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| Voters at Trump for President rally seattletimes.com |
It is for the weekly edition of Blogger Candidate Forum. Sorry for the lateness, yours truly has been suffering through a cold. Blogger is better and ready to write. Before we get started on today's subject, President-elect Donald Trump's success with Midwestern and Rust Belt city voters, yours truly would like to comment on the investigation on whether the Russians did or did not interfere with the American elections.
Blogger is deliberately using neutral language because a full on investigation has not been launched. President Barack Obama has ordered a report on the matter be readied for him before he leaves office on January 20, 2017. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered. First, what was the purpose of hacking into Democratic and Republican party email? Second, who authorized it and how high up in the command chain did it go? Third, would it make a difference now, after the elections? Did POTUS-elect Trump know and or was anyone in his campaign involved? Did the POTUS-elect or anyone else in his campaign stand to benefit from access to private emails? Finally, what does the law say in this matter? Regardless whether you believe that the Russians deliberately interfered with the American elections or not, you have to admit that it has tainted the POTUS-elect's victory and will continue to do so. What remains to be seen is what will the POTUS-elect and the Republican controlled Congress do with the results of the report and subsequent investigation. Now on to today's subject.
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| The Electoral College map triblive.com |
Donald Trump, Republican candidate for President of the United States happened. Andrew Small writes, in his CityLab article "Trump's Rust Belt Bet," "But as my colleagues Linda Poon and George Joseph write, Trump rammed through the Democrats' 'blue wall' in this part of the the United States." The POTUS-elect successfully barreled through the vaunted "blue wall" by increasing turnout in small and mid-sized former industrial cities , which chipped away at the margins produced by those in the bigger cites.
Trump vs. Clinton Field Office Locations
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| The number and location of Clinton field offices pbs.org |
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| The number and location of Trump field offices pbs.org |
With some information provided to CityLab by Joshua Darr from a previous FiveThirtyEight post, Mr. Small was able to map out both campaign's field offices in the Rust Belt. The above maps are courtesy of the Public Broadcast System and give us a clear picture of each campaign's targeted areas. The map on the right indicates the locations of the Trump campaign field offices. Notice how the majority are in small and mid-sized cities. The map on the left presents the location of the Clinton campaign field offices. Pay attention to how they are focused on the East Coast and traditional Democratic states; primarily in the larger cities. This is just a snapshot of where the field offices existed. Mr. Small tells us that to genuinely understand the the difference in POTUS-elect's strategy, "it's helpful to compare it with Mitt Romney's presence in Pennsylvania in 2012."
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| Side-by-side comparison of the number of campaign field offices fivethirtyeight.com |
The ever resourceful Blogger found a terrific map, courtesy of FiveThirtyEight, that presents a side-by-side comparison of where presidential campaign field offices were located in 2012 and 2016. Look at the map on the bottom left hand corner; where former 2012 Republican nominee former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney opened his field offices. Focusing on the state of Pennsylvania, we observe that his campaign did have offices in medium sized cities such as Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, and Scranton, but as Mr. Small points out, "...for the most part they clustered in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where suburban voters were believed to be the crucial swing vote."
Trump Campaign Pennsylvania Field Offices in 2016
Look at the map on the bottom right hand side, showing where the Trump campaign field offices in Pennsylvania were located. Essentially, POTUS-elect turned counties with medium sized cities. For example, in Erie County, the margin of votes tighten from 17 percent in favor of President Obama to a minuscule 2 percent between Secretary Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump. In Luzerne County, which encompasses Wilkes-Barre ballooned from a 5 percent margin of victory for the the current president to a nearly 20 percent advantage for POTUS-elect.
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| Election map of the Rust Belt states usatoday.com |
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| 2016 Election map for Pennsylvania billypenn.com |
CL: What did everyone who was surprised by the election result miss about cities in the Rust Belt?
Piiparinen: Deindustrialization started 1960 and 1970, so it's tough to say that it was the backlash from deindustrialization that brought Trump to the presidency. I know that's the common narrative out there and to some extent it's true, but when you look at the fact that half of the people didn't vote who are registered in this country, and then the vote is split 25 percent apiece between the two candidates, you get a sense there's a few things going on. One was the 'change' candidate and people wanted change. Trump represented that.
Now, that does tie into the economic backlash against neoliberalism, or deindustrialization...in corollary with deindustrialization there is the ramifications when a place like Cleveland moves forward into the knowledge economy, with many skilled and prepared, and many not. So we see this this bifurcation that has been going on in knowledge economy centers like Boston...in the 1960s a, and Pittsburgh did it in the '90s.
Finally there is a racial component, or 'whitewash,' and that is partly an effect of eight years of a black president. You see this playing out in exurban turnouts...where Republican support increased. So it was really the confluence of the patchwork of white votes that he got for varying reasons that pushed him over the edge...
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| Trump support map nationalreview.com |
Piiparinen: The question is, do we want young creatives to concentrate in a few places on the coasts? This is Enrico Moratti's idea: let's get all the young creatives in the most productive parts of the country. Let's figure out affordability so we can produce in San Fran, we can produce in New York City,...if we don't, then overall growth will stagnate.
But need to take into account how political power is doled out in America. Because if progressive vote are clustered geographically in a few places in a few places, then the power of the vote is lessened. A thousand votes in Ohio have ten times the impact of a thousand in Brooklyn. And so when you have such a divided nation, you have a loss of representation and an increased likelihood of an extremely reactionary American policy forward that's not going to do well for economic productivity from a policy stand point.
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| Youngstown, Ohio en.wikipedia.org |
CL: Where do you think the national conservation needs to go to bridge this disconnect between positive global trends, and what people in these smaller and mid-size communities feel in their daily lives:
Piiparinen: There's the realistic look at what's going on macro-economically, and then there's the nostalgic look. Unless we look at that clearly, then we're going to end up with Donald Trumps.
In the late 1800s in the agrarian economy, 80 percent of the country was employed in agriculture. Today that's 2 percent. Does that mean we don't make food, or we don't eat? No. It means that economic era matured and became automated and became its most efficient.
Next is that industrial era. The proportion of American employed in mining, construction, and manufacturing peaked in 1960 around 40 percent. It will likely be five or so percent going forward. Now that doesn't mean we don't mean we don't make things. Manufacturing output is near all-time highs. It means the industrial economy is maturing, like the agricultural economy before it.
So yes, the problem is the disconnect between the "two Americas" in relation to dislocated workers. What do we do with labor that we once needed not too long ago? What do we do with the labor that we once needed not too long ago?...And of course in places like the Rust Belt the glut of labor is still pretty acute. Cleveland's population peaked in 1950. It did so because it had a macroeconomic reason to support a large population of factory worker en masse again. Our macroeconomic reason now is in life science research and that doesn't fill up factories, and it doesn't fill up the suburban homes or inner city neighborhoods, and it doesn't provide upward mobility at scale.
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| Flipping the Rust Belt cleveland.com |
CL: And it requires education and training, things that shift slowly rather than in the immediate aftermath of job losses.
Piiparinen: And that's why Obama's plan to make community college free is right on. Because you're either going to train people for the new economy and spur innovation and knowledge, or you're not going to do that.
You have to keep in mind America's comparative right now is to produce knowledge. It's no longer to produce trinkets. Rwanda is receiving low-skilled factory from China now. China's going through the transition from industry to services that we've doing since 1950s and 1960s.
CL: So many of the factors of openness and diversity that make cities vibrant places economically seem to cluster in large cities. When you have smaller or mid-sized cities that don't manage to attract those qualities, does it wall those kind of positive gains?
Piiparinen: Our political system doesn't match up with the economic idea that you can just have a "spiky world" of productivity that can carry the day for the country. Because there's problems with having spiky world, affordability problems but there's also political problems. Political power is controlled and disseminated differently than economic growth differently than economic growth, and for a while each have existed on separate rails. Middle America is still powerfully a political battleground, but less so an economic powerhouse. The void in between produced President Donald Trump.
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