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.  

On Democrats' quest to win back working-class voters

A few good articles have been published on this topic in recent weeks, and I'll highlight just two here that were published in the New York Times. 

The first is an essay by Alec MacGillis titled "Tim Ryan is Winning the War for the Soul of the Democratic Party." The dateline is Zanesville, Ohio, population.  , and the lede follows:

Tim Ryan is a “crazy, lying fraud.” That’s how J.D. Vance, the best-selling memoirist turned Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, opened his remarks at his September rally alongside Donald Trump in the middle of the congressional district Mr. Ryan has represented for two decades.

Mr. Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passions, outside of politics, are yoga and mindfulness practice.

 * * * 

For years, he has warned his fellow Democrats that their embrace of free trade and globalization would cost them districts like the one he represents in the Mahoning River Valley — and lobbied them to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which, he argued, could repair some of the damage. 

* * *  

After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest. On the campaign trail, he has embraced a unifying tone that stands out from the crassness and divisiveness that Mr. Trump and his imitators have wrought. A significant number of what he calls the “exhausted majority” of voters have responded gratefully.

And his core message — a demand for more aggressive government intervention to arrest regional decline — is not only resonating with voters but, crucially, breaking through with the Democratic leaders who presided over that decline for years. The Democrats have passed a burst of legislation that will pave the way for two new Intel chip plants in the Columbus exurbs, spur investment in new electric vehicle ventures in Mr. Ryan’s district, and benefit solar-panel factories around Toledo, giving him, at long last, concrete examples to cite of his party rebuilding the manufacturing base in which the region took such pride.

The second piece is Shane Goldmacher's "The Battle for Blue-Collar White Voters Raging in Biden's Birthplace."   The dateline is Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the lede follows: 

The fate of the Democratic Party in northeastern Pennsylvania lies in the hands of people like Steve Papp.

A 30-year veteran carpenter, he describes his job almost poetically as “hanging out with your brothers, building America.” But there has been a harder labor in his life of late: selling his fellow carpenters, iron workers and masons on a Democratic Party that he sees as the protector of a “union way of life” but that they see as being increasingly out of step with their cultural values.

“The guys aren’t hearing the message,” Mr. Papp said.

Perhaps no place in the nation offers a more symbolic and consequential test of whether Democrats can win back some of the white working-class vote than Pennsylvania — and particularly the state’s northeastern corner, the birthplace of President Biden, where years of economic decline have scarred the coal-rich landscape. This region is where a pivotal Senate race could be decided, where two seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs and where a crucial governorship hangs in the balance.

Post-election postscript:  Democrats did ok in Scranton.  Democrat Matt Cartwright, who has long represented the district, was re-elected.   Also, John Fetterman, the very embodiment of a blue-collar dude, narrowly defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz to win the open U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.  

Where white majority is fading, election deniers thrive

The New York Times reported last week from several places that are not necessarily rural, but which may be exurban, and where politicians who are election deniers are thriving.  The Times reporters Michael Keller and David Fitzpatrick see a correlation between this phenomenon and a fading white majority.  

The first place featured is Fort Bend County, Texas, which is part of the greater Houston metro area.  Another region featured is far southwestern Virginia, the more rural Buchanan and Wise counties, with populations of 20,000 and 36,000 respectively.  

Here's the gist of the story:    

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

* * * 

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

* * *  

Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

* * *  

Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s [district] in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

From Marie March, a restaurant owner in Christiansburg, Virginia, had this to say about local support for Trump's dispute of the election results: 

You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up.  We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.

March attended the January 6 rally and won a seat in the Virginia state legislature last year.   The story continues:  

[March] said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

 Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

"There are Two Americas Now: One with a B.A. and One Without"

That is the headline for Thomas Edsall's guest column in the New York Times a few days ago.  It is a follow up on the widely discussed work of Mary Ann Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton economists who are well known for their scholarship on deaths of despair.  Some of the focus here is on the upward trajectory and optimism of Black folks and the downward trajectory and pessimism of white folks.  They also note the recently rising mortality rate among Black men, quoting Carol Graham of Brookings: 

Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:

The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks.

Near the end of the piece, Edsall also turns to the rural-urban axis, quoting the work of rural sociologist Shannon Monnat of Syracuse University's Lerner Center:  

Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”

For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over the same 28 years, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25 to 44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”

The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men 45 to 64 saw death rate per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45 to 64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.

I wrote about these issues in my 2018 law review article, The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working-Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  

The Edsall column continues:

In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:

The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.

In a separate 2017 paper, “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:

Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

More on class migration as depicted in Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've already shared excerpts from this debut novel in two other blog posts, here and here.  These are my final excerpts from Lee Cole's Groundskeeping with a focus on depictions of rural and working-class white folks and issues. The first vignette below involves the promotion of the man, Kelly, who has been supervising the Groundskeeping crew on which Owen, the protagonist, works. Owen is a college graduate, but he has never really launched in a career that used his degree.  Now he is favored for a promotion over Rando, who doesn't have a degree.  

We’d been working in the arboretum for about a week when Kelly announced that he’d taken an administrative job with the university and would be leaving Maintenance and Landscape Services by the end of April. There were only ten of us now at the morning meetings, the rest having been laid off. We all knew that Kelly had been gunning for an administrative position. He wanted an office with his name on the door, where he’d never again get chain grease smeared on his khakis.

 

Congratulations, Rando said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

 

Thank you, Randy. As I hope y’all know, it’s been a great honor serving as your fearless leader. They want to hire a replacement in-house, someone who knows what they’re doing. Undoubtably, some of you will want to apply.

 

We’d all been drowsily eating our Pop Tarts and granola bars, waiting for our coffee to cool, but this caught our attention.

 

Anybody’s welcome, but they strongly prefer someone who has a college degree, he said, putting “strongly prefer” in air quotes. That means you two, I guess. He pointed to James and me. Though I’d never thought about it before, we were the only grad students. Everybody else was either contract, like Rando, or in the middle of their undergraduate degree.

 

A degree in what? Rando said.

 

Anything, said Kelly. Don’t matter.

 

I been here ten years longer than these motherfuckers, Rando said. No offense.

 

None taken, I said.

 

What difference does a degree make?

 

Kelly held up his palms. I’m just the messenger, he said. You don’t have a degree, Rando said.

 

I have military experience.

 

So what? So that matters to some people. Look, like I said, any of y’all can apply, and I encourage you to. But I wanted to be up front and let James and Owen here know they’d have a pretty good shot.

 

I questioned the wisdom of announcing this in front of the other men, who were giving us hateful looks. But maybe that was Kelly’s intention.

 Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 191-192) (Kindle Edition).  Among other things, we see a shift from valuing military experience to requiring a college degree--a certain degree/credentials inflation that does not serve the working class, who have to go into debt to get that degree.  

In this scene, Owen takes his girlfriend, Alma, to visit his dad and stepmom in tiny Melber, Kentucky, where Owen grew up:   

The road to Melber carried us past trailer courts and subdivisions, reaching, finally, the bottomlands at the Graves County line. I wished she could’ve seen it in the late summer, when the fields were lush with burley tobacco—velvet-green rosettes, their long leaves curled and yellowed at the edges, sprawling out in rows. Now the same fields were bare, or sown with ryegrass, waist-high and the color of straw. The creeks we crossed on ramshackle bridges were only muddy trickles, and the woods were parched and grayish brown, save only the sycamores, whose stark white branches flashed like ghosts in the passing countryside.

 

I narrated the scene, partly as a way of distracting myself from the nausea and anxiety I was feeling, and partly because I wanted, on some level, for her to see it the way I saw it—as a terrain imbued with significance and narrative. Here was Dan Foley’s house, where I used to set off bottle rockets. Here was the abandoned Citgo station, where, as I was climbing through a window at age thirteen, a blade of glass sliced my calf. Here was Josh Briggs’s house, where I used to shoot clay pigeons. Here was the trailer where Molly Miller, the first girl I kissed, used to live. I left out, of course, that Dan Foley’s father had committed suicide when we were fifteen by hanging himself from the metal track of their garage door, or that Dan had gone on to join the marines and was now stationed in Texas, where he’d become an alcoholic.

I left out that I’d climbed through the window of the abandoned Citgo station in order to smoke a blunt dipped in cough syrup with Josh Briggs, and that Josh Briggs had never left Melber, that he’d been fired from a good job with the river barge industry and had since done some time in jail. I didn’t mention that post–high school, Molly Miller had spent about five years journeying further and further into opioid addiction, the apotheosis of which was her death by fentanyl overdose in the bathroom of Paducah’s public library. Maybe because I left out these things, Alma did not seem as interested as I’d hoped. Was she thinking of how the place could’ve produced me? I hoped that it did not remain two-dimensional for her—a painted backdrop, seen through a passenger window. What would one see who’d never seen it? Empty fields. Churches with graffitied plywood windows. Shoddy houses and single-wides where people she’d never met once lived. To anyone from the outside, it looked like a country town, so close to vanishing that it was hardly there at all. But I could see its inexpressible privacies.

 

We reached, finally, the four-way stop and the green sign reading Melber. It was the town’s sole marker, the only thing that let you know you were somewhere instead of on the way to somewhere else. It was here, every Halloween, that the burning hay bale came to rest. Across the street was the post office and the hairdresser’s shop with a barber pole out front and a rusted, antique Pepsi machine that no longer functioned. Next door was the town’s only restaurant—the Kountry Kitchen. A letterboard sign in the lot advertised catfish and hush puppies.

 

Here we are, I said.

 

Alma looked around, her expression vaguely troubled. You weren’t kidding, she said. It’s not much.

 

My dad’s place could be seen from the four-way. I turned right and pointed it out to her. It had been a batten-board house, built in the ’50s, but five years prior, he’d installed this plastic siding that was supposed to make a house look like a log cabin. It looked more like Lincoln Logs to me. 

Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 225-226) (Kindle edition). 

They go out to dinner at a nearby restaurant, described thusly: 

 The Rebel Smokehouse was such a perfect distillation of the rural South’s grotesquery that it was almost unfair. It was nestled between a Harley-Davidson dealership and an indoor gun range called Range America. A sun-faded Confederate flag had been raised high on a pole in a nearby yard, so that the restaurant was literally in the shadow of it. Even if I took faithful notes, if I wrote it all down exactly as it was, who would believe me?

Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (p. 229) (Kindle edition)

  

In the scene that follows, Owen is asking his father for a loan.  What is revealed here is the less educated parent's judgment of his son's failure to make a living in what the father sees as a conventional way:    

To be honest, I called because I need your help with some money. I wanted to ask you for a loan.

 

A loan?

 

Yeah, just till I get my next paycheck.

 

Several seconds passed. I don’t know, he said. He cleared his throat softly and let another period of silence go by, as if he were giving me a chance to retract my request. I just don’t know if I can keep enabling you to fail, he said finally. This tree-trimming business, this aimlessness—how can I keep supporting that? It hurt me physically to hear him say this. I assumed he thought I was a failure, but assuming it and hearing it were two different things. I tried to come up with some response, but the muscles in my throat tightened...

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.   

Profspring: Folks with well-educated parents dominate academia

Andrew Van Dam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows." The subhead is "First-generation academics were always rare. Now they're vanishing."

To understand critical issues facing the U.S. economy — soaring inflation, worker shortages and perhaps a looming recession — researchers must understand human behavior. They need to know how everyday Americans will react when pump prices double or shelves go bare.

That’s why it’s somewhat alarming to learn that academia in general — and economics in particular — has quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. 

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years.

* * * 

To an outsider, the long path to a professorship can seem frustratingly opaque, particularly in economics. PhD programs tend to require a hidden curriculum of classes in subjects such as mathematics that are not technically required for economics majors. If you discover economics late in your college career and don’t have expert guidance, it might already be too late to get on the PhD track. Similar hidden hurdles lurk in the job market and academic publishing.

* * *

Stansbury said she also wonders if courses like Econ 101 might put off students from low-income backgrounds. “I also worry that some of the terminology that’s used, like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive,” Stansbury said. “And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”

This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented.

On working-class and rural whites--and Democrats' cluelessness about them--in Politico

I published this today in Politico.  The headline is "There Is a Major Rift Dividing the White Working Class—And Democrats Are Clueless." 

Here's an excerpt: 

Ever since J.D. Vance became the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, journalists and pundits have been preoccupied with how Vance’s politics have shifted since the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book brought Vance fame and a platform that he used, among other things, to criticize Donald Trump. Since then, Vance’s positions on polarizing issues like immigration have lurched to the right and he sought — and won — Trump’s endorsement. Vance now also dabbles in conspiracy theories and has taken on a belligerent, Trump-like tone.

What the pundit class isn’t talking about, however, is an important consistency between 2016 author Vance and 2022 politician Vance. In his memoir, Vance pitted two groups of low-status whites against each other—those who work versus those who don’t. In academic circles, these two groups are sometimes labeled the “settled” working class versus the “hard living.” A broad and fuzzy line divides these two groups, but generally speaking, settled folks work consistently while the hard living do not. The latter are thus more likely to fall into destructive habits like substance abuse that lead to further destabilization and, importantly, to reliance on government benefits.

Vance has not renounced that divisive message. He no doubt hopes to garner the support of the slightly more upmarket of the two factions—which, probably not coincidentally, is also the group more likely to go to the polls. While elite progressives tend to see the white working class as monolithic, Vance’s competitiveness in the Ohio Senate race can be explained in no small part by his ability to politically exploit this cleavage.

As a scholar studying working-class and rural whites, I have written about this subtle but consequential divide. I have also lived it. I grew up working-class white, and I watched my truck driver father and teacher’s aide mother struggle mightily to stay on the “settled” side of the ledger. They worked to pay the bills, yes, but also because work set them apart from those in their community who were willing to accept public benefits. Work represented the moral high ground. Work was their religion.

* * *

Democrats can fruitfully borrow a page from how Trump communicated with workers. First and foremost, tell workers that they and their labor are seen and appreciated. A key theme of 2016 election coverage was that many working-class white and rural voters felt overlooked. Tracie St. Martin, a union member and heavy construction worker who supported Trump, summed up the disgruntlement, “I wanted people like me to be cared about. People don’t realize there’s nothing without a blue-collar worker.” (St. Martin, of Miamisburg, Ohio, was quoted in a ProPublica story reported by MacGillis aptly titled “Revenge of the Forgotten Class.”)

Don't miss the rest.   It's pretty good, if I do say so myself.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Pennsylvania Senate candidate Fetterman publishes op ed on inflation's impact on working families

Fetterman tweet dated June 17, 2022
A voter got this photo of him shopping at Costco, 
the discount warehouse store

John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate, published this a few days ago in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat under the headline, "Domestic solutions: High prices not a random problem."  Here's an excerpt, which is striking in its specificity and furthers his "everyman" image: 

Across Pennsylvania, people are getting squeezed. We’re paying more at the grocery store, more at the pump and more almost everywhere.

My opponent, millionaire celebrity Mehmet Oz, doesn’t feel a change in price when he’s filling up his gas tank – if he even pumps his own gas at all (they don’t let you do that in Oz’s native New Jersey). He doesn’t have to worry about his gas or grocery bill, and doesn’t even notice if it’s more than it used to be.

When I fill up my Dodge RAM, it’s costing a hell of a lot more than it did a year ago.

When Gisele and I go shopping for groceries at Giant Eagle, almost everything we buy costs more.

All of our families are dealing with this. In May, the Consumer Price Index saw the largest jump in consumer prices in 41 years, with inflation at 8.6% compared to the previous year. Inflation is hitting families across the commonwealth.

But what’s happening isn’t just random. It’s plain wrong.

Just last week, gas prices hit a record high of $5.07 per gallon in Pennsylvania, an outrageously high price that is impacting families across Pennsylvania.

But the truth is, if it wasn’t for the greed of oil companies, prices likely wouldn’t be this high.

In fact, the last time a barrel of crude oil cost as much as it does now was in July 2014, but at that point, a gallon of gas only cost about $3.54. Oil companies don’t need to be charging this much for gas – they’re just doing it to make excess profits.

Johnstown, in western Pennsylvania, has a population of about 20,000 and is in Cambria County and part of the Johnstown-Somerset metro.  Perhaps Fetterman sought to place this in a small-town newspaper to further and illustrate his campaign slogan, "every county.  every vote."  Or maybe this is the only paper that would run it. (I note that his wife, Gisele, got her op-ed advocating the availability of contraception in the Pittsburgh paper).   Either way, I'm happy to see a candidate taking his message about inflation straight to the people in a local newspaper. 

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.  

New Research: “Make Sure You Look Someone in the Eye”: Socialization and Classed Comportment in Two Elementary Schools

Scholars who think and write about class have long observed the ways class norms permeate children's upbringings, resulting in adults who are either more deferential to authority (working-class) or more willing to challenge authority (middle- and upper-class).  Joan Williams trawled this literature in her early work on class, and I summarized some of it here.  

Now, Peter Francis Harvey, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, has just published an article in volume 127 of the American Journal of Sociology that shows how these classed norms seep into the very physical beings of children.  Here's the abstract: 

Limited attention has been given to how cultural skills and dispositions are transmitted from adults to children. The author examines how young children’s bodies are classed. He conducted three years of observation in two elementary schools—one upper middle class, one working class, both racially diverse. Both schools use the same program, which encourages traditionally middle-class bodily practices (e.g., handshakes at daily Morning Meetings). The author finds that effective transmission of these skills requires the repetition of both explicit and implicit lessons. Moreover, he finds that class differences creep into this socialization. Students at the upper-middle-class school increasingly refine the recommended skills (e.g., handshakes, eye contact). Meanwhile, students at the working-class school instead become increasingly expert at “respectful,” orderly types of comportment (e.g., sitting still for extended periods, not interrupting). These findings suggest that bodily socialization is a multifaceted process. It is not reserved for adults or elites but taught to children across the class spectrum. The physical quality of cultural performance is discussed.

The author further describes the work in a Twitter thread here.  I would love to see more work like this, squarely attending to class.  So much scholarly literature focuses on proving racial differences without, perhaps, looking at class differences that cut across race, as this study did.  

J.D. Vance pulls ahead in race for Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, prompting comparison to positions he took in Hillbilly Elegy

Thought it's been much in the news, I've refrained from posting about J.D. Vance's rise in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from which Rob Portman (R) is retiring, but with Vance garnering Trump's endorsement and pulling ahead in that race, I decided to feature a particularly interesting commentary about Vance and the race. 

Anyone following the race knows that, by the time Vance threw his hat in the ring last year, he had recanted his earlier criticism of Trump (something his opponents in the primary have used against him).  Since then, he's been lurching to the right on a wide array of issues, most notably immigration.  Earlier this month, he released a television ad that begins with, "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  And tonight on Twitter I saw a clip of him accusing Joe Biden of purposefully letting fentanyl into the country to kill Republican voters in places like Ohio.  In other words, Vance is trafficking in conspiracy theories.  So, things have gotten a little out of hand.  

That may help explain the New York Times decision to run this essay about Vance's candidacy--and his about face.  Christopher Caldwell's piece is titled "The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance."  More than any other piece I've read since Vance got in the race, Caldwell situates Vance's current rhetoric and positions against what he said in his best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy.  Here's a provocative excerpt: 

Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.

While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.

But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, 10 days before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”

Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately.

On the misled point, there is a funny video on Twitter right now showing a man walking up to Vance at one of his campaign events and asking for a refund on the book, $16.99 for the paperback, which he says he didn't care for.

Earlier in the New York Times piece, Caldwell offers another observation related to the book and how Vance has changed since its publication: 

Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly unstodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.

“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.

Then there is this: 

Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”

And that is a good segue to my own commentary on Hillbilly Elegy, published in Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, reviewed in the New York Times here.  My big criticism was that Vance threw working class whites under the proverbial bus.  Now, of course, he needs them to vote for him.  And I think that's one of Caldwell's primary points. 

Other recent commentary on the race, in which Josh Mandel is Vance's principal opponent, is here.  

Postscript:  This news item about J.D. Vance and the Ohio Senate primary appeared in the New York Times about 18 hours after this posted went up.  It's by Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Weisman.  "Once Soft-spoken, Ohio Conservatives Embrace the Bombast." The alternative headline is, "In Ohio, Republicans have gone from the Country Club to the MAGA Club." 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On Marine LePen and France's working class (and rural) vote

Today, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected to the French presidency.  As he did five years ago, Macron defeated Marine LePen, typically styled as a "far right candidate."  This time, however, Macron's  margin of victory was narrower, about 58.5% to 41.5%.  

Many have drawn parallels between Trump and LePen, just as there are parallels to be drawn between Macron and, say, Obama.  The former have been viewed as "in touch" with rural and working-class voters, the latter as over-educated, imperious elites who are globalists, looking out for the rich and out of touch with common folks.  

Rachel Donadio notes this LePen association in her guest essay in the New York Times this weekend, writing from Semur-en-Auxois, in rural Burgundy.  Here I'm picking up only the bits of the essay that speak to either rurality or the working class (emphasis mine): 

President Emmanuel Macron won in Semur-en-Auxois in the first round of voting this month, but Ms. Le Pen took the larger Burgundy Franche-Comté region, with 27 percent of the vote over Mr. Macron’s 26 percent. Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats.

* * *

As I drove around rural Burgundy after the first round of voting this month, I came away with a strong sense that while Mr. Macron may well defeat her in the second round this Sunday, in many ways, Ms. Le Pen has already won. In the first round, she put Mr. Macron on the defensive and convinced almost a quarter of voters that she has their best interests at heart. In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017.

* * * 

“The era of high growth is gone,” Niels Planel, a city councilor in Semur-en-Auxois and the author of a book on French economic inequality, told me. In his view, the government should “worry about mobility, worry about training, delivering a high-quality education,” so that workers are ready for today’s economy, not yesterday’s. Otherwise Ms. Le Pen is likely to maintain her grip on many of France’s rural and deindustrialized areas, while Mr. Macron will continue to win more-prosperous urban areas.

I have consumed other media this week, including reporting by NPR's Eleanor Beardsley,  that referred to LePen's base as the working poor.  And, of course, the "yellow vest" movement is often referenced as emblematic of the disgruntlement of France's non-urban workers.  Posts about that movement are here.  

Post-script from David Leonhardt's column in the New York Times on April 25, 2022: 

It’s a common story across Western democracies, including the United States. As many working-class voters have struggled with slow-growing incomes over recent decades — a result of globalization, automation and the decline of labor unions, among other forces — they have become fed up with traditional politicians.

Roger Cohen, The Times’s Paris bureau chief who was previously our foreign editor, said these voters have a sense “of being invisible, of being forgotten, of being the lowest priority.”

In France, many were angry that Macron raised a tax on diesel fuel in 2018. “Just fine for the hyperconnected folks in big cities like Paris,” Roger says, “much less so for people who have seen train stations and hospitals close in their communities and need to drive to work in some Amazon packaging warehouse 60 miles away.”

Geography is a dividing line, in France and elsewhere. Frustrated working-class voters often live in smaller metropolitan areas or rural areas. Professionals tend to live in thriving major cities like Paris, London, New York and San Francisco; they also tend to be more socially liberal, more in favor of globalization and less outwardly patriotic.

The “cosmopolitan elites,” as the Democratic political strategist David Shor notes, are now numerous enough to dominate the leadership of political parties — but still well shy of a majority of the population in the U.S. or Europe.

You can find Roger Cohen's story on Macron's win here. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.   

Another feature on Tim Ryan's effort to reach the white working class, here dubbed the "exhausted majority"

Jazmine Ulloa reports for the New York Times under the headline, "Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority."  The subhead is, "Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question."  The Washington Post and NPR reported on Ryan's efforts last month, which I blogged about here.  

The NYT story plays up Ryan's 2020 loss (48%) in his native Trumbull County where he grew up--a sharp drop in support there since he first ran for Congress: 

Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too.

Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County.

Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades.

Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country.

* * * 

He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans.

“I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.”

I can't help think that, in this case, these voters are exhausted for another reason--that they work so hard for so little.  And let's face it--that's exhausting.   

Meanwhile, Ryan's Republican opponents have just in the last day or so released controversial television ads that evince a race to the right. Here's one by Josh Mandel using the bridge in Selma, Alabama as a backdrop to his critique of "critical race theory."  

Meanwhile, another high profile Republican candidate in the race, J.D. Vance is out with this. Like Mandel's ad, Vance's ad centers how we define "racist," asking "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  Further, Vance cites his mother's drug addiction--which he laid out in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy as a basis for bashing the white working class--as a reason to stop drugs coming in over the southern border.  It is especially interesting--and ironic--that Vance draws his mother's history of drug use into his campaign in a heartstrings move about the importance of kids not losing parents--ironic because in the book Vance condemned and distanced himself from his mother. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.