Why Trump voters supported Trump

Book review of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics

The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics

By Salena Zito and Brad Todd  

Crown Forum

309 pp; $28

Long before he decided to vote for Donald Trump, Jonathan Kochie, a bar owner in Luzerne County, Pa., worried about his country turning from the American traditions of hard work and diversity. “Well, we got away from that and moved toward only some people’s traditions and cultures matter, and the other people just need to go away,” he tells the authors of The Great Revolt. 

This sympathetic, frustrating book is part of the Great Correction, the post-2016 attempt to understand the Trump voters whom the journalists, strategists and others the authors lump together as “the professional left” failed to appreciate before Election Day. Salena Zito, a columnist, reporter and CNN contributor, and Brad Todd, a Republican consultant, use polling from Mr Todd’s firm to identify seven categories of Trump voters. There are blue-collar workers, evangelicals, educated “Rotary Reliables,” newbie “Perot-ista” voters and “Rough Rebounders,” who saw authenticity and a bit of their own stories in the twice-divorced “perfectly imperfect” Republican candidate. Among women, there are “Girl Gun Power” voters and “Silent Suburban Moms” worried about security.

Whatever the taxonomy, though, the same grievances and issues run through the interviews in this book. The Trump victory emerges as an anti-establishment, anti-elitist protest vote, more rejection of Hillary Clinton than embrace of Donald Trump. The authors note that a town they visited in one of the 23 Wisconsin counties that flipped from Mr Obama to Mr Trump had been plastered with Bernie signs during the 2016 primary. And a woman running as a Democrat for the United States Senate outperformed Ms Clinton in Pennsylvania’s “T” — the region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that James Carville memorably identified as “Alabama without the blacks.”

But polls have shown Americans’ faith in institutions shrinking for years. The populist fervour these voters express is almost as old as the nation: They see themselves playing by the rules but still getting screwed, disdained by elites above them and mooched off by freeloaders beneath. And like the 2010 Tea Party supporters before them, most of those polled in 2016 did not suffer financial hardship: 69 per cent had not lost a job in the past seven years and did not have a family member who had; 58 per cent said the Obama years had brought more job opportunities, not fewer, to their communities.

So what was different?

Apparently, the sense of cultural disrespect that Mr Kochie, one of the “Rotary Reliables,” laments, an exasperation with what these voters see as political correctness. “We voted for ourselves, and that is the thing they missed,” Mr Kochie tells the authors.

Although Ms Zito and Mr Todd refer to “a culture careening leftward,” we get hints and code about what they mean rather than context or probing. Interviewees complain about the self-centeredness of protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, and the laziness of workers who think “everything can be free.” (“The entitlement was crazy,” says a Rough Rebounder.) They dismiss Mr Trump’s sexist hot-mic comments as “just locker room talk.” They repeat the discredited notion the Tea Partiers spread about President Obama’s “apology tour” through Europe. As for the authors, they criticise the Democrats for “multiculturalist militancy,” promoting “sensitivity over the stigmatism of Islam” and the “quest for transgender rights and an ever-lengthening acronym to describe them.”

The misogyny and racism of many Trump voters? The authors decline to consider either, dismissing them as fictional stereotypes of coastal elites. The most maddening example of this lack of context is when the authors mock business executives for “cowering to pressure from liberal activists” when they resigned from the president’s economic councils during “one week in August 2017.” They neglect to point out that this was the week after a march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., when President Trump insisted that the counter-protesters were equally to blame for the deadly violence there.

Ms Zito and Mr Todd are right that journalists failed to understand the Trump voters. But they are so intent on gloating that they miss an opportunity for mutual understanding and promote new stereotypes instead. Many of those interviewed in this book welcomed Mr Obama as a fresh perspective, but Ms Zito and Mr Todd seem unwilling to probe this kind of complexity. Ultimately, they fail to answer the question they set out: Was Donald Trump an aberration or a remaking of American politics?

To that the best answer seems to be: November may tell.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service