The Great Flip
Let me tell you a story.
There’s an election. A unique election. An election which saw a substantial realignment of voters. Why? Because a particular candidate’s message impacted this group.
An economic message. A cultural message. A message which flipped a multitude of voters from one political party to the other.
Of course, you think I’m telling the story of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election. Surely, this group of voters I speak of are the highly romanticized “Obama-Trump” voters. The stereotypical, working-class, white, Midwesterner living in a former factory town, who after years of voting for Democrats pulled the lever for our current commander-in-chief.
You’ve seen the endless news coverage of this group (post-2016). The endless CNN reporting forays into “Trump country.” We’ll get into the actual accuracy of this media tale later. But at this point, you may ask:
“You say this story has been told so many times, so why are you telling it again?”
Except I’m not telling it again.
When I speak of a seismic shift of voters, I’m not actually talking about Trump voters at all.
I’m talking about Clinton voters.
Middle America Myths
That is the estimated number of the (much-less-mentioned) Romney-Clinton voters. Voters who have seen little media coverage. Voters who have not been interviewed about why the color of their political hearts changed from red to blue.
Who makes up this group of voters? Where do they live? Before answering these questions, we need to address something else, a myth that has persisted for far too long.
“There are two Americas. One is coastal. It is urban, cosmopolitan, experiences high-economic growth, and drives the political discourse. The other is ‘Middle America.’ It is rural, homogenous, and in the economic doldrums. It is forgotten. Trump appealed to this second America, and that’s why he won.”
There are many problems I have with this story. The first is simple: it paints with a very broad brush.
It assumes that Tennessee and North Dakota (both parts of the aforementioned Middle America) are culturally and economically identical. It assumes that New York City and San Francisco can be thrown into the same bucket simply because of their voting patterns.
Not only is this view inaccurate, but it is frankly insulting to the millions of Americans who live in these alleged two regions. It ignores many differences in both culture and way of life, for the sake of making a shallow political analysis.
A second issue I have with this story is that when it mentions the “forgotten rural voter” or the “forgotten Midwestern voter,” it assumes that all of these voters are white.
The strength of this criticism lies not in anecdotes or hearsay, but in demographic data. Not all voters in the Midwest are white and live in rural areas. For example, many African-Americans in Detroit were also hit hard by the collapse of industrial jobs in the region. Yet this group did not turn out in large numbers for Donald Trump like white voters in similar situations did.
Furthermore, not everyone who lives in rural America at large is white. The best example of this would be in the many blue counties of the Deep South. These counties are rural – shouldn’t they have also gone big for Trump?
Most of these counties are majority-African-American, and Trump’s performance in them was abysmal.
When media pundits talk of Midwestern voters, they talk of white Midwestern voters. When they speak of rural voters, they speak of white rural voters, whether they realize it or not.
Suburbia Still Exists
However, the biggest oversight of this story, at least when it comes to our analysis, is this:
It forgets that suburbia still exists.
It assumes that all of America is made up of either countryside and cities – that farms and mountains dominate the land until they run into metro areas. Bipolar. One or the other. Not true.
The news media may forget this simple fact, but fortunately, many Americans haven’t: suburbs exist.
They are a major political battlefield. They are middle-class, usually white, and are more moderate than rural regions, particularly on cultural issues. It is here where our great shift occurred, where more than two million otherwise Republican voters bolted the ticket for Clinton.
Cobb County, Georgia. Anne Arundel Country, Maryland. Orange County, California.
All of these counties and others were those Romney won in 2012, but which Clinton carried just four years later.
Furthermore, there were many more red counties that may not have flipped, but in which the Democrats’ percentage of the vote increased.
Many regions in my own New Jersey are evidence of this. Trump performed slightly better than Romney throughout the state. But in the affluent and largely white Morris County, Trump actually did worse.
So, who are the Romney-Clinton voters? The most prominent members of this group would be women. Specifically, college educated white women, and married women. Economically moderate, socially liberal, middle-class, and wanting nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Ok, so that was a generalization. I don’t like generalizations.
But the point is that while Donald Trump’s appeal has expanded the Republicans’ strength in the Rust Belt and other areas, it has arguably damaged it in the suburbs, and this is something which has not received nearly the attention it deserves by most news outlets.
However, there is a deeper point to be gleaned here.
We’re All Real Americans
Why this lack of coverage of suburbia’s shift? Why does it not receive the same attention as that which occurred in the Rust Belt?
It is easy to be drawn to the simplest explanation: Rust Belt voters were those that put Trump over the top in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, handing him the White House. So of course, they will receive more attention than those who shifted the other way!
I’m not buying it.
There’s something else at work here, an idea spoken of often by pundits, which many have internalized – the idea that working-class white voters in small towns are fundamentally “real Americans.”
That they are the “average voters” which politicians need to win. How many times have you heard someone say “Yeah, well, (insert candidate X here) may appeal to people in Massachusetts, but they can’t win over ‘real, ordinary Americans.’”
Real Americans. Sure, working class whites in small towns are real Americans.
And so is everyone else.
I’m tired of this idea that there is this grand, mainstream, average American voter group which any candidate running for high office needs to appeal to in order to both win an election and govern this country.
It’s a lazy idea. One which is not backed up by history or modern data.
People who live in cities, people of color, members of the LGBT community, immigrants, and yes, college students, are just as much “ordinary Americans” as anyone else. No more, no less.
Nobody has a monopoly on patriotism.
I say this with no ill will towards the white working class, nor ignorance of their hardships in the post-industrial era. But it is important to be direct: there is nothing fundamentally elevating their struggles over those of other groups, many of which face struggles arguably worse.
Yet, the outcry of working-class whites and their subsequent political shift received far more media attention than a similar outcry and shift from Romney-Clinton voters.
If you’re going to talk about how a Midwestern dad in a factory town is struggling to pay the bills (a completely legitimate story), then you also need to cover the concerns of a suburban mom worried about whether her daughter will be sexually-assaulted when she goes off to college.
But why focus on that when you can do more feature pieces on “real Americans?”
After all, that suburban mom is just another member of the “coastal elite.” They don't face any real issues.
Suburbia doesn’t really exist anyways.