America's Factory Towns, Once Solidly Blue, Are Now a GOP Haven
WASHINGTON—The Republican Party has become the party of blue-collar America.
After the 1992 election, 15 of the 20 most manufacturing-intensive Congressional districts in America were represented by Democrats. Today, all 20 are held by Republicans.
The shift of manufacturing from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican one is a major force remaking the two parties. It helps explain Donald Trump’s political success, the rise of Republican protectionism and the nation’s polarized politics. It will help shape this year’s midterm elections.
South Carolina’s third Congressional district, on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, epitomizes the swing from blue to red.
In 1992, the district was dotted with textile mills and was represented by a Democrat, Butler Derrick, as it had been for the prior 17 years. He backed gun control, got along with unions and voted for a 1986 law granting citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants.
The district has since become an auto-parts and plastics manufacturing center. Then and now it was among the 20 districts in the nation with the highest concentration of workers in the manufacturing sector, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of census data.
Today, the district is represented by a Republican, Jeff Duncan. He has compared illegal immigrants to “any kind of vagrant or animal,” gets a 5% rating by the AFL-CIO and derides the World Trade Organization as a “globalist organization” with too much power.
“We’re in servitude” to Chinese bond buyers and other creditors, he told a constituent during a teleconference with voters in May.
The Republican Party didn’t have a grand strategy to capture manufacturing. It happened over time as the economy and party changed.
“My image of Republicans is of a blue-collar type,” says Larry Smith, a 68-year-old weave room supervisor at Greenwood Mills Inc. in South Carolina’s third Congressional District. He voted for Democrats before, including Barack Obama in 2008, but sided with Mr. Trump in 2016. “Democrats come from more financially successful groups.”
His boss, Jay Self, says a lot of local voters were turned off to the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton eased the entry of China into the WTO in the late 1990s, which he blames for wrecking the textile business. His family-owned business employed around 3,000 people in the U.S. in 2000, he says. Now that workforce is just 320.
As with many onetime Democratic manufacturing strongholds, social issues played a role in the shift to red from blue. Rep. Derrick supported the 1993 Brady Bill that mandated background checks on firearms purchases. Angry gun owners packed a town hall meeting in Pickens, S.C. He did not run for reelection in 1994.
Rep. Derrick, who died in 2014, was succeeded by a series of Republicans, all of whom took conservative positions on social issues and opposed the free trade deals unpopular in the district. “Down here, the Democrats shifted their attention to career people like in the medical industry, accountant or lawyers,” Clemson University political scientist David Woodard. But current factory workers, he said, came from “linthead” families, using the local term for textile workers. “They all love Trump.”
The changing allegiances in factory towns have scrambled politics for both Democrats and Republicans.
Voters for Democrats now tend to be better educated, more urban and less likely to identify themselves as blue-collar than Republicans and Independents, according to pollsters.
While House Democrats overwhelmingly oppose free-trade deals, their voters don’t. By a 57% to 16% margin, Democrats said that free trade helped the U.S., according to a February 2017 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, the last one to address this issue.
Republicans, meanwhile, have become more attuned to the desires of manufacturers and their workers. They have led a crackdown on immigration, moved away from plans to privatize Social Security and support some infrastructure spending. Most notably, the party has retreated from free trade.
Republicans need to hold on to their manufacturing base to retain control of Congress.
The GOP holds a 23-seat majority the House of Representatives. About 50 Congressional districts rated competitive by political analysts have manufacturing workforces higher than the national average. In the Senate, the GOP margin is just two seats, and many big manufacturing states have Senate races this fall, including the states that won Mr. Trump the White House—Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Not a good scenario for the supposed "Blue Wave".
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