This in lieu of a thing I can't find now about how some Midwest county got fucked because Caterpillar closed a plant.
Possibly you are thinking of the Carrier plant near Indianapolis. Everything you need to know about Trump and the Indiana Carrier factory. Became a pillar of his campaign and he struck a "deal" to save it. And of course the reality (and subsequent history) was much more nuanced.
Across the roughly 2,600 counties that he won in the election, growth barely breached 1% in 2016, low even by the standards of the sluggish recovery from the 2007-2009 recession. In some 1,200 of those counties, GDP actually fell by close to 4% in 2016.
"Much" is doing a lot of work in the post title and linked headline. Depending how I interpret that sentence, it seems like the majority of these counties may have had growth, if low. What share of the Clinton counties were in recession? How does this disparity in 2016 compare with the same in 2012 or 2008 or 1992? The economy has been getting more major-metropolitan for a while.
Not to say that can't still be a factor. But the implication of "was in recession" is that that was a new phenomenon, and I suspect it wasn't.
Also, even in more suburban-to-rural areas, counting by county is suspicious as they have such a long tail. The bottom 1,000 counties out of 3,143 have 7 million people, the bottom 2,000 have 31.5 million, and Trump got 63 million votes - he also relied on big counties!
I have cousins who live in Indiana. I don't question their lifestyle choices, but I don't understand them.
I suspect they vote for Democrats anyway. The one showed up in an all-electric VW.
How does this disparity in 2016 compare with the same in 2012 or 2008 or 1992? The economy has been getting more major-metropolitan for a while.
This is what I was trying to get at with Roger and Me.
2: I want very much that you do my homework and prove me wrong! Clear?
Heebietake: Those are all excellent reasons to think Biden will win the popular vote. What I question is whether those reasons matter at all to the ~100k people whose votes actually decide the election (or did in 2016).
In terms of the end, January 2020 is going to stick with people.
Is that supposed to be January 2021?
See, that's the kind of deep homework-doing that mossy and I wanted from this post.
5: Yes, I didn't read that part carefully enough.
Two-thirds of presidents who run for re-election win, and in every case but three in US history they have increased their popular vote and their number of EC votes by doing so.
The exceptions - presidents who ran for re-election and won but didn't get as many votes as they did when they were elected, are:
Wilson, who got more popular votes but fewer EC votes in 1916, presumably due to third-party weirdness in 1912;
FDR, who lost votes in 1940 and 1944 compared to 1932 and 1936;
and Barack Obama in 2012.
2012 was a lot closer than everyone remembers.
Heebietake: Those are all excellent reasons to think Biden will win the popular vote. What I question is whether those reasons matter at all to the ~100k people whose votes actually decide the election (or did in 2016).
I think they apply fairly well to Michigan/Georgia/Wisconsin/Arizona voters. It's not an argument that relies on the New York/California/Texas dichotomy.
11.last: looking at the results, it wasn't a close election, but I do see foreshadowing of 2016 (Florida! Ohio!).
Prove Me Wrong, Reprobates!
That's not a kind way to refer to the American voter.
13: Obama won Ohio in 2012, and it wasn't even that close. I still don't understand what happened between then and Nov. 2016.
When did Obama wear the tan suit?
13: Obama won Ohio in 2012, and it wasn't even that close. I still don't understand what happened between then and Nov. 2016.
You're correct. Looking at the history again Ohio did vote for GWB twice (by comfortable margins) but, yes, 2016 looks way outside the previous results.
16: You figured it out!
On August 28, 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama held a live press conference on increasing the military response against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria while wearing a tan suit.
When was the flag pin lapel incident? Or the scandal about letting the soldier hold an umbrella for him?
Did we really live through those strange times together? It's so wild that one side can freak out about flag pins, and then one side can storm the capitol, and those are the same side, while the opposition is busy trying to provide healthcare.
"Gaslighting" became the most annoying word years ago, but it is like an abusive relationship where one person apologizes profusely for spilling coffee and the other person withholds forgiveness, but then goes and cheats with a new partner every weekend.
White people are obviously the broken. The question is why Ohio white people broke so much compared to other northern states.
It is impossible for me to say, "Trump will not win the general,"
I want to believe it so badly, but I've also come to believe that huge chunks of the American population are just malicious dickheads on principle, so.
Trump will win without another massive GOTV effort.
Biden got 15 million more votes than Clinton. The polls aren't good enough to predict the election with that kind of variation in turn out, unless they can predict turn out (and they don't have enough data to do that well). There's at least a 25% chance Trump is president after 2024.
But we barely had a conventional GOTV effort in 2020. Lots of postcards; maybe that was more effective than doorknocking?
In California? I can assure you there were hundreds out knocking on doors here.
11.last: And it's kind of a shame that people don't remember that. Romney was a strong candidate! Much much stronger than Trump. Kerry too.
The main thing I remember about 2012 is the "unskewed" poll guy.
I had forgotten that that one turned out to be straightforwardly accurate.
(Which on rewatch, also presaged dignity-wraithing.)
2012 was so much more civilized. Unsurprisingly, I had a lot of students solidly in Romney's corner and some were even working on his campaign*, and the day after the election everyone was pretty cheerful. Not so much in 2016!
*I'm guessing phone banking? It's not like he was going to lose Utah. They called it with 0% reporting.
It's not like he was going to lose Utah.
Blowing the elephant whistle to keep the elephants away! And getting some political cred / connections in the process, I imagine.
Obviously the risk is that the Fed's much-sought recession materializes after all (as Drum super-confidently predicts, although I'm pretty sure he's already moved the goalposts by 3-6 months from his '22 predictions of recession), and that's all she wrote for Biden. If the election were this year, I'd bet a lot on a PV victory, and quite a bit on an EC victory. But Nov. '24 is very far away.
That said, if nothing much changes economically, then I think the passing of inflation will only help Biden, and I think Dobbs has permanently shifted a few percent of white women into the D column in every state. There was just a special election in which a +13 R incumbent won a +20 Trump district by like 4 points (all numbers approximate from 2 day old memories). There's IMO zero evidence that Dobbs isn't a permanent, significant shift in every district in the country, and the horror stories will never stop coming, which means the salience will never fade.
Again, if it's a +5 R year because of economics or whatever, that shift won't save Ds, but I think that it may offset the R advantage in the EC.
On a related note, I saw a couple different items pointing to the exact same thing from different data: a small but significant number of Hispanics has both changed their self-ID to white and their voting from D to R. "How the Irish Became White" was history, but we're seeing it in real time.
As I'm sure I've said, I believe firmly that misogyny is the essence of Trumpism, not racism, xenophobia, or homo/transphobia. It's increasingly explicitly linked to a certain definition of whiteness, so I think that's the avenue of conversion (so to speak) just as much as anti-Black racism. My sense, partly from living in Miami, was that (many) Hispanics viewed whites as "softer" on various kinds of machismo, but that MAGA has made loud-and-proud whiteness quite explicitly misogynistic, and that, combined with the other perks of whiteness, makes it a more appealing identity. IOW, 30 years ago Anglos were kind of wimpy, but now associating with whites means associating with a more appealing masculinity.
So, when are people going to discuss Florida's new African American history curriculum? 300 years of unpaid internships
26 et seq: It is really striking, now I think about it, that incumbents almost always do better in their re election. Certainly isn't true in the UK - much more common for the government majority to shrink (of course parliamentary system, but still).
I don't see anything out of the ordinary.
37: Doesn't that seem less the case in the last four decades, though? Before Thatcher, one party usually kept government through one or two elections. Since, it's usually three or four. Thatcher gained in '83, as did Cameron in '15 and Johnson in '19, and Blair only lost 12 seats in '01. And now the polls suggest a third major turnabout. It's like the public decided it likes to binge and purge.
Can I ask a really stupid question about Irish people not being white? In the past were people able to tell who was Irish just by looking at them?
It's because we have incredible cheek bones.
Also, you can tell "poor" and "immigrant" pretty easily.
Names are also a giveaway. But mostly the cheekbones.
Right, I assume 43 is going on (plus accent). But I think of "race" as being a category that at least in theory you're supposed to be able to tell from just looking at a naked person. (Of course this isn't possible in practice in plenty of cases, but people often find it disturbing when then can't tell a person's race just from looking at them.) But is that not how people thought about race then?
I guess you can say the same thing about Hispanic or Latine as a category, but of course that's why it's been separated out as a non-racial distinction.
The Irish immigrants to America were very traditional in terms of religion. They were always clothed in public.
I, too, have questions about the "Irish weren't white" thesis, but in my experience, it was sometime in the '70s that slurs against the Italians and Irish lost a lot of their sting, and maybe a little later for the Poles.
We told Polish jokes in the 70s. Biden is the first Irish American who doesn't have a nephew trying to run on a Republican platform in the Democratic primary to be president, so maybe we're finally being accepted.
41: I thought "Irish aren't white" was a shorthand for "Irish people were discriminated against compared to non-Irish white people". It's not like they were classed as "coloured" in the Deep South or deprived of the vote or whatever. The argument of "How the Irish became white" was that Irish immigrants to the US were able to leverage their cruelty towards black people in order to improve their status in white society. It isn't arguing that the Irish in America were literally regarded as "not part of the white race".
49: Yeah - my question about that is: What does that framing contribute to our understanding of race and ethnicity in the US?
Irish people were discriminated against compared to non-Irish white people
That's the motte; the bailey is that (whether or not it was precisely racial or whether it worked the same way legally) Irish immigrants had it approximately as bad as Black people and got out entirely through their own efforts.
There's real ambiguity in how people have talked about race and applied their beliefs socially, but legally the Irish were not barred from naturalization under the 1790 US law that limited naturalization to "free white persons." I haven't read Ignatiev's book but the criticisms I've heard are that he presents the concept of "being white/becoming white" in terms that people at the time wouldn't have used to describe themselves.
I don't remember most of the whiteness studies books I've read because I didn't find them particularly compelling, but somewhere in the archives I think I posted a comment about them when I still had some memory of them.
I think there's an ambiguity between "white" in an American context meaning "not subject to any legal disadvantages either now or in recent memory by reason of ethnic or racial identity" and "unquestionably a member of the ethnic group with the highest social status". The Irish, and Italians, and Jews, and Slavs were all, as far as I know, white under the first definition all along. To varying degrees they weren't included in the second definition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it's arguable how much the second definition described a distinction between white and non-white at that time.
41: If you're aware enough, there are subtle tells: https://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2020/04/30/its-a-struggle-big-irish-head-syndrome-sufferers-speak-out/
There was a thing from the 1890s or so where a Pittsburgh factory manager wrote out all the ethnicity and what types of jobs they are good for. But I can't find it now.
I believe Sir Kraab sent it in as a guest post. Let me go see when that was.
She sent the email on Saturday, Jan 2, 2016. So probably I posted it during the week thereafter.
53 is correct I think. There's also a diachronic component in which the importance of "race" as a "scientific" concept increased markedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rise of Darwinism, and there were accompanying changes to social and legal conceptions of difference.