RISE OF THE ‘ROSEANNE REPUBLICANS,’ A SYMPATHETIC VIEW OF TRUMP VOTERS
A sympathetic look at Trump’s working-class voters
Maybe Trump Nation was overdue for a big hug.
Hillary Clinton said half of it consisted of “a basket of deplorables.” Its president is unpopular, his friends beset by investigators. Ever since its champion started winning primary elections, it has endured researchers and reporters from clueless coastal institutions, who have studied it extensively but rarely affectionately.
So here’s a warm embrace from Pittsburgh-based journalist Salena Zito and Republican strategist Brad Todd, authors of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”
Ms. Zito, a Pittsburgher who now works for CNN and the Washington Examiner, cops to Donald Trump’s faults but has only praise for his supporters. Writing of one Wisconsin woman (who is characterized as a “King Cyrus Christian” for her belief that an irreligious president can protect the faithful just as an ancient Persian monarch did for the Jews), Ms. Zito gushes: “She is beautiful, inside and out.”
Such sentiments run through profiles of two dozen Trump voters, some of whom are charming. Who wouldn’t embrace David Millet of Erie, who survived an Epstein-Barr yeast infection and lost his wife to cancer only to bounce back as a Kenny Rogers impersonator? Underlying the profiles is fresh polling data from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, which the authors use to break Trump Nation into seven subgroups with catchy nicknames like “Blue-Collar Blues” and “Rotary Reliables.”
Ms. Zito quotes her subjects at length, sharing both the profound and the incomprehensible, capturing their voices perfectly while never questioning their assertions. A common theme is disillusion with a Democratic Party that they feel has abandoned them, even after they voted for Barack Obama once or twice, by allowing globalism to erode their towns and media to mock their values. Another motif is the sense that things were “getting out of hand,” as one gun-toting government contractor puts it. A third is a scorn for an elite that no longer cares about the little people nor welcomes the children of the humble into its ranks.
This may be a cross-section of Trump voters but not of Americans. The only hint we get of diversity is a white woman who adopted two black kids and other children of mixed ethnicity — a point used by the authors to refute any contention that some Trump voters are prone to racism.
“I’m racist?” asks one “Rough Rebounder” from Ashtabula, Ohio, halfway through “The Great Revolt.” “I love it when people say, especially if they’re black or something, and they say, ‘You don’t know about me, you don’t know about ….’ Well you know what, buddy? You have no idea who you’re talking to. My family is, well, we are like a rainbow family.”
Other than one Trump voter’s argument that Mr. Obama exacerbated racism, and a claim that “race-tinged subjects were rarely cited by Trump voters interviewed for this book,” there’s scant further mention of racial attitudes. As for anti-immigrant sentiment, “building a wall” is dismissed as Trump Nation’s distant fourth-highest priority.
When the profiles get a little tiring, it’s worth continuing for the often astute political analysis in the book’s closing chapters.
“The question of whether Mr. Trump’s unconventional bid merely picked the lock of a different era of Republican politics or whether his new fusion of populism with conservatism is a remaking of the American political axis entirely is a central question of this book,” the authors write. “The Great Revolt” suggests that the distrust of elites that energized the 2016 election isn’t going away, and neither is the polarization that stems from our echochamber media habits. It argues that “the New Deal Coalition of government takers” is shattered and the left is responding to Trumpism in self-destructive ways.
“The Great Revolt” pulls an intellectual muscle contending with the fact that Mr. Trump tanked in 86 of the 100 most educated counties. Rather than consider the possibility that scholarly people had concerns with a populist-conservative fusion, the book attributes that statistic to “the social pressure that comes with living exclusively among other college graduates” who presumably shamed each other into voting against Mr. Trump. But why did some well-educated people in places like Ashtabula (where just 13.3 percent have a bachelor’s degree) vote for Mr. Trump? The book postulates a “political liberation” that comes from “a more educationally diverse orbit.” So in some places the college-educated are sheep, while in others they’re liberated.
Setting aside the occasional leap of logic, Ms. Zito and Mr. Todd have done a service by portraying Trump Nation in a way that goes beyond either academic data-crunching or breathless coverage of presidential rallies. And if you wondered whether this was all going to blow over, you need only read the book’s final profile, of a Keokuk, Iowa, woman placed into the “Silent Suburban Mom” category. “You know,” she says, “I have to admit I like him more now than I did as a candidate.”
“THE GREAT REVOLT: INSIDE THE POPULIST COALITION RESHAPING AMERICAN POLITICS” By Salena Zito and Brad Todd Crown Forum $28