Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to right on radio. I'm talking with Stephanie Tranello about her recently published work, how the Heartland went Red, why local forces matter in age of nationalized politics. Her work offers a comparative study of three predominantly white, post industrial, blue collar midwestern cities.
To know shows the ways local contexts have sped up or slowed down white voters shift to the right. Despite elite polarization, fragmented media, and the nationalization american politics, Trinella argues the importance of place persists. Trinella is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2022, and her research has appeared in the american political science Review journal Politics and Social Problems. Stephanie, welcome to the ride on radio.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: In examining the transition of heartland politics from the New Deal to the Trump erade, how do you explain the resilience of democratic support in some areas like Motorville, despite broader national shifts toward republican dominance?
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question, sort of the question at the heart of the book. And I think if you read the introduction, you'll learn, which probably isn't surprising to most folks, particularly those in the midwest, that a lot of the cities, like the ones that I studied for this book, are voting pretty reliably republican these days. It's pretty rare to see a sort of industrialized heartland, midwestern city that's still voting democratic. But I found one of them, and I studied that one city for about 18 months. I call it Motorville, Wisconsin, in the book, but that's a pseudonym.
And so my argument is that one city is so rare among other cities like it because it still has a set of really politically mobilized unions that are still very engaged in advocating for folks, for local and even statewide offices. And I didn't find that in either of the other cities that I studied.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Okay, so how do you think the fading influence of labor unions have affected the political landscape in Lutheran and Gravesend compared to Motorville, where unions seem to have retained more strengthen.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really hard for unions to organize these days, let alone to stay engaged in politics, whether that's sort of local, state, or national politics. Right. And so in the other cases that I studied, one which was in Minnesota and one that was in Indiana, as you said, unions still exist in both of those places to varying degrees, but they don't sort of advocate for, quote, unquote, labor candidates for office. So they're not trying to elect leaders who talk about issues that are central to organized labor anymore. And in my Indiana case, they really haven't been doing that for decades. And part of that is about sort of the decline of organized labor more broadly. There are fewer people whose jobs, who are part of unions as their I part of their jobs, but it's also about sort of the political engagement of those unions.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: You discussed the role of path dependency in shaping current political behaviors. Can you elaborate on how early political decisions set the stage for future partisanship in these communities?
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think the questions about organized labor are really connected to this question. Right. So in the example of my Indiana case, there was their largest employer left town in the 1970s, and there were rumors that I found circulating in the local editorial pages that they'd left town in search of, quote, cheaper labor.
And so people thought that they'd lost the biggest employer in town because they had, were a UAW shop that had been on strike twice in the past decade. So the whole town thought, okay, organized labor costs us jobs. That's as best I could tell from, from the local newspaper archives. And so after that, a new owner came into that exact same plant, and they hired back a third of that exact same workforce. These are many of the same workers working in the same plant doing very similar jobs. And so the UAW comes back in and says, well, let's get the union going again. And they failed twice. So workers in the 1970s who had been part of the UAW for a couple of decades and who had been going on strike and sort of had been this active part of the local labor movement, they voted against the union twice after the larger employer had left town. Right. And so quite quickly after they voted against that union, the town lost sort of any semblance of a broader labor movement that they'd had. So they had had a local labor council, which is sort of the lowest geographic unit of the AFL CIO, which is the national labor organization. And so local labor councils coordinate across different unions. So they'll kind of get the teachers in the same room as the postal workers, as the UAW folks at the builders, and they'll say, like, what do we need to do in this local election? Who are we endorsing? Or what are the problems going on in town? How can we all work together to help each other? And those labor councils don't exist in many places anymore, but this town had one. It just disappeared after the largest union sort of failed to reunionize these new workers.
And then they basically haven't had any labor activism in that community and 50 years. And so that decision in the 1970s means that that community hasn't had an organized voice telling workers and other residents kind of how to think about their social problems as part of this broader system of inequalities. And so instead, they think about their social problems through a different lens.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: You describe how local contexts such as community organizations and social networks influence political identities. How do these environments directly affect voter behavior and party loyalty?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's all connected. So I'm just going to keep repeating myself in a lot of ways.
But let's keep going with this example of my Indiana city from the 1970s and compare it to this Wisconsin city. Right? And so Indiana city from the 1970s, it's lost its local labor movement. And so as they're experiencing kind of negative economic shocks, the same way that a lot of these kind of industrialized cities were experiencing in the seventies, eighties and nineties, they're experiencing these shocks. They're experiencing a rise in poverty and economic precarity. But instead of having, like I said, an organized labor movement that reminds them sort of this is because we're part of an unequal economic system and we can work together to protect good jobs. And the Democratic Party is the party that kind of supports workers and supports people who are facing economic parity. They lost that in the 1970s. And so in contrast, this Wisconsin city, this rare place that still has a really politically engaged labor movement, they still have this sort of organized force telling folks all of those things. Right? And they're telling people, like, it's not your fault that you're struggling. We're all struggling. It's the fault of this sort of broader system. And if we elect people who care about workers, if we elect people who care about all of us who are struggling, if we elect democrats, then we all stand to benefit of. And so those kinds of messages from local organizations and also the way that local organizations help communities solve problems have direct implications for how people think about national politics.
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Can you talk about the role of local media and information dissemination in shaping political opinions and maintain partisanship in Gravesend, Minnesota?
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. So I think it's sort of widely known at this point that local media is particularly newspapers struggling. Right.
They're not everywhere, and they're not nearly in nearly as many places as they used to be. And often where you see local media, they're not necessarily owned by sort of the locally rooted businesses they used to be. And so that definitely there's been a lot of great research showing how that has contributed to national polarization because sort of, you don't have, like the, I pick up my little newspaper and it tells me about what's going on in my neighborhood. Instead, you're learning about what's going on with Donald Trump and Joe Biden routinely, every single day. And so a lot of folks have shown how that's contributed to polarization in the US. But in my Minnesota case and all through the places I studied, there's lots of other ways that people are still learning about what's going on locally. Whether it's the radio or on Facebook, their friends tend to be really local. There's other research showing that our social media networks are often kind of mirrors of our in person networks. This is sort of mainly in a Facebook era. But so if you think about going on Facebook, you're still seeing things about what goes on in your community from your friends and neighbors who post about Facebook. A lot of local politicians are on social media updating folks about sorts like, you know, right now, I have a lot of road work going on outside my house. And my. I. My city councilor routinely sends emails about these kinds of things, right? And so there's lots of ways that I learn about what's going on in my community from different kinds of local media, both traditional and social media. And what I argue in the book is that in different places, local media kind of talks about the community in different ways, to some extent based on the sort of local organizations that are most prevalent in the town. So going back to that Indiana case, they have a lot of really important and kind of well resourced churches in town that do a lot of public facing activities. They do a lot of service provision. And so the local newspapers, local politicians, everyone on social media everywhere is always talking about what the churches are up to. And they have been since the 1930s, not just in religious ways, but sort of like, what's, you know, like in the thirties, they were posting about. I mean, they were doing straightforward religious things in the thirties in this newspaper. But you'll just say, like, this church is having a bazaar or whatever, and so, or these churches are working together to resolve homelessness. And so you kind of start to think, oh, I live in a town where, like, we fix homelessness through the churches over time. And so that tells you, like, why do I need the government to help fix homelessness? Because churches do it where I live. And so in that way, local media is at least partly a reflection of the local what's going on locally.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Right.
In your book, you explore the concept of anti statism in local politics.
How does that manifest in different cities? I mean, you just gave the example I think with churches. But I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, so that's the exact example. I already warned you I was going to repeat myself so I don't have to.
Yeah, but that sort of the main example in the book is just how it all comes back to local organizations. Right. So this Indiana case, like I said, they voted out the union in 1970s or a major union in the 1970s, but they've kind of sustained a really high church attendance and not just sort of quantitatively high, but qualitatively high. People in this town donate churches. They volunteer with churches. And so churches are sort of stores of human and financial capital for problem solving. And they spend a lot of energy and time investing in addressing what's going on in the community. They're really well coordinated amongst each other. They're plugged into the other nonprofits in town.
During the early days, the Covid-19 pandemic, all of the city leadership in this Indiana town, to the mayor, business leaders and pastors were having weekly phone calls where they talked about, like, what do we need to do? How is everything going? And so they're really seen. Pastors are really seen, and churches are really seen as like key community leaders, and they're expected to play a social service role in the community.
And so because people expect that from them, people give in to the churches. Right. And so it's this sort of cyclical pattern. This is back to the path dependence piece that you asked about before. And so the folks that I talk to you in that community, we hear a lot about anti statism in the sense that Americans hate the federal government. And sure, you can find that if you ask people for it. But often when I talk to people in that particular town, what I heard instead was like, we just don't need the government. It's superfluous. I don't hate it. Why do I need the government to do x, Y and z? Because here we solve it this way. We do it with churches, we do it with nonprofits.
That's not to say that they succeed.
There's actually a lot of poverty and economic precarity in this town, probably the most of all three of my field sites. But people feel like it succeeds. And that's kind of what matters for their politics. Right. Their perception is that I can't really see what the federal government does for us or for our community, but I can see what churches are doing for us in our community. And there's been other folks who've written about the visibility of the federal government and people's lives. And one reason for american sort of anti statism is the lack of visibility of the federal government in their lives. And in this place, we have the lack. On the one hand, we also have the visible presence of these churches and nonprofits.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: On the other hand, you discussed community identity narratives and their impact on political alignment. Can you provide an example of how such narratives have either reinforced or challenged existing political leanings?
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Sure.
Okay. So let's then compare this town in Wisconsin to the town in Minnesota, and maybe a useful contrast. So, in this Wisconsin town, we already know lots of unions. They're really engaged in politics. When I was there during my fieldwork, four out of ten of the city councilors are also labor leaders. Another city councilor was elected with labor support. The mayor was elected with labor support. Right? And so this is the community where, if you ask people kind of to describe this town, someone who's never been there, they'll tell you it's a blue collar town. They'll tell you it's a typical small, midwestern, blue collar city. They'll say it was built by organized labor. They'll say it's a working city. It's a hard working, hard drinking city. Maybe.
But people sort of define this community by its labor, right? They think of themselves and the community more broadly as a community where not just working hard, but working hard together is sort of central to their identity. And they also think that as this sort of hardworking community, they've really struggled over the last couple of decades because of both deindustrialization and sort of a widening gap between the wealthy and the not so wealthy. And they think that that gap has been exacerbated by political attacks on unions, particularly in a state like Wisconsin, where republican governor Scott Walker sort of made attacks on unions, sort of a key tenet of his administration. Right? And so they think of themselves as this hardworking town built on the back of organized labor.
And they don't blame their problems on themselves or on, for example, immigrants or socialism. They blame their problems on this widening income gap. And they think of those problems as more likely to be resolved by a politics that would attempt to redress that income gap. Right? And they think of themselves as benefiting by anything that would level the playing field, because they see themselves as in this unequal, this fundamentally unequal playing field in this kind of working class, although people don't use class language, but this kind of working community. Right?
And so that sort of feeds into their identity as workers, as union members, as people who would benefit from a democratic leaning politics. And then, in contrast, we have my Minnesota case, which still has some semblance of a labor movement. There's still both private and public sector unions in this town. They're not as active as they once were. Churches are not as active as they once were, although church membership still is reasonably high.
And so. And this community has also had some really, really severe economic declines, probably the worst of my three communities. And so they had sort of some of these shared characteristics with the other Indiana town and the Wisconsin town. But now, if you talk to people there, they don't think of themselves as a working town or as a town where everyone's Christian and takes care of each other. They think of themselves as a dying town. And people will tell you this again and again. I bumped into an older guy at the YMCA one morning when I was swimming, and he was like, you know, what are you doing here? Because I was, like, a lot younger than everyone else who was at the YMCA.
He's like, you must not be from here. And I said, no, I'm a grad student. I'm doing this research project. And he was like, why are you trying to study what it's like in a dying town? And that sort of like the fact that, you know, the one interaction this man had with me, he's not the only person who said that. Almost everyone's had something like that over the course of our many conversations over 18 months. But it was. It's that salient to people, right? People have a strong sense this is a community in decline. And so among some group of that town, not everyone in the town, but a group of people in that community.
The sort of rhetoric that immigration and socialism are to blame, in part for these declines and that the Democrats are no longer helping the worker because this community hasn't been helped by democratic administrations as much as they can experience it, right? Like, they still feel they're dying.
And so immigration and socialism are sort of easily, like, pinpointed as scapegoats for a community like that that experiences themselves that way.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: You suggest that national crises and economic downturns don't necessarily disrupt local organizational context. Could you discuss how these cities might react to future national crisis, such as an economic recessions or political upheavals?
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Sure.
I think one of the classic touchstones we have for the decline of local service organizations as a way of taking care of each other is the Great Depression. Right. There's a lot of historians who've argued, and I think argued correctly, that, that kind of civic associationism, you know, ethnic, immigrant, religious, whatever, you know, fraternal organizations, where that's how we met the need. If someone was hungry, if someone lost their job, we had pools of money outside of the government, and that's how we took care of each other, and it just didn't work. During the Great Depression, the scale of the crisis was extraordinary, and all of those organizations failed to meet the need. And so the argument is that then they turn toward the government because what worked before was no longer working.
And so we might have thought something like that would have happened during Covid-19 right. The scale of the crisis was immense. Was like once in a century, hopefully.
But that's not totally what I observed in these places, in part for in largely drawing on the example of the Indiana city with those well resourced churches, as I already told you, they were part of the problem solving that went on during the pandemic. And largely, they massively extended their services to a growing number of hungry folks in town. And residents saw that and continued to think churches are doing a great job. And that's probably because it wasn't just churches. Right. This is, again, the visible, invisible thing. The federal government also massively, massively extended itself, providing resources for folks in need during the pandemic, for the unemployed, for everyone under a certain income threshold.
And then that's just on top of a social safety net that we already have in place. Right. And so I think the combination of a sort of much larger federal government now than what we had in the 1930s and the ability of some of these organizations to continue through that crisis means that I don't think communities, at least the communities I studied, they didn't see organizations break down in the same way that their historical counterparts would have seen organizations break down during the Great Depression. And so in some ways, and again, other folks have written about this a lot more than me, but what we have already in this country is a patchwork of government provision of social services and nonprofit provision of social services. And that patchwork seems to just kind of hop along. Not that it couldn't break down, but it's just kept hopping along to some extent during the pandemic. And so people didn't feel this sort of total organizational decline.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Considering the increasing nationalization of politics, how do you foresee local identities evolving or resisting these trends?
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Oh, good question.
So what I argue in the book is that when people talk about the nationalization of politics, they often mean sort of.
If you ask me a question, I'll answer it as a Democrat or a Republican, regardless of what the question is. So if you say, like, how should I pave this road? I'll say, what do the Democrats say about paving the road? Okay, pave it the democratic way, or what do the Republicans say about trimming the trees? Trim it the republican way. And that's sort of the nationalization argument. Right. And you can see a lot of evidence for that argument in surveys. You can see evidence of that anytime a new issue kind of pops into national politics. You can see people on either side of the aisle polarized quite quickly on those issues. But my argument, and I stand by this, I think, I think it's probably right. I wrote about it. So, hey, but my argument is that there's something more stable that kind of drives to people's politics that's more persistent than these quick moments of polarization. And that that's sort of how they make sense of national politics from their everyday lives, from where they live, from the people they talk to, from the organizations they participated in, from where they work, from who they listen to on the radio, all of these things that sort of gives you a lens through which you view the world. And at some point, yeah, you join a political party, and then if you see, if you're a Republican and you see your party leader, Donald Trump, say something on tv, might think, oh, yeah, hey, that's a good idea. But that's not sort of your overwhelming politics. And so you might say the right republican answer on a survey. But what's really driving your politics is sort of your concern about the decline of small family farms, for example. And that's the main thing that's driving your politics. And so that's the local piece. And I think that that's a lot more durable and a lot more meaningful than these bursts of polarization.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Reflecting on the conclusions drawn from your study, what are the most critical actions that political parties should consider, then address the unique political dynamics of the heartland?
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Well, I suppose it depends on what the political parties want.
I guess they want to win.
So, yeah, I think it depends on which party you're in. But let's leave the parties aside for a second, if I can.
I think that if you were just a person and you were concerned about something like economic inequality in the United States and you wanted to build support for a political coalition that was going to mobilize to address economic inequality, regardless of it, whether it's part of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, we've seen both in american political history. Right. So you want to build this kind of working class politics designed to address economic inequality. If you were that person, then the clear argument in the book is that you should be working to support organized labor and you should be working to rebuild organized labor in places like my Minnesota Field site, where there's still components of a labor movement but they're not as engaged in politics. You should be working to support organized labor in my Wisconsin field site, where they are really politically engaged, but they're still struggling.
And you might realize that it's a lot harder to revitalize organized labor in places like my Indiana field site, where it really hasn't existed for 50 years. Right. And so the book suggests a sort of place based mobilization strategy focused on the american working class and trying to rebuild, revitalize and support the remnants of the labor movement that still exists across different cities.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: Then my last question for you, Stephanie. What advice would you offer to young political scientists or campaigners starting to explore the complex landscape of american heartland politics?
[00:26:07] Speaker B: Oh, well, of course, you got to go out and listen to people, right?
You got to listen to people.
And you always just have to ask them, like, what are their biggest problems? And before you ever get into politics, you should have a solid 30 to 30 minutes, hour long conversation just about their life, their town and what their concerns are. And then you can start thinking about politics.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: This has been my time talk with Stephanie Trinello about her work, how the heartland went red, why local forces matter in the age of nationalized politics, available now from Princeton Press. Stephanie, thanks so much for being on the show.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: And now this.
