President Trump’s sweep of the Rust Belt last November caught the Acela corridor off guard, inducing months of rumination from people with elite diplomas in coastal cities hoping to diagnose the Democratic Party’s decline in its historical strongholds.
One would be hard pressed to find a congressional district more representative of this shift than the district of Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., which covers rural parts of central and northern Wisconsin. From 1969 until 2010, the district re-elected Democrat David Obey time after time to represent its interests in Washington. But a changing economy has hit the district hard, shuttering paper mills and hurting farms.
“Romney/Ryan won my district by two points. Trump won it by more than 20,” Duffy said during an editorial board interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “I have the least Republican district in Wisconsin by far. Donald Trump won my district with the highest percent vote total than any other district in the state.”
Duffy believes it was Trump’s focus on the economy that impelled his constituents to vote Republican last year. “As Democrats have focused more on the social side, those who have been left by in a lackluster economy have looked for someone that’s going to stand up and fight, and Trump is that guy,” the fourth-term congressman said. “They feel like they now have a president who is fighting for them.”
“They listen to Billy Bush and they’re like ‘I don’t love this,’ but they feel like he’s fighting for them,” he added later in the interview.
Duffy, a champion lumberjack athlete who won his seat in the Republican wave of 2010, walked through a detailed and insightful explanation of exactly how Trump captured the loyalty of his constituents, pointing specifically to the impacts of trade policies.
I’m a free trade guy. I believe free trade is good for America. But there’s a lot of people in my district, free trade has taken a factory away, has taken their job away. Unfair trade deals allow paper to get dumped into the U.S. We already have a tough time with paper because of these, but you dump Chinese paper, you start closing down my paper mills.
You have the federal government that locks up my federal forest, so instead of logging and managing our forests, we have trees that are actually dying and rotting in our forest.
We have Canada that treats us unfairly with regard to ultrafiltered milk. They want free trade until they want to protect their own industries.
“They see all of this,” Duffy said, “and they want someone to stand up and fight for them. They haven’t had a raise in 10 years, they haven’t felt like they have good opportunity.”
Trump’s campaign rhetoric, he believes, resonated with voters in Wisconsin because it spoke directly to the immediate, practical interests of their lives.
“Everything Trump talked about was about them,” Duffy contended, “So as Democrats were talking about bathrooms, he was talking about their job and the economy and fighting for them. And that had a profound impact on flag-waving, church-going, beer-drinking, Packer-cheering Americans.”
And it wasn’t a one-off phenomenon for the Republican Party either, the congressman argued.
“I’ll tell you of the support that he’s gotten, they haven’t left him. They are still there,” Duffy divulged.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
