Who Turned My Blue State Red?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/who_turned_my_blue_state_red_20151122/
Posted on Nov 22, 2015
By Alec MacGillis / ProPublica
Shutterstock
This story was co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times' Sunday
Review.
It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country
that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are
increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul
railed against "intergenerational welfare" and said that "the culture of
dependency on government destroys people's spirits," yet racked up winning
margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily
dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely
anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly
erratic first term - with strong support in struggling towns where many rely
on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a
conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion
that had given the state the country's largest decrease in the uninsured
under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.
It's enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where
the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of
blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those
godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own
interests.
But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that's
taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic
Party's growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps
us from fully grasping what's going on in communities where conditions have
deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in
their mortality rates.
In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung
Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the
safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting
against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not
voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting
suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger
proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder - the
sheriff's deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas
station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the
Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those
below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety
net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining
towns.
These are voters like Pamela Dougherty, a 43-year-old nurse I encountered at
a restaurant across from a Walmart in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she'd come
to hear Rick Santorum, the conservative former Pennsylvania senator with a
working-class pitch, just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses. In a lengthy
conversation, Dougherty talked candidly about how she had benefited from
government support. After having her first child as a teenager, marrying
young and divorcing, Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten
safety-net support - most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to
attend community college, where she'd earned her nursing degree.
She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this
didn't make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that
helped her. Instead, Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She
was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display
at the dialysis center. The federal government has for years covered kidney
dialysis treatment in outpatient centers through Medicare, regardless of
patients' age, partly on the logic that treatment allows people with kidney
disease to remain productive. But, Dougherty said, only a small fraction of
the 54 people getting dialysis at her center had regular jobs.
"People waltz in when they want to," she said, explaining that, in her
opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said
"'You're getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit
yourself.'" At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to
keep up her grades. "When you're getting assistance, there should be hoops
to jump through so that you're paying a price for your behavior," she said.
"What's wrong with that?"
Yes, citizens like Dougherty are at one level voting against their own
economic self-interest, to the extent that the Republican approach on taxes
is slanted more to the wealthy than that of the Democrats. This was the
thesis of Thomas Frank's 2004 best seller, "What's the Matter With Kansas,"
which argued that these voters had been distracted by social issues like
guns and abortion. But on another level, these voters are consciously opting
against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good
for other people - specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients in
their midst.
I've heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing
against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but
is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to
indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state's deeply depressed
southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a
Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area's reliance on
government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people
on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator
Manchin declared, "If you're on a public check, you should be subjected to a
random check."
It's much the same across the border in eastern Kentucky, which, like
southern West Virginia, has been devastated by the collapse of the area's
coal industry. Eastern Kentucky now shows up on maps as the most
benefit-dependent region in the country. The welfare reforms of the 1990s
have made cash assistance hard to come by, but food-stamp use in the state
rose to more than 18 percent of households in 2012 from under 10 percent in
2001.
With reliance on government benefits so prevalent, it creates constant
moments of friction, on very intimate terms, said Jim Cauley, a Democratic
political consultant from Pike County, a former Democratic bastion in
eastern Kentucky that has flipped Republican in the past decade. "There are
a lot of people on the draw," he said. Where opposition to the social safety
net has long been fed by the specter of undeserving inner-city
African-Americans - think of Ronald Reagan's notorious "welfare queen" - in
places like Pike County it's fueled, more and more, by people's resentment
over rising dependency they see among their own neighbors, even their own
families. "It's Cousin Bobby - 'he's on Oxy and he's on the draw and we're
paying for him,' " Cauley said. "If you need help, no one begrudges you
taking the program - they're good-hearted people. It's when you're
able-bodied and making choices not to be able-bodied." The political upshot
is plain, Cauley added. "It's not the people on the draw that's voting
against" the Democrats, he said. "It's everyone else."
This month, Pike County went 55 percent for the Republican candidate for
governor, Matt Bevin. That's the opposite of how the county voted a dozen
years ago. In that election, Kentucky still sent a Republican to the
governor's mansion - but Pike County went for the Democratic candidate. And
30 percent fewer people voted in the county this month than did in 2003 -
11,223 voters in a county of 63,000, far below the county's tally of
food-stamp recipients, which was more than 17,000 in 2012.
In Maine, LePage was elected governor in 2010 by running on an anti-welfare
platform in a state that has also grown more reliant on public programs - in
2013, the state ranked third in the nation for food-stamp use, just ahead of
Kentucky. LePage, who grew up poor in a large family, has gone at safety-net
programs with a vengeance. He slashed welfare rolls by more than half after
imposing a five-year limit, reinstituted a work requirement for food-stamp
recipients and refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare to cover 60,000
people. He is now seeking to bar anyone with more than $5,000 in certain
assets from receiving food stamps. "I'm not going to help anybody just for
the sake of helping," the governor said in September. "I am not that
compassionate."
His crusade has resonated with many in the state, who re-elected him last
year.
That pattern is right in line with surveys, which show a decades-long
decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in
conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. There has been a
particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans,
who perhaps see it as a threat to their own Social Security and Medicare.
Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University,
have pinpointed a tendency by Americans in the second lowest quintile of the
income ladder - the working or lower-middle class - to dissociate themselves
from those at the bottom, where many once resided. "There's this virulent
social distancing - suddenly, you're a worker and anyone who is not a worker
is a bad person," said Edin. "They're playing to the middle fifth and
saying, 'I'm not those people.' "
Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are
simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest
Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates
have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012;
also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in
recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
In the spring of 2012, I visited a free weekend medical and dental clinic
run by the organization Remote Area Medical in the foothills of southern
Tennessee. I wanted to ask the hundreds of uninsured people flocking to the
clinic what they thought of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act,
whose fate was about to be decided by the Supreme Court. I was expecting a
"What's the Matter With Kansas" reaction - anger at the president who had
signed the law geared to help them. Instead, I found sympathy for Obama. But
had they voted for him? Of course not - almost no one I spoke with voted, in
local, state or national elections. Not only that, but they had barely heard
of the health care law.
This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge
ramifications - polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending
on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows
even larger among poor nonvoters. In the early 1990s, Senator Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky freely cited the desirability of having a more select
electorate when he opposed an effort to expand voter registration. And this
fall, Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, reportedly said low
turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state's Obamacare gains
wouldn't help Democrats. "I remember being in the room when Jennings was
asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences
of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance," State Auditor Adam
Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a
Louisville journalist. "And he simply said, 'People on Medicaid don't vote.'
"
Republicans would argue that the shift in their direction among voters
slightly higher up the ladder is the natural progression of things - people
recognize that government programs are prolonging the economic doldrums and
that Republicans have a better economic program.
So where does this leave Democrats and anyone seeking to expand and build
lasting support for safety-net programs such as Obamacare?
For starters, it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit
from the programs. This is no easy task with the rural poor, who are much
more geographically scattered than their urban counterparts. Not helping
matters in this regard is the decline of local institutions like labor
unions - while the United Mine Workers of America once drove turnout in coal
country, today there is not a single unionized mine still operating in
Kentucky.
But it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic - finding
ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income
ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make
sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible. Instances of
fraud and abuse are far rarer than welfare opponents would have one believe,
but it only takes a few glaring instances to create a lasting impression.
Edin, the Hopkins researcher, suggests going further and making it easier
for those collecting disability to do part-time work over the table, not
just to make them seem less shiftless in the eyes of their neighbors, but to
reduce the recipients' own sense of social isolation.
The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true
economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the
rise, the sort of improvement that is now belatedly being discussed for coal
country, including on the presidential campaign trail. If fewer people need
the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will
be more likely to re-engage in their communities - not least by turning out
to vote.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Who Turned My Blue State Red?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/who_turned_my_blue_state_red_20151122/
Posted on Nov 22, 2015
By Alec MacGillis / ProPublica
Shutterstock
This story was co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times' Sunday
Review.
It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country
that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are
increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul
railed against "intergenerational welfare" and said that "the culture of
dependency on government destroys people's spirits," yet racked up winning
margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily
dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely
anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly
erratic first term - with strong support in struggling towns where many rely
on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a
conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion
that had given the state the country's largest decrease in the uninsured
under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.
It's enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where
the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of
blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those
godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own
interests.
But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that's
taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic
Party's growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps
us from fully grasping what's going on in communities where conditions have
deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in
their mortality rates.
In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung
Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the
safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting
against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not
voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting
suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger
proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder - the
sheriff's deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas
station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the
Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those
below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety
net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining
towns.
These are voters like Pamela Dougherty, a 43-year-old nurse I encountered at
a restaurant across from a Walmart in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she'd come
to hear Rick Santorum, the conservative former Pennsylvania senator with a
working-class pitch, just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses. In a lengthy
conversation, Dougherty talked candidly about how she had benefited from
government support. After having her first child as a teenager, marrying
young and divorcing, Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten
safety-net support - most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to
attend community college, where she'd earned her nursing degree.
She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this
didn't make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that
helped her. Instead, Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She
was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display
at the dialysis center. The federal government has for years covered kidney
dialysis treatment in outpatient centers through Medicare, regardless of
patients' age, partly on the logic that treatment allows people with kidney
disease to remain productive. But, Dougherty said, only a small fraction of
the 54 people getting dialysis at her center had regular jobs.
"People waltz in when they want to," she said, explaining that, in her
opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said
"'You're getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit
yourself.'" At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to
keep up her grades. "When you're getting assistance, there should be hoops
to jump through so that you're paying a price for your behavior," she said.
"What's wrong with that?"
Yes, citizens like Dougherty are at one level voting against their own
economic self-interest, to the extent that the Republican approach on taxes
is slanted more to the wealthy than that of the Democrats. This was the
thesis of Thomas Frank's 2004 best seller, "What's the Matter With Kansas,"
which argued that these voters had been distracted by social issues like
guns and abortion. But on another level, these voters are consciously opting
against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good
for other people - specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients in
their midst.
I've heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing
against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but
is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to
indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state's deeply depressed
southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a
Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area's reliance on
government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people
on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator
Manchin declared, "If you're on a public check, you should be subjected to a
random check."
It's much the same across the border in eastern Kentucky, which, like
southern West Virginia, has been devastated by the collapse of the area's
coal industry. Eastern Kentucky now shows up on maps as the most
benefit-dependent region in the country. The welfare reforms of the 1990s
have made cash assistance hard to come by, but food-stamp use in the state
rose to more than 18 percent of households in 2012 from under 10 percent in
2001.
With reliance on government benefits so prevalent, it creates constant
moments of friction, on very intimate terms, said Jim Cauley, a Democratic
political consultant from Pike County, a former Democratic bastion in
eastern Kentucky that has flipped Republican in the past decade. "There are
a lot of people on the draw," he said. Where opposition to the social safety
net has long been fed by the specter of undeserving inner-city
African-Americans - think of Ronald Reagan's notorious "welfare queen" - in
places like Pike County it's fueled, more and more, by people's resentment
over rising dependency they see among their own neighbors, even their own
families. "It's Cousin Bobby - 'he's on Oxy and he's on the draw and we're
paying for him,' " Cauley said. "If you need help, no one begrudges you
taking the program - they're good-hearted people. It's when you're
able-bodied and making choices not to be able-bodied." The political upshot
is plain, Cauley added. "It's not the people on the draw that's voting
against" the Democrats, he said. "It's everyone else."
This month, Pike County went 55 percent for the Republican candidate for
governor, Matt Bevin. That's the opposite of how the county voted a dozen
years ago. In that election, Kentucky still sent a Republican to the
governor's mansion - but Pike County went for the Democratic candidate. And
30 percent fewer people voted in the county this month than did in 2003 -
11,223 voters in a county of 63,000, far below the county's tally of
food-stamp recipients, which was more than 17,000 in 2012.
In Maine, LePage was elected governor in 2010 by running on an anti-welfare
platform in a state that has also grown more reliant on public programs - in
2013, the state ranked third in the nation for food-stamp use, just ahead of
Kentucky. LePage, who grew up poor in a large family, has gone at safety-net
programs with a vengeance. He slashed welfare rolls by more than half after
imposing a five-year limit, reinstituted a work requirement for food-stamp
recipients and refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare to cover 60,000
people. He is now seeking to bar anyone with more than $5,000 in certain
assets from receiving food stamps. "I'm not going to help anybody just for
the sake of helping," the governor said in September. "I am not that
compassionate."
His crusade has resonated with many in the state, who re-elected him last
year.
That pattern is right in line with surveys, which show a decades-long
decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in
conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. There has been a
particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans,
who perhaps see it as a threat to their own Social Security and Medicare.
Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University,
have pinpointed a tendency by Americans in the second lowest quintile of the
income ladder - the working or lower-middle class - to dissociate themselves
from those at the bottom, where many once resided. "There's this virulent
social distancing - suddenly, you're a worker and anyone who is not a worker
is a bad person," said Edin. "They're playing to the middle fifth and
saying, 'I'm not those people.' "
Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are
simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest
Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates
have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012;
also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in
recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
In the spring of 2012, I visited a free weekend medical and dental clinic
run by the organization Remote Area Medical in the foothills of southern
Tennessee. I wanted to ask the hundreds of uninsured people flocking to the
clinic what they thought of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act,
whose fate was about to be decided by the Supreme Court. I was expecting a
"What's the Matter With Kansas" reaction - anger at the president who had
signed the law geared to help them. Instead, I found sympathy for Obama. But
had they voted for him? Of course not - almost no one I spoke with voted, in
local, state or national elections. Not only that, but they had barely heard
of the health care law.
This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge
ramifications - polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending
on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows
even larger among poor nonvoters. In the early 1990s, Senator Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky freely cited the desirability of having a more select
electorate when he opposed an effort to expand voter registration. And this
fall, Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, reportedly said low
turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state's Obamacare gains
wouldn't help Democrats. "I remember being in the room when Jennings was
asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences
of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance," State Auditor Adam
Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a
Louisville journalist. "And he simply said, 'People on Medicaid don't vote.'
"
Republicans would argue that the shift in their direction among voters
slightly higher up the ladder is the natural progression of things - people
recognize that government programs are prolonging the economic doldrums and
that Republicans have a better economic program.
So where does this leave Democrats and anyone seeking to expand and build
lasting support for safety-net programs such as Obamacare?
For starters, it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit
from the programs. This is no easy task with the rural poor, who are much
more geographically scattered than their urban counterparts. Not helping
matters in this regard is the decline of local institutions like labor
unions - while the United Mine Workers of America once drove turnout in coal
country, today there is not a single unionized mine still operating in
Kentucky.
But it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic - finding
ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income
ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make
sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible. Instances of
fraud and abuse are far rarer than welfare opponents would have one believe,
but it only takes a few glaring instances to create a lasting impression.
Edin, the Hopkins researcher, suggests going further and making it easier
for those collecting disability to do part-time work over the table, not
just to make them seem less shiftless in the eyes of their neighbors, but to
reduce the recipients' own sense of social isolation.
The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true
economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the
rise, the sort of improvement that is now belatedly being discussed for coal
country, including on the presidential campaign trail. If fewer people need
the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will
be more likely to re-engage in their communities - not least by turning out
to vote.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
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