The Midwest question: Can US politics move beyond white working class?

This week may be a trial for US President Joe Biden's core strategy-- that appealing to the white working class in the American Midwest is key to the White House

Every now and then, a moment comes when the assumptions underlying a nation’s politics are completely overturned. For India, this moment has come occasionally — most recently in 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), overturning a decades-long consensus that coalitions would always be necessary to rule in New Delhi.

 

This week, the United States (US) may face one of those moments. The battle between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is a test of the sole political principle of the administration led by Ms Harris’ boss, President Joe Biden. And that is that the key to the White House is framing policies for the white working class in the American Midwest.

 

For more than two decades, American politics has revolved around the states of the Midwest. In the 2004 election between John Kerry and George W Bush, it was Ohio that was decisive. That state has now shifted completely into the red, Republican column. Since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, the deciding Midwestern states have been the former Democratic bastions of Michigan and Wisconsin. Even if Ms Harris wins these, she may still lose if she cannot bring home Pennsylvania — which has never technically been Midwestern but does share cultural and economic signifiers with that region.

 

The ruling narrative of American politics is thus the following: That the ex-industrial “rust belt” in Middle America has felt betrayed by elitist politics in Washington; and that these states are dominated by the white working class, which longs for the vanished age in which this was the industrial heartland of the world. The candidate the white working class sees as embodying their values, or defending their interests, is the one whom they will vote for. During the 2008 crisis, they trusted Barack Obama to clean up after Mr Bush. In 2016, they believed that Mr Trump would bring jobs home. And in 2020, they thought Mr Biden’s old-school dedication and down-home background presaged competent and committed administration.

 

Such narratives are essentially unfalsifiable. They cannot be properly tested. But what can be tested is if giving the white working class what it supposedly wants actually makes a difference to electoral results. For some time, it has been claimed that policies focused on reshoring industrial production to the US would allay the resentment of the white working class. That is precisely what Mr Biden’s administration has focused on. If his hand-picked successor does worse in the Midwest than he did, then the political assumptions of the past few decades have failed the only test that matters for such: The ballot box.

 

The US political class is not good at earning votes from industrial policy. Too much money gets spent, and a lot of it in the “wrong” areas politically. But it is worth pointing out that a cynical President could have worked on various other ways of redrawing the electoral map. For example, the shift of the fast-growing states in the American southwest — from Texas to Arizona — towards the Democrats could have been accelerated through targeted policy. But Mr Biden chose to orient his tenure, and even his foreign policy, around securing the Midwest in 2024. If industrial policy, a “foreign policy for the middle class”, the end of the Washington Consensus, higher trade barriers and a pro-union tilt have failed, where does that leave his brand of politics?

 

Cultural shifts in entire regions are perhaps more lasting than the economic distresses that Mr Biden was trying to address. For a century, the southern states of the US were firmly with the Democratic Party, in opposition to the Republicans, who had been formed to oppose slavery in the 19th-century South. Once the Democrats became the party of civil rights in the 1960s, those states drifted away from them. In 1996, Bill Clinton, a Southerner, managed to win half his home region; but by 2000, Al Gore, another Southerner, would lose it all, and fail even to win his home state of Tennessee.

 

The only way to moderate these shifts is cultural or demographic change. Twenty years on from Mr Gore’s loss, there are signs that the effect is reversing. Virginia, the heartland of the old South, is now a blue state thanks to the liberalising effect of the southern Washington suburbs. Mr Biden won Georgia in 2000, driven again by the increasing size and prosperity of Atlanta.

 

The lesson is that overarching political narratives, especially those driven by claims about the economy, are usually quite detached from reality. We in India should not give in to simplistic stories of the kind. For example, the BJP did not lose in 2004 because of reforms or win in 2019 because of welfare. Much deeper trends play out in general elections.