denisdman wrote:
That is my point- take Wisconsin, which has been largely blue. Those same "racists" were there when Democrats were winning. Did they just become racists because Trump won?
Wisconsin politics are a little strange in that there are strains of liberalism and conservatism that cover the whole state, neither being exactly factory-standard. To begin with, unlike Illinois, which has about 66% of the population concentrated in and around Chicago, it's only about 35% of the population concentrated in and around Milwaukee. Much like Ohio, there's a big distribution of medium-sized cities beyond Milwaukee and Madison (think Green Bay repeated across the state), which weakens the traditional big-city, machine-boss approach to Democratic politics. Instead, Madison tends to distribute a progressive politics that values education (the Wisconsin Idea was all about the work of the state university enriching the whole state) but also looks out for labor and agriculture, which you also see in Minnesota with the Democratic/Farmer-Labor Party. Rural southwestern Wisconsin in particular has always leaned left, with parts of northwestern Wisconsin being damn near socialist, and it's that statewide liberalism that more than concentrated urban populations has reliably given Wisconsin to the Democrats in national elections. It wasn't a surprise to anyone but Nate Silver that Bernie Sanders won Wisconsin handily, because he fits right into that progressive/social-democratic tradition.
On the other side, the vector of conservative power isn't the "big country" or the Janesvilles and Appletons but Milwaukee's suburbs and exurbs from about the second ring out: Waukesha County, Ozaukee County, Washington County, parts of Walworth County (Lake Geneva and Genoa City tend to get disengaged from state politics for obvious reasons), all within Milwaukee's sphere of influence but decidedly
not of the city. White flight hit Milwaukee like a ton of bricks and the people who fled have never gotten over it, attributing every metaphorical hangnail the state of Wisconsin has to The City and The Blacks. Wisconsin's racism manifests itself in a weird, no-hard-feelings way, as if to say it's
not that black people are inherently inferior human beings, it's just that they happened to ruin Milwaukee for whites and must be made to pay for it.
INTERPOLATION: This is a silly detail, but it's a sports board so I can bring it up: did you ever notice that the Milwaukee Brewers' grey road uniforms since moving to Miller Park don't say "Milwaukee," they just say "Brewers"? This isn't accidental: after the collar counties had to chip in to build Miller Park, there was some serious apprehension about identifying the Brewers too closely with Milwaukee because it could upset the jamokes out in Brookfield or Mequon or wherever because they'd see it as the city freeloading off the 'burbs. Silly, I know, and they've only recently started wearing "Milwaukee" on alternate shirts again, but for a while there was a real concern that the Brewers had to be a state team and
not a city team.
Moving on, while there sure as shit are some 2nd Amendment warriors in Wisconsin for (again) obvious reasons, culture-war issues don't carry the day quite in the same way they do in the Bible Belt. Evangelicals aren't as dominant as good old German Catholics and Lutherans, so people tend to leave you alone about religion in that tense, repressed (and repressive!) Midwestern way. Ted Cruz won the primary, but I don't think that tells the whole story. Go back to the southeastern-WI conservative apparatus, which exists to serve everyone's favorite tongue-lolling genius Scott Walker. Most of us forgot as Trump racked up the scalps of Jeb!, Rubio, Cruz, and improbably, even Hillary Clinton, but Scott Walker was really one of the first big names Trump owned, and he did it simply by coming to Wisconsin and asking something like "if Scott Walker is so great, how come your economy sucks so bad," which, well, good point, Don. This made Walker's media cronies very upset, as anyone would by dropping into the neighborhood and telling you your life's work sucks, so they became ardent Never-Trumpers (using the agreed-upon definition,
not whatever long time guy imagines it to be solely inside his own head) and, with the WI primary so late in the game that the other polite conservatives had all been murked, sent their devoted WTMJ/WISN listeners to Cruz. Here's the map:
Cruz yellow, Trump blue, matching up nicely with Milwaukee AM radio signals. Meanwhile, Republicans to the north and west, in small-to-medium towns but outside Walkerland, did go Trump. So you're dealing with a population that was, in
some sense at least at
some stage, resistant to Trump's message.
So then you have 2012 versus 2016.
What changed? The big one would appear to be western Wisconsin, where outside of LAX/EC, blue counties turned red,
not to mention Kenosha and Racine Counties (the two L-shaped puzzle pieces in the lower right) went to Trump as well. I think all those areas could have stayed blue
had the Democrats campaigned there. Those western counties certainly have a little bit of both political traditions, but Obama won their hearts and Hillary didn't.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
