On Election Day 2012, one voter I spoke with in Columbus, Ohio, encapsulated how well Obama had managed to frame the election as a “who’s on your side” choice between himself and the private equity titan Mitt Romney, and thereby hold onto enough white working-class voters in crucial swing states. Matt Bimberg, 50, was waiting by himself at a remote bus stop in a black neighborhood on the edge of town. He had in the past decade lost jobs as a telecom technician for Global Crossing (he still carried a Global Crossing tote bag) and at a factory making escape hatches for buses. But he had just landed a job at a nearby warehouse as a forklift operator, a success for which he credited a three-week training course paid for by the U.S. Department of Labor. And as gratitude for that, he was voting for Obama after voting for John McCain in 2008. “My line of thinking was that under Romney and [Paul] Ryan, it would be more of a trickle-down administration,” he said. “Their thinking is to give that money to corporations and the rich in tax breaks, and some will trickle down. But it didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Romney reminds me so much of Reagan’s theory of supply-side economics. It scares me.” N ot so long ago, Hillary Clinton would have seemed ideally suited to keep such northern white working-class voters in the fold. After all, she had trounced Obama among many of these very voters in the 2008 primaries, as she beat him in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania and at one point went so far as to declare herself, in a slip of the tongue, the champion of “working,
hard-working Americans, white Americans.” But things had changed in the intervening years. For one thing, she was further removed from her stint representing downtrodden upstate New York as a senator – she had spent the years since 2008 in the rarefied realm of the State Department and then giving more than 80 paid speeches to banks, corporations and trade associations, for a total haul of $18 million. For another thing, cause for resentment and letdown had grown in many of those Rust Belt communities where Obama had held his own – they might be inching their way back from the Great Recession, but the progress was awfully slow, and they were lagging ever further behind booming coastal cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington, where the income gap compared with the rest of the country had grown far larger. Most crucially, she was running not against Mitt Romney, the man from Bain Capital, but against Donald Trump. Yes, Trump was (or claimed to be) a billionaire himself, but he was not of Romney’s upper crust – they scorned him and his casinos and gold-plated jet, and were giving him virtually none of their campaign contributions. Trump attacked the trade deals that had helped hollow out these voters’ communities, he attacked the Mexicans who had heavily populated some of their towns and had driven much of the heroin trade in others, and, yes, he tapped into broader racial resentments as well. Faced with this populist opposition, Clinton
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