The following article by Lou Martin, associate professor of history at Chatham University and author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives: 

The 2018 documentary Moundsville drops viewers into the West Virginia town with no introduction. Instead, the film takes us directly into conversations with local residents, the mayor, a former mayor, retirees, a couple of historians, young entrepreneurs—a dozen or so people from all walks of life.  They talk about the town’s history, the prehistoric burial mound for which it is named, the leading industries over the decades, the boom times, the economic decline since the 1980s, and ideas about the town’s future.  I grew up in the Ohio Valley, about an hour’s drive from Moundsville, so these conversations felt familiar, like spending an afternoon in the local diner.

A central theme is the local economy, including the remarkable number of products that the towns’ workers manufactured in decades past.  At one time, Marx Toys, which employed thousands in its Glen Dale factory (neighboring Moundsville), produced one of every three toys made in America.  Other major employers in the area included Fostoria Glass, U.S. Stamping Company, Allied Chemical, and the Moundsville State Penitentiary.  A short drive away were coal mines, steel mills, and more chemical plants.

Today, Moundsville’s economy—like much of the region’s—looks a lot different.  Many of the mines and mills have shut down.  RV Parks just out of town house out-of-state gas pipeline and drilling crews.  The downtown has a lot of old businesses but also empty storefronts, and the Walmart Supercenter and other chain stores on the edge of town have won over many customers.  Some local entrepreneurs have found their niche in the new economy by, among other things, capitalizing on tourism to the now-shuttered prison and the nearby Palace of Gold (a Hare Krishna community).  But a third of the town’s residents have moved away.

With so many rusting factories, Moundsville could have become just another of the many reports from “Trump Country” since the 2016 election.  Most of those seem to be written by journalists facing deadlines, who parachute into Appalachia, gather a few quotes that support their assumptions about racist provincials, and then head back to the airport.  In her recent book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte writes that these reports “share a willingness to use flawed representations of Appalachia to shore up narratives of an extreme ‘other America’ that can be condemned or redeemed to suit one’s purpose.”

Those reports often attempt to construct a single narrative about voters in “Trump Country,” and the makers of Moundsville explicitly position their documentary against such narratives.  The voiceover for one of the trailers for the documentary explains that after the election “every media story about small-town America seemed to focus on the same things: Trump, opioids, and the rusting factory.”  “But,” it continues, “what if you went to a small town and didn’t talk about those things?  What if you simply asked people about their lives without connecting their answers to those larger narratives?”

Indeed, Moundsville does a good job of capturing the joys of life in a small town and highlighting the diversity of voices even in a town of nine thousand by featuring young and old, women and men, and white, African American, and Latino voices.

While this portrait is refreshing because the filmmakers brought empathy and patience to the project, they left out some important, complex, and challenging topics do not lend themselves to restaurant conversations.  While the documentary touches on economic decline, trade policies, and the outmigration of young people, it tends to treat economic change as natural or neutral, not even mentioning the policymakers or policies that facilitated capital migration.  I would argue that one of the greatest accomplishments of the proponents of neoliberalism has been to make their ideology seem like economic changes just happen.  Neoliberals’ free trade policies, cuts to taxes and social spending, privatization, and the elimination of union protections have hollowed out many factory towns, cut assistance to the poor and unemployed, and concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the few.

While some of the participants in the documentary share their memories of Moundsville’s prosperous decades, they don’t talk about how unions enabled workers to address safety concerns and gender discrimination, win fair wages and benefits, bring stability to their families, buy homes, and have discretionary income to spend at local businesses.  While the residents remember those prosperous years by listing employers, they don’t mention the American Flint Glass Workers’ Union, the United Steel Workers of America, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, and the United Mine Workers of America.  I’m guessing that only a few of those interviewed were union members, and as union strength has declined since the 1980s, public memories of the critical role they played in earlier decades have faded.

Also, Moundsville offers only a cursory discussion of race and racism.  A former mayor, who is African American, recalls painful episodes of racism when he was growing up but says that he no longer faces that kind of cruelty.  And the Latino owner of the Acapulco Mexican Restaurant says that racism is still present and that it negatively frames residents’ understanding of immigrants.  We do not hear other residents’ thoughts on the role of race in their town’s history.  While Moundsville avoids the overly simplistic, stereotypical portraits of racist hillbillies that are a common feature of “Trump Country,” the result is to largely ignore race and racism, which are admittedly complex subjects.

Growing up in northern West Virginia, I was largely unaware of racism and associated it most with the use of the N-word, which was only uttered by the crudest students at my school.  It was not until I reached adulthood that I began to realize that racism was particularly powerful when it was unheard and unseen.  Racism has shaped life in these Ohio Valley factory towns in fundamental ways, particularly through discriminatory housing, employment, and education, and sometimes as a result of battles fought decades ago.  These forms of racism are pervasive throughout the United States—no region or social class has a monopoly on it—and institutional racism’s profound effects up through the present need to be better understood.

When we erase subjects like institutional racism, the labor movement, and the rise of neoliberalism, the resulting portrait is incomplete, and things seemingly just happen to people and towns with no understanding of why.  Moundsville is an intimate portrait of a former factory town whose residents are proud of their hometown and working to redefine it, and I appreciate the filmmakers’ hard work and empathetic lens.  Yet, much work remains to help us make sense of the past and present of Moundsville and many places like it.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Public opinion and recent electoral results suggest American voters are ready for significant change in a leftward direction. Consequently, the Democratic nominee in 2020 is likely to offer a strongly progressive program to the electorate.

Common sense suggests, however, that there are limits to how far left this program should go. Programs that lack public support should be avoided and programs preferred that generate strong support among not just among the base Democratic constituencies like blacks and Latinos but also among white college graduates and ideally have significant purchase among white noncollege voters as well.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Biden’s spike in the polls is well-documented. His current popularity with black voters is striking as has been noted. Less has been written about how he’s doing with white noncollege voters, but the results here are also of significance. Harry Enten notes in his latest CNN column:

“Whites without a college degree still make up a substantial portion of the Democratic Party. Despite much noise about how whites with a degree are the future for Democrats, each group is about 30% of the party. Nonwhites, both with and without college degrees, are about 40% in total. [Note: these figures agree with my own States of Change data.]….

Our latest CNN national poll shows Biden is strong with non-college educated whites, as well [as with nonwhite voters). Biden jumps from the low 20s among whites with a college degree to the mid 30s among whites without a college degree. Comparably, his lead over Sanders increases from only 5 points over Sanders among whites with a college degree to about 20 points among whites without a college degree. Sanders polls in the mid 10s with each group….

Biden’s ability to breakthrough with non-college whites marks perhaps the biggest difference between the 2016 and 2020 primaries. In 2016, Clinton actually lost white voters without a college degree in the primary. Sanders beat her by 7 points among this group in the median Democratic nomination contest with an entrance or exit poll, even though she won college educated whites by 7 points in these same contests.”

This pattern clearly could help Biden secure the Democratic nomination. But does this mean Biden is the most “electable” nominee against Trump?

Not necessarily and for two reasons, which are frequently confused. One is that superior appeal to one group of voters does not mean that more voters may not be lost by inferior appeal among another group. Using Biden as an example, perhaps whatever he gains among white noncollege voters relative to other potential candidates will be more than counterbalanced by losses from unenthusiastic support and turnout among young voters and possibly some other Democratic constituencies.

Therefore, electability is always and inevitably about trade-offs. No candidate will be without them so people should be asking: who has the highest net, given potential gains and losses, and therefore the best chance of beating Trump overall and in the states that are likely to count the most. This is always hard to do given data limitations but that is really the argument we should be having.

The second reason to be cautious about Biden’s electability is that, even if one is taking proper cognizance of the various factors that may increase or decrease a candidate’s appeal, it is hard to make these judgments and harder still this far in advance of the actual general election campaign, when data are sparse and less reliable. Put more bluntly, a lot of early judgments about electability, by voters and pundits alike, turn out to be wrong.

Does that mean we shouldn’t care about electability and, since no one knows anything (as they say in Hollywood), just roll out who we like the best and hope they win? I don’t think so, especially given the 2020 stakes. But we do need to think about it in a sophisticated and, to the extent possible, in a data-driven way.

That’s it for my plea for rationality. Back to the usual heated and intemperate debate who’s the best candidate!

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Jonathan Chait attempts to unlock the riddle of why Joe Biden seems to be doing so well, even if he doesn’t seem to represent the leftward shift of the Democratic party. Chait points out that the general leftward shift of the party is frequently confused with the viewpoint of its leftmost adherents, which does’t really make sense. The whole party can be shifting to the left–I believe that it is–but the median Democrat, even if more left than they once were, can still be pretty different from the aggressively left activists who seem to get most of the attention.

Maybe that’s why Biden is doing so well, much to the dismay of the Twitterati and the puzzlement of political observers who pay attention to that world. The median Democrat simply wants to beat Trump and a generally left program, even if falls short, of the current AOC-approved laundry list, will be just fine with them.

Democrats are currently spending a great deal of time debating how much effort should be devoted to regaining support from working class Americans–but much less time discussing how it can be done.

But it’s the second question that’s the most important. Trump’s victory in 2016 was a brutal demonstration that Democrats had lost the trust and support of many working Americans. To prevail in 2020, Democrats now must convince working people that they genuinely understand their problems and will represent them better and more authentically than Trump and the GOP.

This will not be easy–and the first step must be to recognize that simply advocating a list of progressive economic policies will not be sufficient.

The Democratic Strategist is therefore pleased to present the following strategy memo:
Democrats: To Understand How Workers Feel About Jobs, listen to Sociologists and not just Economists

To read the memo, click HERE.

We believe you will find this memo both useful and important.

The following article by Stanley Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz, which includes findings from March and April focus groups with unregistered and low propensity members of the Rising American Electorate, is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:

With voters turning out at historic levels in 2018 and people now following politics more closely than at any point in the past, WVWVAF asked us whether progressives should start working to register unregistered and low propensity voters? It usually conducts its registration programs with the Rising American Electorate in the Fall of the odd year before the election.

The answer for the women is resoundingly, yes. They are already politicized, engaged by President Trump, and looking for how to bring change.

Listening to these unregistered or low propensity African American women, Hispanic women, white unmarried women, and white millennial women tells us quickly they are so engaged early in reaction to President Trump:

• Trump has raised the stakes and you know elections and your vote matter.
• Trump’s in-your-face style and over-claiming tweets force them to pay attention.
• 100 new women being elected in reaction to Trump says change is possible.
• Claims of “greatest economy” is hurting Republicans, particularly as people are struggling financially, while corrupt politicians take care of the richest.
• Trump’s divisiveness is elevating their desire for greater unity.
• There is a new millennial consciousness – shaping the reaction to Trump.

We are in a unique time when every time Trump tweets to argue his case, he produces a backlash in the RAE that motivates them to register and vote. 

VIEW THE REPORT

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

2018 Turnout Data-palooza

My friend and frequent co-author Bill Frey has issued a nice report on the Brookings site on 2018 turnout. In the report, he mines the recently released Census Current Population Survey voter supplement data to provide detailed findings on turnout and vote share in 2018 by key demographics.

By and large, the general patterns found in the Census data agree with those found in other data sources like Catalist (previously posted), even if specific levels may differ (white noncollege share, for example, is significantly lower than Cataist in the Census data).

The following article by John Russo of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

The recent debate over the Green New Deal got me thinking about a lecture I gave in 2018 at the Columbia University Seminar on Energy Ethics. The faculty who attended were mostly environmental lawyers and scientists. I am neither. But they asked me to discuss “The Fragility of the Blue-Green Alliance” – not so much the formal partnerships between union and environmental groups but rather the complex challenges of bridging differences between workers and environmentalists. My remarks were informed by three things: Pope Francis’s Encyclical (2015) on the environment, Laudato Si’; my research on working-class communities and economic change; and my frustration with the reporters, liberals, and environmentalists who show little understanding of the experiences of working people.

Our views on climate change reflect our social and economic positions, which in turn reflect multiple factors — class, race, ethnicity, gender, place, and religious and ethical frameworks.  Any discussion of climate change or environmental policies must acknowledge not only that individuals have different stakes in the environment and the economy but that sometimes, those stakes are themselves contradictory. Working-class people and their communities are harmed by both environmental and economic injustices, and they have few economic choices. Solutions that might seem obvious, like ending the use of coal, can come with real costs to workers and their communities, even as they address environmental injustices and climate change.

In talking with colleagues at Columbia, I drew on a local example, from an article in the New York Times, “How Skipping Hotel Housekeeping Could Help the Environment and Your Wallet.” The article described how hotels were promoting opting out of daily room cleaning as a sustainability program, because it reduced the hotels’ use of electricity, water, and chemicals. Customers could earn food and beverage credit by skipping housekeeping. But, I asked, sustainability for whom? As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014, “green programs” like this were killing jobs and cutting wages as housekeepers lost tips and had to work harder, since fewer workers now had to clean rooms after guests left, but with the same hours as before.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild offers another example in her book, Strangers in Their Own Land.  Hochschild spent four years interviewing people living and working  near the polluted bayous near Lake Charles Louisiana who did not support greater environmental protections that could protect their health and safety. She asked “Why do working-class people support policies that liberals think hurt them?” which she described as the “Great Paradox.” The people Hochschild talked with often sided with the chemical and oil companies that provided local jobs while also polluting homes and bayous. Their beliefs were based on an underlying “deep story” or resentment — but not toward the companies. Rather, people felt they had been marginalized by flat or failing wages, rapid demographic and social changes, and a liberal culture that often mocked their faith and patriotism and assumes they are racist and sexist. Put differently, liberal culture and politicians did not have a real understanding and “empathy” for the plight of working class.

As these examples suggest, creating blue-green alliances requires empathy rather than just judgments. It also helps to have a clear shared enemy. Steve Early describes this kind of alliance in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. He writes about how workers, environmentalists, Latinos, African-Americans, and some progressives in highly polluted Richmond, California, organized a blue-green alliance in response to a major refinery fire. They built a culture of resistance and forced Chevron to spend $1 billion dollars to modernize a plant, making it safe and cleaner for the workers and community while saving jobs. It was this attention to jobs, working conditions, and the environment that enabled the group to build a volunteer-driven political organization. When Chevron spent $3 million to try to get new city council and mayor elected (an amount unheard of in a local election), the blue-green coalition fought back, electing three environmental-friendly city council members and Richmond’s current mayor. As Early states, “It was a clear achievement for class-based community organizing around environmental issues and the importance of politics.”

But Early acknowledges that this type of blue-green organizing is not easy. In fact, a similar blue-green alliance formed after a refinery fire in Torrence, California, came apart when union members faced the threat of job losses. As Early notes, “job blackmail—and fear of job loss—remains a potent check on labor organization behavior involving workers engaged in the extraction, refining, transportation, or use of fossil fuel.” Tension over jobscreates real divides between unions and environmentalists.

To find more comprehensive solutions, we need to start by identifying shared values. A good place to start might be in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, where he asks people to join an inclusive dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. He speaks to the moral and spiritual challenges of the ecological crisis, its disproportionate impact on the poor, and environmental racism. He also calls for solidarity and shared responsibility and for economic development that will reduce injustice and inequality.

People have begun to take climate change and sustainability seriously, often with great empathy for working people. Interests and investments are growing for projects like greening of buildings and cities, producing green products, and developing sustainable global production networks. Most of these are grassroots efforts, but larger groups and institutions are forming new national and international organizations that link environmental concerns with workplace and economic transformation. For example, the ACW (Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Change) connects 25-partner organizations, including unions and environmental groups from seven countries, with 56 individual researchers working on opportunities and obstacles to create a low-carbon adaptations for resources, manufacturing, construction and services where worker agency, environmental concerns, and just transitions are all taken seriously. The model of just transitions emphasizes protecting and even improving workers’ livelihoods (health, skills, rights) as well as substantive community support.

Political leaders are just beginning to engage in this work, though the results so far are mixed. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal (GND), a Congressional Resolution (not a bill), reimagines work in a period of climate change and a transforming economy. The GND offers an ambitious “vision statement” for a decarbonization infrastructure, yet it also provides social protection as just transitions for displaced workers, training for green skills jobs within a broader social safety net. The GND drew howls from elected officials and industry lobbyists, who complained that it was too big, too fast, and impractical. Others suggested watered-down policies that undermined the GND but provided political cover for future elections.

While the House did not vote on GND, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell pressed for a vote in order to embarrass Democrats prior to 2020 elections.  In the Senate, Republicans all voted against the resolution and most Democrats voted “present” — a display of the politics of evasion only slightly less dramatic than Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. If this is how Democrats respond, why should anyone expect workers to be more receptive response from the working class?

But there are signs of change, as some politicians are developing their own plans. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed his own Green New Deal, calling for the second-largest city in the country to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. Presidential Candidate Beto O’Rourke has proposed new federal policies that would lead to net-zero emissions by 2050 and $5 trillion in spending over 10 years for investments in clean energy and extreme weather preparation.

Energy companies are even getting involved. Worried that they will not be able to control legislation, they are trying to demonstrate their commitment to the environment through family-friendly and alternative energy commercials touting their work addressing climate change. Yes, these same companies had rejected climate science for years. Some, like the Koch brothers, used their financial strength and political clout to disrupt  the building climate and workplace justice movements.

To build a just and inclusive movement to fight climate change and overcome past environmental classism, we need empathy, shared values, and organizing. This is what the Green New Deal promotes. In a short film about the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez imagines a green future that links carbon use with job guarantees that provide workers with good wages and benefits. But the GND’s most important contribution may be its call to build an environmental movement where no one is left behind.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

Should Democrats Be Talking More About Foreign Policy?

Yes, but the trick it to talk about in a way that voters can understand and identify with. A report from CAP describing and analyzing a major new survey of public views on foreign policy provides useful guidance along these lines. The first thing to note is Trump has serious vulnerability in this area. As summarized by EJ Dionne in his Post column on the survey:

“[T]he survey…found that foreign policy is a genuine vulnerability for President Trump. While voters narrowly (50 percent to 48 percent) approved of the president’s handling of the economy, a large majority (57 percent to 40 percent) disapproved of his handling of foreign policy. Just 31 percent of voters said that “the United States is more respected in the world because of President Trump’s leadership,” while 62 percent picked the other option: “Under President Trump, America is losing respect around the world and alienating historic allies.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Two new articles highlight two ways in which Biden might maximize the Democrats’ chances of beating Trump. I emphasize the “might”–it is possible Biden is not the best Democratic candidate to do these two things. But it seems to me unarguable that the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, must do very well in both of these areas.

1. The White Working Class Vote. The subtitle of Ron Brownstein’s new article is “Joe Biden’s candidacy is a proxy for the larger question of how the party can best rebuild a successful presidential majority.” As, Brownstein puts it:

“No choice in 2020 divides Democratic activists more than the question of whether the party needs a nominee best suited to winning back these white voters, who have been drifting away from the party for decades, or one best positioned to mobilize the party’s new alliance of minorities, young people, and white-collar whites, especially women.”

After noting the ongoing decline of the white working class share of voters, as underscored by recently-released Census data, Brownstein makes the following indisputable observation:

“The long-term erosion of blue-collar whites as a share of the national vote is unmistakable and irreversible. That trend has ominous long-term implications for a GOP that is relying more heavily than ever on squeezing greater advantage from that shrinking group. But those white voters are disproportionately represented in the pivotal Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (as well as in Ohio and Iowa, which have trended further away from Democrats). Democrats wouldn’t need to focus as obsessively on those states, and on courting their large working-class white populations, if they could tip some of the diverse and growing Sun Belt states where those whites are a smaller share of the vote, such as North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, much less Texas. (Arizona, probably the top new Sun Belt target for Democrats in 2020, actually houses an elevated number of non-college-educated whites because it attracts so many white retirees.) But until Democrats can reliably flip some of those Sun Belt states, they can’t downplay the Rust Belt in presidential contests.”

To bring this point into focus, projections indicate the voting electorates in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2020 will probably be, respectively, 56 percent, 52 percent and 49 percent white noncollege. If turnout patterns are particularly favorable to the Democrats, you might knock another point off these levels. But that’s still a lot of voters. Biden says he can reach these voters better than Clinton did in 2016. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s wrong. But his Democratic rivals need to make the case that they’d be as good or better than Biden among these voters. Otherwise, they’re asking Democratic voters to draw to an inside straight.

2. The Union Vote. Nate Silver has a good item in his most recent “Silver Bulletpoints” column. Silver cites Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data showing:

“Trump’s union support [was not] merely a matter of white men shifting en masse to Trump. While white women and nonwhite men in unions mostly voted for Clinton, her margins with those groups were considerably narrower than Barack Obama’s in 2012.

In fact, the shift among union voters was enough to swing the election to Trump. According to the CCES, Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership — and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.”

Again, Biden can make the case that he’s the best candidate to appeal to these voters. That doesn’t mean he’s right but it does mean that other candidates need to show how and why they’d be better than him at reaching union voters. And at the moment I’m not hearing any candidate besides Biden saying things like: “I make no apologies. I am a union man (or woman). Period.”

So Biden–love him or hate him, he’s got a real case. I’m ready to hear a better one, but so far I’m not overwhelmed.