, violence, and yes, white trash. Some commentators have even tried to equate fandom of wrestling or other violent sports with support for Trump, as if by consuming this low-brow, culturally inferior sports entertainment it causes you a more gullible victim for Trump’s lies.

Professional wrestling is the perfect example of a sport that has acquired distributional significance, because it is strongly classed, both internally and externally. Externally, pro wrestling embodies the virtues of the lower classes in open displays of strength and violence. Internally, as discussed in the prior part in this series, wrestlers purposefully work to class the sport by playing on class conflict in their backstories.  What elites seek by putting down pro wrestling are the social profits they obtain by outwardly differentiating their own choices in consumption from the working class.

However, while the elites may continue to thumb their noses at the nation’s first pro wrestling president, they should probably take note that the animosity between wrestling fans and elites is mutual. Like the white-working class heroes that dominated pro wrestling storylines in past decades, white working class wrestling fans don’t very much like being told what to think or how to act.

Outside of the opinion pages, a different type of class conflict is happening in the ring. One Appalachian wrestler from Kentucky has capitalized on tension between elites and the working class by dubbing himself the Progressive Liberal. This uniquely Trump-era wrestler wears shirts emblazoned with Hillary Clinton’s face and trunks that bear Obama's face or say "Blue Wave". He berates the Appalachian crowd with airs of cultural superiority, calling them “Fox News maggots” and riffing on country music saying, “it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.” The wrestler also throws out nasty political one-liners like, “You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state” or “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

I wonder how much right wingers will like the new gear I’m debuting this weekend. pic.twitter.com/SGzPd65w9a

— The Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards (@ProgressLib804) September 26, 2018

The Progressive Liberal acts out what white working-class fans fear from coastal elites: cultural superiority weaponized into a threat against their existence. The Progressive Liberal's patronizing espousal of elite liberal values makes him the perfect “heel” (i.e. the villain in a wrestling contest) for the Appalachian white working class because he threatens and denigrates their way of life.

So perhaps, instead of adding fuel to the fire and sneering at the “the lowbrow guilty pleasure” of professional wrestling, liberal elites should instead look to pro wrestling for clues on how they can recapture the white working class. It’s impossible to ignore how the average WWE viewer is exactly the sort-of person that Democrats failed to reach in this last election – white, male, low-income, and possessing less than a college degree. Quite simply, pro wrestling offers a unique insight into the white working class in America, primarily because they are its biggest fans.

A good start for elites would be accepting a more nuanced view on the white working class and learning to communicate with them on equal terms. While Trump represents the worst of pro wrestling, it is helpful to instead look at the best. The Dusty Rhodes or the Stone Colds of the sport were clearly able to communicate with the white working class, and it wasn’t because they were overtly racist or misogynist. What these white working class heroes did instead was authentically communicate that being working class was not an inferior way of life and that fans or even athletes didn’t need to change their culture or conform with the values of elites.

Tandem attacks on Trump and pro wrestling may give elites a nice frame for arguments for cultural superiority over the white working class, but ultimately, it’s not productive to moving the conversation forward. Democrats who won in deep red areas often did not directly attack Trump and instead avoided the extremes. They also directly appealed to working class voters by highlighting their working class backgrounds and sticking with non-partisan messaging around education and healthcare instead of divisive social issues.

Understanding the distinction between the worst of group and the best is completely lost on many elites because it is easier to be reductive about sports or classes of people than it is to have a nuanced perspective. (It’s probably also fair to say the same is true of the attitudes of many working class whites towards Blacks and Latinos.) However, if liberals want to be able to recapture the white working class and turn Trump from hero to heel, it may make sense to slack off of criticisms that espouse cultural superiority and instead turn to communications that will reassure working people that their way of life is safe.

The white working class hero trope in pro wrestling (Part 2 of 3)

 This is part two of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses the trope of the white working class hero in professional wrestling.

More than perhaps any other sport, professional wrestling embodies the virtues of the white working class by uplifting heroes with backstories rooted in the trope of the white working class hero. Stone Cold Steve Austin was one of the biggest stars of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. He was known for wearing a black leather vest and jeans, and had proclivities for shotgunning cans of beer, giving the finger on live TV, and overall sticking it to the man.

One of Steve Austin's most infamous rivalries was against Vince McMahon, the CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE), who constantly pressed working-class Steve Austin to clean up and go corporate. In one memorable encounter, Austin at first pretends to cede to McMahon’s demands by wearing a well-tailored suit and tie and agreeing to change his ways. To thundering boos, Stone Cold tells the crowd that he realized that “little old Steve Austin . . . a redneck from South Texas”, could never defeat Vince McMahon, “a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a man with a multi-million dollar company, an entrepreneur, a leader.”

However, at the last moment Austin changes his tone and rips off the layers of his suit to reveal a black t-shirt, with cut-off sleeves, featuring his signature phrase “HELL YEAH” and a skull. Stone Cold addressed the stunned McMahon, saying:

You gotta remember son, what you see is what you get with Stone Cold Steve Austin. I ain’t fancy. Am I a redneck from South Texas? You’re damn right. And I ain’t gonna change for nobody.

Although Steve Austin knows his corporate overlord wants him to sell out, he turns down all the privileges that would have come with being in the managerial class because to do so would be to abandon his working class values and instead adopt the values and respectability of the elite in the ways he speaks, dresses, and acts. Because of his working class roots in South Texas, Steve Austin may not talk right, dress right, or act right; but dammit, he is who he is and no businessman from Connecticut can take that away from him.

This is far from the first time that a white working class hero has been involved in staged class conflict under the guise of professional wrestling. Take for example this verbal takedown by the white working class hero of the 1980s, Dusty Rhodes, against his arch nemesis, the Rolex wearin’, diamong ring wearin’, limousine ridin’, and jet flyin’ Ric Flair:

You don’t know what hard times are, daddy. Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work, they got four or five kids and can’t pay their wages, can’t buy their food. Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ‘em to go home. And hard times are when a man has worked at a job for thirty years—THIRTY YEARS—and they give him a watch, kick him in the butt and say “hey a computer took your place daddy,” that’s hard times! That’s hard times! And Ric Flair you put hard times on this country by takin’ Dusty Rhodes out, that’s hard times. And we all had hard times together, and I admit, I don’t look like the athlete of the day supposed to look. My belly’s just a lil’ big, my heinie’s a lil’ big, but brother, I am bad. And they know I’m bad.

It’s hard to avoid the allure of Rhodes’ words. Is this an impassioned speech from a Bernie Sanders-style populist with a Texas twang? Or a professional wrestler ready to chokehold his opponent in staged combat? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that Rhodes was a star at the top of his profession, but like Steve Austin he never forgot who he was or where he came from.

The lower-class virtues born from the struggles that stars like Austin and Rhodes had growing up white, rural, and working class are the same ones that gave them popularity on the wrestling circuit or give white working class politicians today a boost at the polls. There is something inherently appealing about a person who reaches the highest levels of their profession, but never forgets about the little guy along the way.

This is the total opposite of what is normally expected in the sports world. Where cultural and economic elites love a bootstraps story, they hate when a sports star acts in conformance with what the upper echelons fear from the working class: violence, outward class expression, and a lack of decorum and respectability.

To elites, becoming a sports star is supposed to improve you, because wealth is supposed to instill the values and virtues of the elite. Athletes who know “hard times” are supposed to forget those and stand for the national anthem even when they feel they were left behind and have no affinity for it.

Pro wrestling may therefore be an anomaly in the sports world because it rewards athletes who proudly reflect working-class values. The normal assignment of cultural capital is entirely reversed because it doesn’t help stars to be respectable or espouse the values of elites in their conduct. Indeed doing so may actually hurt them. While other sports stars are expected to adhere to the conventions of the elites, pro wrestlers eschew them.

Elites may continue to turn their noses up at pro wrestling, but the sport is still a place where working class whites can find affinity with certain wrestlers. Every time Steve Austin or Dusty Rhodes went to the mat, they were there to do staged violence against the elites, the enemies of the working class.

Examining these white working class heroes gives elites insight on how the white working class responds to criticism. They doesn’t like being judged by cultural and economic elites for how they look, act, or talk. They don’t like it when their “hard times” are diminished because they refuse to leave behind their rural and working class roots – spiritually or physically – even though they may know their jobs and communities will eventually be the victims of the steady onslaught of technology and globalization. Though these white working class heroes may not espouse elite respectability, they instead exude a working-class definition of respectability which means never turning your back on where you came from or changing who you are because of wealth or success.