But what dominated the map was a fist of red over the Great Lakes: Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Set aside the hype and whimsy of Trump’s plan to conquer California, and this was the news: Trump will be running a Midwestern campaign.
.. And yet in Michigan—in most of the Midwest, really—the economy is doing O.K. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa all have unemployment rates well below the national average of five per cent, and Ohio and Indiana are just a touch higher than average, at 5.2 per cent. Among Midwestern states, only Illinois’s unemployment is significantly higher than the national average, and when people talk about the decline of the Rust Belt no one really means Illinois.
.. It’s hard to know exactly how to get beyond the top-line statistics to understand how shaken people are by a recession, but one way is to examine economic instability. When Yale’s Jacob Hacker led a study that did so, no Midwestern state ranked among the places where instability was most acute. (Those were mostly in the South.) In Michigan especially, Hacker found, overall levels of economic instability were remarkably low.
.. A 2016 race between Clinton and Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt,” the Washington Post’s Dan Balz predicted in March.
.. (those with family incomes between thirty thousand and seventy thousand dollars) in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They found that Trump does not even have the support among these voters that Mitt Romney had. The poll had him trailing Hillary Clinton by nine per cent.
.. Just after 9/11 David Foster Wallace presented the view of the world among churchgoers in Bloomington, Indiana: “There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre absence of cynicism in the room.” It is exactly this long tradition of seeing the Midwest as decent and innocent—and therefore as moral—that supplies the Rust Belt story with its force.
How America Lost Its Mojo
U.S. dynamism is in the dumps: Americans are less likely to switch jobs, move to another state, or create new companies than they were 30 years ago (or 100 years ago). What’s going on?
Between the 1970s and 2010, the rate of Americans moving between states fell by more than half—from 3.5 percent per year to 1.4 percent. “It’s a puzzle and it’s the one I wish politicians and policy makers were more concerned about,” Betsey Stevenson, a former member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told TheNew York Times this week. Fewer Americans moving toward the best jobs and starting fewer companies could lead a less productive economy. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that productivity “is set to fall in the U.S. for the first time in more than three decades.”
.. Whereas the middle class used to move toward productivity and jobs, like the River Rouge complex, they’re now barricaded from the most productive places by housing costs. So they’re moving toward cheap housing, instead.
.. Like smoking habits and fitness, entrepreneurship is a contagious behavior. “Exposing individuals to entrepreneurs may encourage them to start their own ventures,”
How to Get Trump Elected When He’s Wrecking Everything You Built
it fell to Reince Priebus to formally surrender on behalf of a shellshocked party Establishment. This being 2016 and the Age of Trump, Priebus, the long-serving chairman of the Republican National Committee, did so in a tweet: “@realDonaldTrump will be presumtive [sic] @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
.. In the weeks before Trump prevailed, the political media made a sport of trying to get Priebus to concede that his party was falling to pieces, while Priebus insisted against all evidence that things were going great. Commentators on both the left and right likened him to “Baghdad Bob,” ..
.. And his vision of the GOP’s future is in many ways the diametrical opposite of what Priebus and the party Establishment had imagined. Many politicians, Trump told me, had privately confessed to being amazed that his policies, and his lacerating criticism of party leaders, had proved such potent electoral medicine.
.. In 2007 he became the youngest-ever chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and part of a triumvirate with Paul Ryan and Scott Walker that led the GOP takeover of Wisconsin in 2010.
.. control debates to shield candidates from what Republicans believed was hostile questioning by liberal moderators trying to embarrass presidential hopefuls. While the report was unblinking about the need to win more support from women, minorities, and young people, it betrayed no hint that Republican policies beyond immigration reform might need adjusting to attract them. Emphasis fell instead on such things as hiring a more ethnically diverse staff (“The RNC must hire [Asian Pacific Islander] communications directors and political directors for key states”) and injecting a dash of Hollywood glamour to impress fickle millennials (“Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry … to attract younger voters”).
.. “After Romney’s loss, every major donor was just distraught and ready to bail, convinced we could never win a national election. So the autopsy was absolutely necessary from a donor maintenance standpoint. But it was public relations, nothing more. Reince never had the power to implement it.”
.. “I told him, ‘Listen, you’ve had four unbelievable years,’ ” says Georgia’s Evans. “ ‘If you stop now, you’re gonna be regarded as one of the most successful party chairmen in history. If you run [for another term], you’re going to be judged by one presidential election.’ He said, ‘You’re right.’ But he really thought we had in place all the pieces to dominate the election cycle.”
.. But then came Trump, a walking exaggeration of every negative attribute the autopsy had warned against.
.. “Reince is not the general,” says Murphy, the Republican strategist. “He’s stuck in the job of being the supply clerk to a losing presidential army.”
.. I asked Trump what he thought the GOP would look like in five years. “Love the question,” he replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry. What I want to do, I think cutting Social Security is a big mistake for the Republican Party. And I know it’s a big part of the budget. Cutting it the wrong way is a big mistake, and even cutting it [at all].”
.. He’s the subject of a steady stream of articles that describe how Republicans are working to “shape” and “guide” his views—meaning block his ideas. On May 9, Priebus took the unusual liberty of dictating terms to Trump by telling a conservative radio host that Trump wouldn’t touch the platform, and furthermore ought to “tell people that you don’t want to rewrite—you like, you appreciate, and agree with the platform the way it is.”
.. A moment later, Scavino hustled in and handed him a folder, from which he drew, from beneath printouts of the Drudge Report, a bright-red map of the U.S. showing how he dominates Google search ratings in all 50 states. His point was that he has the power to convey any message he likes: “I have the loudspeaker.”
.. To spend $2 billion or $1 billion, I was saying to my people the other day, I said, ‘Explain it to me. I just won against 17 people, all governors and senators who are very successful people. I just won, and I spent $45 million. That was over a period of a year.’ ” Did he really think he would raise $1 billion? “No,” he replied. “I’d say over $500 million. I just don’t know why you need that much money.”
.. Even as Trump takes over, Priebus is trying to enforce a distinction between “Trump” and “Republican Party” that might preserve the inroads he believes he’s made in minority communities.
..
In 2011, when Trump was still in the embryonic stage of learning how to roil the national political debate, he began insisting Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Priebus, as the new chairman, had to field awkward questions about Trump’s “birther” antics, and while he made clear his own view that Obama was born in Hawaii, he never denounced Trump and Trump never recanted. How, I asked, could his plan to moderate his party’s image possibly withstand a nominee who’s a birther and has labeled Hispanics “rapists” and “drug dealers”?
Priebus reddened and replied, with Freudian clarity, “What the RNC doesn’t do, we’re not able to muzzle people and put a sock in people’s mouth and take duct tape out and tell people what they can say and can’t say. Nor is it fair to then criticize the national committee for something that some person says somewhere around the country.” He added, “I can’t be judged based on things I don’t control.”
..
“What do you know about—you know something about voter data and outcomes and messaging and microtargeting? I mean, what kind of expert are you?”
“I know that the public face of the party saying these things has driven his own negatives up astronomically high.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Did you see the poll yesterday that he actually had better numbers with black and Hispanic voters than Mitt Romney?”
“I did.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I was surprised.”
“OK, well, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
At this, Priebus’s deputy jumped in to announce that we were going off the record.
.. Trump criticized Ryan’s proposed entitlement cuts as unfair and politically foolish. “From a moral standpoint, I believe in it,” Trump told Ryan. “But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’ ” Afterward, both sides offered platitudes, but Ryan didn’t endorse.
No, the Battleground States Are Not a Terrific Fit for Donald Trump
For most of this conversation, we’ve been talking about the “white working class” as a single demographic category. But the white working class is fairly diverse. White working-class voters in Appalachia, for instance, have behaved very differently from those across the Northern tier in recent cycles (Obama lost a lot of ground in Appalachia, but did better than John Kerry or Al Gore in a place like Wisconsin). There was a fairly similar split with Trump in the primary. He did really well with white working-class voters in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, but really struggled in places like Iowa and Wisconsin, or Vermont and Minnesota. So I wouldn’t be very surprised if it turned out that Trump made gains among white working-class voters nationally, but didn’t pick up much or anything in a state like Wisconsin.
.. I guess all I would say is that if Trump can’t be competitive in Ohio, he’s not going to even come close nationally, or in states like Virginia and Colorado.
.. Can Mr. Trump really win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote there again, especially after he went after home-state favorites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio? Then factor in the rapid pace of demographic change and the extent that Obama already lost a ton of ground among older, white working-class voters in the state. Suddenly it’s really hard to figure out how Trump is going to win the closest battleground state from the last election, even if he fixes his problem with well-educated white voters nationally.
I think there’s a real case that Florida could save Democrats in a close election
.. Mitch Stewart, who served as battleground states director for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said that Michigan was the state Democrats should worry most about being flipped.
.. I think a quick Hillary Clinton-Sanders unity tour through New Hampshire, Boulder, Ann Arbor and Madison wouldn’t be too surprising. I think Bill Clinton is probably at his best in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which is also where the Obama campaign tended to use him.
.. the Democratic advantage in the Electoral College would start to look pretty flimsy if the Republicans started to make further gains in the Upper Midwest instead of Appalachia.