Near the end of “The Great Revolt,” a newly released book of Trump Country written by Salena Zito (a Washington Examiner columnist) and Brad Todd, the authors quote from Charles Murray’s prescient 2012 book on rising class divisions, Coming Apart.
“It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors,” Murray wrote. “It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.”
And, indeed, empathy might be what Zito and Todd convey best, profiling voters in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to bring President Trump’s oft-misunderstood coalition to life. Relying on survey data, Zito and Todd outline seven archetypes of the “most surprising” voters Trump attracted, fleshing out each category with compelling voter interviews that make the numbers easier to understand.
The authors let their subjects do much of the work, breathing life into the electoral statistics many coastal observers understand mathematically more than emotionally. Trump’s coalition was a complicated one, stitching together a patchwork of supporters from different backgrounds that are too often stereotyped either only as Roseanne Connor or as bigots.
[BOOK EXCERPT: ‘We knew exactly who he was when we voted for him’]
Readers meet Trump voters like Renee Dibble of Ashtabula, Ohio, who express deep frustrations with such stereotypes. “‘Racist.’ Every time someone throws that at me I spit right back out: ‘Let’s see, our daughter that we’ve adopted is biracial. I got two hundred percent black sons. I’ve got a half-Japanese grandson, a bi-racial daughter-in-law, and a daughter-in-law that is half Puerto Rican and half Mexican. I’m racist?’” she asks.
“It’s not that I think he’s perfect, but we didn’t want perfect.” Dibble later says of Trump. “The reason, I think, and my husband will tell you the same darn thing too, it’s because he tells it like it is.” Dibble, a foster parent, cancer survivor, and longtime Democrat, thinks she and The Donald would get along “really good,” a revelation that brings the authors to one of their strongest insights — that in Trump’s outsider, institution-busting persona, many struggling people see “a proxy for them in a battle they see themselves fighting in their own lives.”
Dibble is but one of many longtime Democrats whose journey to Trump Zito and Todd document, including plenty of people who voted for Barack Obama. Their stories are, perhaps, the most interesting, occurring against the backdrop of widening cultural gulfs with national Democrats and ailing local economies. (Zito and Todd frame each profile with basic economic and historical context on the region in question.)
Some of the book’s interviewees are exuberant in their support of Trump, but some are reluctant, a trait especially pronounced among the “King Cyrus Christians,” as they’re dubbed, many of whom grappled painfully with the election (“It was really hard,” said Julie Bayles of Bristol, Wis., whose pro-life convictions ultimately impelled her to pull the lever for the president, reassured by Vice President Mike Pence’s addition to the ticket).
Others, of course, are true believers all the way through, like Dave Rubbico of Erie, Pa. Though he now has an “Infowars” sticker on his Jeep, Rubbico, a veteran, retired income-maintenance caseworker for the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, and former statewide union official, still calls Obama’s speeches “perfect.” He voted twice for the former president, but was turned off by his perceived sense of inaction.
“Look, this isn’t that complicated, in fact it is pretty simple. I wanted Barack Obama to succeed. He ended up hurting us. He was weak. Donald Trump? Well, we finally have someone who has the balls to say what needs to be said and then goes out and does what he says,” Rubbico explained.
There’s a lot of frustration, a lot of institutional distrust (distributed among Wall Street, Washington, and the media), and shockingly little partisanship. There’s also a lot of people with stories both remarkable and remarkably common, having toiled in earnest for years to better the lives of themselves and their families, sometimes with success, sometimes without much of it at all, but often with strong convictions about the values of hard work — values that multiple interviewees say our culture no longer seems to embrace.
The mystery of how a gaudy reality television star landed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue still looms over Washington, where few are in prolonged contact with the communities that swung big for Trump. It’s true the authors of Great Revolt are sympathetic to their subjects. But that’s a lens those people aren’t often afforded, and though it may not suit them all, for many it’s entirely warranted. The benefit of the project like this one, where voters are simply allowed to explain themselves in their own words, is that even if you don’t share the authors’ sympathies, or agree with their subjects’ reasoning, you’ll at least be able to better understand what happened. After all, Trump supporters will be voting again in 2020, and a truck driver’s ballot is worth just as much as a professor’s.
