Rust Belt battle: Harris fights to stop Trump and save democracy

Oct 16, 2024

Harold Meyerson 9th October 2024

Read how Kamala Harris battles for the Rust Belt to stop Trump and defend American democracy.

With less than four weeks to go until the American presidential election, an already tight race has become even tighter. Most polls now show Vice-President Kamala Harris’s centimetre-wide leads over former President Donald Trump in the three swing states she has to win—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—have been reduced to millimetres.

These states, of course, comprise the heart of America’s Rust Belt – home to a disproportionately high share of working-class voters whose grandparents once dwelt in the world’s most productive and highly unionised region. In the Eisenhower 1950s, Detroit and Milwaukee had the highest rates of homeownership of any American cities, as the members of the auto worker and steelworker unions who were concentrated there were the most highly paid members of the nation’s and probably the world’s, working class.

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For the last several decades, however, those factories have been shuttered, the ranks of those unions decimated, and new investment all but non-existent. Central Pennsylvania is an immense expanse of hills and hollows, and the main streets in those hollows often have no buildings that were built after 1960. As Harvard political sociologist Theda Skocpol and her student Lainey Newman documented in their indispensable 2023 book, Rust Belt Union Blues, the union halls of 146 locals of the United Steelworkers that once occupied most of those hollows today number a bare 16.

Those halls were the places to which steelworkers went for drinks and their families for weddings, dances and other festivities. The workers were enmeshed in a unionised culture, where voting Democratic was what you and your peers did. Today, the only social groups in those onetime mill towns are gun clubs, and you and your peers likely get your news from Rupert Murdoch’s propagandists and a conspiracy-besotted social media.

Like the socialist parties of the European centre-left, the Democrats’ trajectory over the past 40 years has been one of class inversion, losing their longtime working-class base and gaining a base among college-educated professionals. Proceeding apace with that class inversion has been a grotesque rise in economic inequality, with the wages of working-class Americans largely stagnating since the 1970s, as capital concentrated on the two coasts and abandoned much of the nation that lay in-between and as the share of unionised private-sector workers dropped from one-third in the mid-twentieth century to a trace-level 6 per cent today.

Joe Biden’s presidency has been remarkable for its efforts to begin reversing these staggering trends. Its signature legislation, providing tax credits to manufacturers of green technology such as electric cars, has led to the first boom in factory construction in decades. Most of these new factories have been deliberately located in the post-industrial Midwest. His Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board have produced the most pro-union policies since the New Deal. But Biden’s inability to audibly champion these policies have meant they’re still largely unknown to the American public, even as the price increases of the past four years are known universally.

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In the course of her campaign, which had no time to incubate given Biden’s belated decision to withdraw, Harris has largely run on a reduce-the-cost-of-living, family friendly platform: calling for government provision of child care and pre-school, a major increase in the child tax credit, and $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers. She also promises to continue Biden’s industrial policies, which have produced way more new factories than the tariffs Donald Trump imposed during his term as president (and which he vows to increase if elected).

But Trump and the entire Murdochised Right have worked assiduously to blame all of America’s woes on immigrants, who Trump vows to deport by the millions – with the aid of the military – if elected. His disinformation machine, now abetted by Elon Musk and the little muskrats who tweet on the website formerly known as Twitter, has managed to reduce Harris’s lead in the three key Midwestern states to what most polls now show to be just 1 per cent. Harris is almost a sure bet to win the popular vote. Still, since the presidency goes to the candidate who wins the Electoral College, a creation of the men who wrote our Constitution in the late 18th century (and who feared vox populi like the plague), Trump could prevail in the Electoral College nonetheless.

Indeed, he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 (as George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000), but, like Bush, won the election. Ever since Southern whites began voting Republican in the 1960s, enraged by the Democrats’ support for civil rights, Republicans have opposed minority rights. In recent years, they have also opposed majority rule. With the race so close and with the continued existence of American democracy very much at stake, Americans – at least, those who understand the Trumpian peril – have not been this nervous since the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to blow us all up.

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large of The American Prospect, a former longtime op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, and the former executive editor of L.A. Weekly.