Basic points
- Three pivotal dates in Midwestern history – 1787, 1854, and 1937 – have shaped Midwestern culture and attitudes and can be used to examine the role of the Midwest in the 2016 election.
- History of the Midwest reveals what factors contributed to changing voter attitudes, their transition from Obama to Trump, and why Midwesterners have voted close to the national average throughout history.
- After this discovery, the Midwest, especially the remote Midwest, may no longer be ignored by political journalists and taken for granted by Democratic strategists.
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Introduction
Much to the surprise of the spoofers—the fancy word for election watchers—the key votes in the 2016 presidential election leaked to the Midwest. Not by Hispanics in the sun belt or by young techies in trendy gentrified neighborhoods in Silicon Valley, Brooklyn or Austin, but by white non-college graduates in the counties outside of a million metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Of the 100 electoral votes that switched from Democrats in 2012 to Republicans in 2016, 50 were in the Midwest—Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa—and another 20 were in Pennsylvania, specifically west of metro Philadelphia, which demographically and closer it looks more like the midwest than the rest of the northeast.
Credit: Twenty20
Additionally, 29 more were in Florida, where the core Obama-to-Trump movement came in small counties along the Gulf Coast and north of Orlando that are largely populated by former Midwesterners. And the one additional Democratic-to-Republican electoral vote was that of Maine's Second Congressional District, a boreal forest region similar to Michigan's Upper Peninsula or the boreal woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota. To paraphrase the British tabloid The Sun, which headlined the surprise Conservative victory in 1992 with “It's the Sun Wot Won It”,1 in 2016, the Midwest won it.
The standard analysis of this is that significant numbers of white non-college graduates shifted nationally from Obama to Trump, and that those voters were concentrated in the Midwest. That's right, as far as it goes. But history also has its claims — and it can influence voter attitudes, often almost imperceptibly, for many years and decades afterward. So I want to look to the history of the Midwest to explain this unexpected turn of events. And not just to understand why white non-college Midwesterners switched from Obama to Trump in 2016, but also to understand why such an unusually high percentage of them, compared to the national average, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and why midwesterners have voted as they have, close but not identical to the national average, throughout history.
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Notes
- Aaron Reeves, Martin, McKee, and David Stuckler, “It is The sun Wot Won It': Evidence of media influence on political attitudes and voting from a UK quasi-natural experiment. Social Science Research (2015), http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri3110/Details/Sun%20paper.pdf.
