About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 1 (July 2017)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiaavy0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Key Points * Three pivotal dates in midwestern history-i 787, 1854, and 1937-have shaped midwestern culture and attitudes and can be used to examine the Midwest's role in the 2016 election. * The Midwest's history reveals which factors contributed to the change in voters' attitudes, their switch from Obama to Trump, and why midwesterners have voted close to the national average throughout history. * Following this discovery, the Midwest, especially the outstate Midwest, may no longer be ignored by political journalists and taken for granted by Democratic strategists. This essay is adapted from a speech Michael Barone gave to the Midwest Historical Association on June 7, 2017. Much to the surprise of psephologists-the fancy word for election watchers-the key votes in the zo16 presidential election were cast in the Midwest. Not by Hispanics in the Sun Belt or young techies in newly fashionable gentrified neighborhoods in Silicon Valley, Brooklyn, or Austin, but by white noncollege graduates in the counties outside million-plus metropolitan areas in the Midwest, Of the 1oo electoral votes that switched from Democratic in 2012 to Republican in 2016,50 were in the Midwest-Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa-and 20 more were in Pennsylvania, specifically west of metro Philadelphia, which demographically and attitudinally more closely resembles the Midwest than the rest of the Northeast. In addition, 29 more were in Florida, where the key Obama-to-Trump movement came in small counties along the Gulf Coast and north of Orlando, heavily inhabited by former midwesterners. And the one additional Democratic-to-Republican electoral vote was that of the Second Congressional District of Maine, a north woods area resembling the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or the north woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota. To paraphrase the British tabloid the Sun, which headlined the conservatives' surprise 1992 win with It's the Sun Wot Won It,' in 2016, it was the Midwest wot won it. The standard analysis of this is that significant numbers of white noncollege graduates nationally shifted from Obama to Trump and that those voters were concentrated in the Midwest. That is right, as far as it goes. But history also has its claims-and it can affect voters' attitudes, often almost invisibly, for many years and decades afterward. So, I want to look at the Midwest's history to explain this unexpected turn of events. And not just to understand why white noncollege midwesterners switched from Obama to Trump in 2016, but also to understand why such an unusually high percentage of them, compared to the national average, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and why midwesterners have voted as they have, close to but not identical to the national average, throughout history. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most