During the height of the New Deal era 90 years ago, white working-class communities tended to support the Democratic Party, but this support has ebbed away so that now almost all support the Republican Party. In new research, Stephanie Ternullo looks closely at towns in Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota, finding that in these communities the types of local organizations which residents rely on matters. Communities where churches and Christian organizations play an active role tend to want less intervention from the federal government and are therefore more likely to support the Republican Party, while those communities which still have politically mobilized unions are more likely to support the Democratic Party. 

It’s February 2020. I’m standing in the back of a crowded room in a small Minnesota city, which I refer to as Gravesend.* All the seats are taken, as dozens of people have showed up to listen to the head of the Economic Development Association talk about his plans for revitalizing the local economy. As the Question-and-Answer portion of the meeting begins, there is palpable tension: the city’s largest employer, a steel foundry, burned to the ground in the late 1990s and the land where it once stood still sits vacant. Residents return to this again and again. Why hasn’t the city ever done anything with that land? Why have city leaders not been able to woo new companies to take the foundry’s place? Where is the city’s leadership? 

These questions echo what I heard in my conversations with residents and community leaders in Gravesend during the 18 months leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The community had lost so much that residents worried it was dying, and they seemed to lack the kind of local leadership they needed to save them from extinction. Ultimately, I saw how this context of decline offered fruitful ground for the Republican Party: as statewide and federal candidates followed Donald Trump’s message that immigrants and socialism were a dual threat to the small town (white) American way of life, this resonated with many people in Gravesend who already felt they were under threat.

Similar people and places often vote differently

Gravesend, in many ways, represents the story of Republican politics in the industrial Heartland that scholars such as Katherine Cramer, Arlie Hochschild, and Justin Gest have documented: largely white, ex-urban, and postindustrial communities often feel their challenges go unnoticed by their state and federal governments, who instead favor cities, immigrants, and people of color. Many people in these communities increasingly embrace right-wing populist appeals that promise to dismantle those systems.

But this story misses the fact that many white, postindustrial cities like Gravesend do not share Gravesend’s politics. For example, in addition to Gravesend, I also studied two other, very similar cities: Lutherton, IN, has voted Republican in national politics since the early 1970s; and Motorville, WI, still votes reliably Democratic at all levels of office.

Why do similar people in these communities vote so differently?

I argue that one important part of the answer is place itself: not just the local material and demographic conditions that many postindustrial communities share, but also the local organizations – particularly churches, unions, and the community leadership they provide—that vary across the Heartland and shape residents’ experience of both the local economy and national politics. Only when we understand that variation can we understand how and why the industrial Heartland has gone from blue to red.

Communities after the New Deal era

To illustrate the role that place plays in Heartland politics, first consider the starting point: the height of the Democrats’ political appeal in industrialized cities during the New Deal era of the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt’s social programs and pro-labor policies created a new link between the Democratic Party and – largely white—workers. People across Gravesend, Lutherton, and Motorville, swelled into the Democrats’ ranks.

Figure 1 below illustrates this, showing all the counties that could be considered part of the white, working-class, New Deal coalition and that have remained largely white and working-class to the present.

Figure 1 – White working class communities in the US

But since the New Deal era, an astoundingly small portion of those counties – just four percent – have remained firmly in the Democratic coalition. Motorville, Wisconsin is among them.

Lutherton, Indiana, along with 68 percent of the original New Deal counties, began voting Republican in 1968, after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and ensuing Racial Realignment. Another 11 percent turned to the right in the early 2000s, after the consolidation of the Religious Right within the Republican Party.

By the time of Trump’s first election, just 21 percent of the original white, working-class counties remained competitive to Democrats. At that point, most of the remaining counties– like Gravesend, Minnesota – peeled away.

“Main Street, Poseyville, IN” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by w_lemay 

Looking at why communities moved away from the Democrats

What explains why some places, like Lutherton, abandoned the Democratic coalition decades ago, while other, very similar places, like Gravesend, did not do so until 2016?

To answer these questions, I spent several months in these three communities, interviewing more than 100 community leaders and 80 residents not directly involved in local politics. I then re-interviewed residents four times over the course of the 18 months leading up to the 2020 election.

I found that local organizational contexts shape the way residents diagnose their postindustrial social problems and construct narratives about what kind of community they are and where they fit into the party system. Ultimately, this helps produce and reproduce residents’ partisan attachments.

What does this mean concretely in each of my field sites?

Lutherton, IN – which turned to the right decades ago – still has thriving churches that coordinate with each other, local nonprofits, and local government to visibly address social needs like hunger and homelessness as they emerge. Even when they fail to solve local problems, the very visibility of their actions reminds residents that they are part of a Christian community that takes care of itself, such that they don’t need or want more intervention from the federal government. For many Lutherton residents, the Republican Party makes sense.

In contrast, Motorville, WI—the outlier Democratic case—still has politically mobilized unions who advocate for policies that support organized labor and help elect local officials to enact those policies. Many residents there think of themselves as a disadvantaged community that is struggling under the weight of growing economic inequality and would benefit from more redistribution. For many Motorville residents, the Democratic Party makes sense.

The fact that this community is a political outlier (one of just four percent of the original white, working-class New Deal counties still voting for Democrats) suggests both the power of organized labor in postindustrial politics and its precarity: unions have helped to keep this rare community in the Democratic coalition, but the labor movement’s broader decline has contributed to the broader rightward turn across the industrial Heartland.

The role of local organizations in postindustrial areas

This brings us back to Gravesend, MN, where churches and unions still exist, but are no longer acting as community leaders in the same way they do in Lutherton and Motorville. Moreover, Gravesend has had a particularly acute experience of postindustrial decay: in addition to losing their largest employer in the 1990s, they’ve seen a 20 percent decline in population since 1980. But it is the combination of that material transformation and the lack of coherent community leadership that produces the sentiments I heard at the economic development meeting: amidst these challenges that threaten the very survival of the community, where are their leaders?

This pervasive feeling that the community is near-death and lacks answers about what can be done to save them, left several people I interviewed open to the kinds of messages articulated by a new wave of Republicans who have argued that immigration and socialism are further threats to their community’s survival.

But once we set Gravesend in comparison with Lutherton and Motorville, it becomes clear that the story of the Heartland’s past and present reddening is not just one of racialized postindustrial populism – this likely explains some, but clearly not all, of the Republican Party’s support in these communities. In Lutherton, for example, residents often think of the federal government as superfluous, but they are less likely to view it as malignant. Moreover, the emergent vein of right-wing populism I observed in Gravesend is not the necessary product of deindustrialization or status threat — it is also about how communities have responded to recent economic-political transformations using their existing organizational resources, thereby teaching residents how to think about local challenges and which political party will best address them.

• * All town names are pseudonymized to protect participants’ anonymity. 
• This article is based on the paper, ‘Place-Based Partisanship: How Place (Re)produces Americans’ Partisan Attachments’, in the American Journal of Sociology. 
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.  
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