The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics - Hardcover

Salena Zito, born and bred in Pittsburgh, she worked for a Pittsburgh-based newspaper for 11 years. Since 2016, Salena has joined the New York Post, acts as a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner.

Brad Todd, a sixth-generation native of rural East Tennessee, is a founding partner at OnMessage media firm. His candidate clients have included six U.S. Senators, three Governors, and more than two dozen congressmen.

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Hidden in Plain Sight

Jefferson, Ashtabula County, Ohio—It is 1:45 in the morning and Bonnie Smith’s alarm has just gone off. That alarm is a reminder that, seven days a week, she is living her lifelong dream of owning a bakery.

“I come in at two-­thirty in the morning. We start making doughnuts from scratch. After that, I go into the breads and pies or whatever I have going out—­like right now I need to do cupcakes, and I have a couple pies I have to put out, but I also have to check what orders are going out. Then we start soups, and by eleven o’clock we start lunch,” she explains.

At sixty-­three, she is two years into her second career in the small town of Jefferson, running a Chestnut Street bakery that is a throwback to simpler times: pretty pink-­and-­green wallpaper decorated with cupcakes surrounds a fireplace and tables and chairs that fill the front of the bakery.

By 9:00 a.m., already half of her sugar cookies, tea cakes, cream wafers, brownies, mini tarts, and thumbprints are gone. With the help of her grandson, a fresh batch of sugary glazed doughnuts makes its way from the kitchen to a tray in the display case.

The aroma is irresistible and intoxicating and gently teases the senses.

A young mother enters with her three-­year-­old daughter, Evelyn, who immediately makes a beeline to the display case filled with color­ful cookies and pastries and, with the willfulness and determination only a toddler possesses, plants her face against the case to get a closer look at the cupcake with rainbow sprinkles on top.

To the girl’s delight, Smith hands her the confection, and minutes later Evelyn’s face and fingers are covered in pink icing. The imprint of her little face on the display case—­a smudged outline of a tiny nose and lips—­makes Smith smile broadly.

As Smith started making soup for the anticipated lunch crowd, the diminutive brunette was sporting a white apron with legally sweet embroidered across the front, the name of her shop and a hat tip to her thirty-­plus years at the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office.

She started working as a cook in the sheriff’s department when the youngest of her three children was five years old. It was the same job her mother had.

But Smith wanted more.

So she went back to school for criminal law while she worked as a cook in the courthouse. She then moved over to dispatch and then up through the ranks in the sheriff’s department until she made deputy, all the while raising her three children with her husband, an electrician for Millennium Inorganic Chemicals—­one of the last big blue-­collar employers in the once-­mighty manufacturing county of Ashtabula, wedged between the shore of Lake Erie and the Pennsylvania state line, northeast of Cleveland.

Smith was raised a Democrat, her parents were Democrats, she is married to a Democrat, and she worked for elected Democratic sheriffs in a county that had not voted a Republican into local office for as long as anyone you find can remember.

Until 2016, that is, when Ashtabula picked Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and swept in a local ticket of Republicans underneath him.

Bonnie Smith was one of the unlikely participants in that unforeseen realignment that happened across the Great Lakes region in hundreds of communities like Ashtabula County, flipping Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa into the Republican side of the electoral college after serving as what journalist Ron Brownstein dubbed the reliable industrial Democratic “Blue Wall” for decades.1

How Democratic was Smith, and how recently? In March 2016, she voted for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primary contest. Voting Republican wasn’t even on the table for her, until suddenly it was, just a few months later.

“I am not sure what happened, but I started to look around me, and my town and my county, and I thought, ‘You know what? I am just not in the mood anymore to just show up and vote for who my party tells me I have to vote for,’ ” she says.

She was not alone. Ashtabula County had given its votes to John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Michael Dukakis. It gave Barack Obama a 55 percent majority share of its vote twice—­before turning 180 degrees to prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, a 31-­point swing from one election to the next.

At first look, the numerical magnitude of Ashtabula’s swing, in a nation presumed frozen in partisan polarization, is what seems notable. At second look, the remarkable aspect is just how common that kind of change was in 2016 in the states that make up the Rust Belt.

Thirty-­five counties in Ohio, long the nation’s premier presidential bellwether, swung 25 or more points from 2012 to 2016. Twenty-­three counties in Wisconsin, thirty-­two counties in Iowa, and twelve counties in Michigan switched from Obama to Trump in the space of four years.

With few exceptions, these places are locales where most of America’s decision makers and opinion leaders have never been. Trump only carried 3 of the nation’s 44 “mega counties,” places with more than one million in population, and only 41 of the country’s 129 “extra large” counties with more than 400,000 but less than one million. Those 173 sizable counties are home to 54 percent of the U.S. population, and in 135 of them Trump even lagged behind the net margin performance of losing 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Trump crawled out of that mathematical hole in the all-­but-­forgotten communities—­thousands of them.

It took a lot of Bonnie Smiths, in a lot of places like Ashtabula County, to wreck political expectations—­and if their political behavior in 2016 becomes an affiliation and not a dalliance, they have the potential to realign the American political construct and perhaps the country’s commercial and cultural presumptions as well.

For Smith, who lives with her husband, George, on a working farm in nearby Saybrook, the political tipping point—­even more than the job losses and the decay of the area—­was a result of her faith and her growing disconnect on cultural issues from the candidates she had previously supported.

“I had looked the other way for far too long, had accepted that I was supposed to be more modern in my views when I wasn’t comfortable with the views my party started to take,” Smith says, making clear that this was a difficult decision to have made and to discuss publicly. “And I took a stand for myself, my beliefs, for life, and for my country.”

She says she also took a stand for her community: “All of this decay has happened under their [the Democrats’] watch.”

The shopping district where Legally Sweet sits is struggling; a Family Dollar store is around the corner, and the majestic Ashtabula County courthouse, where she worked for years, is across the street. Shuttered businesses dot both sides of the street.

“The town closes up about three o’clock on the weekdays and, like, one o’clock on Saturday. There’s nothing here. The people come in and . . . you’re making it but you’re not. You know? You’ve got enough to skimp by for the next day, but that’s it,” she says.

The statistics on the area’s own economic development website paint a picture of an Ashtabula County stuck in transition and trying to creatively reinvent itself to get out of the Great Recession, from which the wealthier America on the East and West coasts recovered years ago. As of May 2016, the local economic partnership wrote that the county’s employed workforce level was still stuck under 42,000 people—­nearly the same figure as at the bottom of the national recession in 2010, a fall from 46,000 in its pre-­recession high.2 Nationally, the number of employed Americans had bounced back to pre-­recession levels by 2014.3

The physical reality of the county’s industrial footprint tells the same story. Empty, idle, hulking coal-­fired power plants line the lakeshore, and the docks that once attracted waves of Italian and Scandinavian immigrants to unload coal and iron ore now see little activity. The county’s population, according to the Census Bureau’s 2016 estimates, is 98,231, almost exactly what it was after the 1970 census, a span that saw the country as a whole grow by 59 percent.4

A Democrat for decades, Smith didn’t quite know what to expect when she went home one day and told George she was thinking about supporting Trump. He told her he was already there. “So there was that,” she says, laughing.

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America’s political experts, from party leaders to political science professors to journalists to pundits, did not expect the Smiths, or enough people like them, to vote for Donald Trump. Virtually every political and media expert missed the potential of Donald Trump because they based their electoral calculus on assumptions that they hadn’t bothered to check since the last presidential election. To recognize the potential of the Trump coalition, analysts would have had to visit places they had stopped visiting and listen to people they had stopped listening to.

“I am kind of that voter that was hiding in plain sight that no one saw coming. I was right here all along. I’ve seen the job losses here, the rise in crime, the meth and heroin problem, society essentially losing hope; something just gave in with me,” Bonnie Smith says.

The political experts called the 2016 election wrong—­not because they took too few polls or studied too many census trends, but because they assumed American elections were immune to the same changes wreaking havoc in every other part of American society.

Amazon is in the process of destroying Walmart and what is left of Main Street at the same time. Streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube are fragmenting and democratizing the creation and delivery of video entertainment. Person-­to-­person payment systems like PayPal and Venmo, and crowd-­sourced funding communities like GoFundMe and Kickstarter, are reshaping the movement of private capital. In virtually every sphere of American society, institutional loyalty and expert filtering are being discarded in favor of direct communication and deliberate silo-­ing. Similarly, Donald Trump’s electoral coalition is smashing both American political parties and the previously impenetrable political news media, often in spite of Trump himself.

In the wake of the 2016 election surprise, the political experts have continued to blow it—­looking to predict the coming demise of the president without pausing to consider the durability of the trends and winds that swept him into office. Even if Netflix disappears, traditional cable providers will never have the monopolistic hold on viewers they did twenty years ago. Similarly, after Trump, traditional political parties will not have the same sway with voters they’ve had for past election cycles.

The history of the American electorate is not a litany of flukes; instead it is a cycle of tectonic plate–­grinding, punctuated by a landscape-­altering earthquake every generation or so. This movement is not dissimilar to that of any other American consumer category; it should come as no surprise that electoral choices float and change in the same manner as other voluntary behaviors in the most open and dynamic market in the world.

Analysts of consumer-­product marketing make a distinction between category killers and category builders. Disruptive brands that merely reorient a single category are category killers: think Miller Lite beer, or diet soda. Meanwhile, products that are category builders do more, starting an entirely new marketplace: think Federal Express or Apple’s iPad.

Political analysts across the spectrum have given Trump credit for being a category killer, reshaping Republican politics in his image. But the characteristics of his rise and the unique new coalition he fused in the Rust Belt argue that he should be viewed as a category builder, the first success of a coalition that is not likely to soon separate.

Employing direct marketing to the consumer instead of relying on referrals is a hallmark of category builders. Trump’s favored message delivery mechanisms: Twitter, dominance of cable news even when it required self-­stoked controversy, and television-­friendly rallies not only cut against the normal practices of the professional campaign industry, they enabled him to outflank, and simultaneously own, his critics in the news media as well. Trump used the red-­hot scrutiny of journalists to polarize and galvanize a plurality of ­voters in primary after primary, and then in the general election’s key battle­grounds.

Attacking all existing brands with equal ease and success is another trait of category builders. Trump drove a wedge between ­voters and the existing brands simultaneously, making the case that both parties were incapable of delivering his attributes. Trump’s campaign was arguably the least partisan in recent memory because from the start he aimed his fire at both political trenches. By Election Day, Trump had vanquished not only the stale institutional hierarchy of the Democratic and Republican parties, exemplified perfectly by the gasping legacy brands of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, but the entire national press corps as well.5

In his first campaign announcement speech in the lobby of Trump Tower in June 2016, Trump said: “I’ve watched the politicians. . . . They will never make America great again. They don’t even have a chance. They’re controlled fully—­they’re controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests, fully.”6 Trump, previewing his stamina for a slashing campaign that would leave him with few elected allies, said, “This is going to be an election that’s based on competence, because people are tired of these nice people. And they’re tired of being ripped off by everybody in the world.”

Trump bore out his differentiation on the primary campaign trail for a year through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and subsequent primaries, even creating a months-­long melodrama around the prospect that he might mount a third-­party bid if his effort at the GOP nomination was thwarted. Trump deftly used Republican elites, exemplified by the well-­off and well-­connected backers of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, as foils, even daring to attack the donor-­heavy, in-­person audiences sitting just feet from him at the GOP’s primary debates. What struck many as thin-­skinned rants turned out to be brand-­building, proving to Trump’s most loyal followers that he was a different kind of Republican, one that wasn’t much of a Republican at all.

For nearly a century, American politics has put the New Deal coalition of government takers on one side, opposed by the fusion of affluence and evangelicalism of the modern Republican Party. The coalition that elected Donald Trump—­and the one that opposed him—­fit neither of those blueprints.

James Carville, the architect of the first Clinton campaign in 1992, famously said that after five Republican victories in the prior six presidential elections, he and the Clinton team engineering what was then a novel Democratic victory “didn’t find the key to the electoral lock here. We just picked it.”7