How the Midwest Slipped Away from Democrats

For two decades, Democrats have relied on a seemingly impregnable blue wall in presidential elections.

The 18 states plus the District of Columbia that voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in six consecutive elections gave the party 90 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the White House. Successive Republican campaigns have tried and failed to storm that wall, but have repeatedly failed. Even George W. Bush couldn't get through in any of the states.

Then, last November, three Midwestern brick-and-mortars collapsed.

{mosads}Donald Trump won Michigan by 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes.

Trump even came within 45,000 votes of winning Minnesota, a state that hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972 — the longest such streak for a Democrat in the country.

The Democratic collapse in the Upper Midwest was not a Republican tsunami, an accidental disaster from which the party would easily rebuild. Instead, it was a red tide, sweeping a certain kind of white working-class voter away from Democrats and onto GOP shores starting as early as 2010.

“The Midwest is zero here,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster originally from Wisconsin. After years of taking these states for granted, “the math doesn't work in these states without winning large swathes of white voters.”

This is the 19th story in The Hill's Changing America series, in which we examine the demographic and economic trends affecting American politics today.

The Midwestern states that delivered Trump the White House turned against Democrats thanks to a confluence of important factors working for the GOP: First, white working-class voters hard-hit by the recession took out their frustrations on the governing party. Second, minority groups and younger voters who turned out in record numbers for President Barack Obama sat on their hands when it came time to choose his successor.

Democrats who relied on the diverse coalition that Obama assembled in 2008 and 2012 were uniquely sensitive to the collapse of that coalition in the Upper Midwest. These states are more likely to be whiter, older and less educated than the national average, all factors associated with conservative voting patterns.

And these older, whiter, blue-collar workers have felt the pressures of a recession as devastating to manufacturing as no other group in America.

Even before the recession, the major industries that drive the Midwestern economy had begun to change.

In 1950, 39 percent of Michigan residents worked in manufacturing, about twice the national average. By the 1970s, the energy crisis had driven automakers to a standstill, forcing them to streamline their assembly lines and take advantage of new technology to cut costs—and workers.

These technological advances have cost more jobs than other factors such as globalization, regulation and even the recession. There are now more industrial robots per worker in metropolitan areas such as Youngstown and Toledo in Ohio and Detroit and Grand Rapids in Michigan than any other major city, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

(Automation is likely to cost many thousands more jobs in the future: The nation's three largest automakers are investing more than $21 billion in renovating facilities, which likely means more robots and fewer jobs on the line.)

Mining in northern counties in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula followed a similar course of technological innovation and economic decline.

“We had really booming industrial economies from Buffalo and Pittsburgh east through St. Louis,” said Reynolds Farley, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “Many of these jobs can be and have been automated.”

Even the agricultural sector that employed so many thousands of Midwesterners, and which largely survived the global recession thanks to high commodity prices, has gone through an automation revolution.

“[Agriculture] as a whole it has really come on some hard times again. Prices are falling, even though yields are good. Making a profit is hard,” said Gary Hendrickx, a commissioner in Swift County, Minn.

The economic pressures of a changing labor market have caused a rapid migration of younger and more mobile workers away from rural areas around the Upper Midwest. Michigan's Upper Peninsula has fewer residents now than it did in 1910, Farley said. Detroit's population today is just over a third of its peak in 1950. Minnesota's Iron Range has a smaller population than it did in the 1960s.

Even with population decline and economic anxiety, Democrats held their own across the Upper Midwest until Obama took office. Two years laterlongtime Democratic Reps. David Obey (Wis.), Bart Stupak (Mich.) and Jim Oberstar (Minn.) left office, either losing or retiring.

At the same time, Republicans won the governorships of Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In 2016, white working-class voters abandoned Democrats at a higher rate in those states than anywhere else in the country, according to Robert Griffin, a demographer at the Center for American Progress and George Washington University.

This shift had a profound political impact on Democrats: In 2012, Obama won 167 counties in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In 2016, Trump won 110 of those counties.

Democrats were also stung by their inability to reach the core voters who gave Obama such a boost in 2008 and 2012. African-American turnout fell 12 percent in Ohio and 34 percent in Wisconsin. Turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds fell by more than a quarter in Wisconsin and by a fifth in Ohio, according to an analysis compiled by Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier.

In Michigan, Brookings Institution demographer William Frey found that African-American turnout fell by 2 percentage points. Even that smaller drop cost Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton: She received 519,000 votes in Wayne County, Detroit's heavily African-American home state. Four years ago, Obama won 595,000 votes there. The 74,000 missing votes were nearly seven times Trump's statewide margin of victory.

Similarly, Obama won 45,000 more votes than Clinton in Milwaukee County, Washington, nearly double Trump's statewide margin there.

The decline in minority and younger voter turnout has vindicated Republicans who have argued over the years that Obama's success was unique to his campaign and that Democrats have yet to figure out how to inspire those voters from the charismatic former president .

Said Tim Shaler, a Republican data analytics expert who has worked in the Upper Midwest: “There is such a thing as a Democratic voter only for presidents.”

Democrats just haven't figured out how to turn those voters away if Obama isn't on the ballot.