Rural neglect

Oklahoma’s attraction to Trump and Sanders

Aside from their whiteness and maleness, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders don’t have much in common. One is a billionaire whose personal brand and chief selling point—winning—is founded upon ostentatious displays of wealth, the other a lifelong activist who claims with a straight face to have never worn a tuxedo. But in the weird cross timbers of Oklahoma this unlikely pair shares another commonality—compared to rivals in their respective party primaries, they both had their best showings in rural areas, by far. 

With the sizable evangelical contingent in Oklahoma GOP, it’s no surprise that Ted Cruz won the day among the Republicans. In Oklahoma, Bernie Sanders bucked a national trend and beat Hillary Clinton in a deeply red state. He did this by winning Democratic voters throughout the state but he was most successful in counties that are sparsely populated and where the ravages of poverty run deepest. This holds true even in far-flung places like Cimarron County in the panhandle, where he won 68-22, and which is much poorer than neighboring Texas County, where he didn’t do as well. As it happens, Donald Trump’s electoral map in Oklahoma looks roughly similar, his performance like a rampaging storm system growing stronger west to east, along the same trajectory that poverty grows worse in the state. In other words, Bernie did best in Trump country, and vice versa. 

Clearly, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, so different in style and many policy positions, speak to issues that resonate with similar kinds of people in similar sorts of communities. These two candidates are opposite sides of the same coin, and taken together the voters casting ballots for them— roughly 300,000 total in the Oklahoma primaries—represent a considerable political force. Liberals instinctively turn their noses up at Trump and his supporters, dismissing them as stupid racists, while conservatives cast Sanders as a socialist impossibly out of step with the American mainstream. Both perspectives are wrong, and the political establishment holds to them at its own peril. 

The people who support Trump and Sanders are angry about many of the same things: trade imbalances that have hobbled American manufacturing and eliminated working class jobs, an economic order that favors banking over building stuff and encourages wage stagnation, and a political order increasingly dominated by an oligarchy that is wholly out of touch with the reality of life in working class America. These people are not insane. For years the political class has spoken mostly glowingly about the neoliberal economic policies of the past 20 years, always with the caveat that, in the understated words of candidate John McCain in 2008, “free trade is not a positive for everyone,” as though acknowledging the existence of people screwed by free trade deals is sufficient to allay their anger. For political elites, taking life-sustaining jobs from working families in exchange for cheap smartphones is “not a positive.” That’s a euphemism if ever there was one. 

The rural communities across Oklahoma where both candidates did best are places where these effects are felt most acutely. A factory up and leaving for Mexico in a town the size of Pryor affects the community more than a factory closing in a city the size of Pittsburgh. Though many of Oklahoma’s small towns are fine places to live and remain strong communities, there’s no denying that rural Oklahoma is a shell of its former self, vacant buildings dotting Main Streets from the panhandle to Pushmataha County. The experts will say, as they always do, that the economic forces at work are longstanding, multifarious and complex, and they are, but at some point such explanations ring, if not false, just hollow. The simple fact is that people angry about having been neglected have been neglected, and the sooner this country’s political class addresses that reality the better. Because this election cycle is just the beginning. 

The Left ridicules Trump and company as dumb and racist, but beyond the headlines and clickbait the bulk of Trump’s speeches aren’t about rounding up Mexicans and keeping out Muslims. They are, in broad terms, about the downsides of neoliberalism, which is not to say the danger of his white-supremacist-supported candidacy isn’t real. Adolf Hitler wasn’t elected on a platform of racism and genocide, he was elected on a platform of national unity and socialism in a country plundered by the international community and ravaged by the global economy. The grievances at play among working class Americans today are no less palpable, and the danger here is very real indeed.

For more from Denver, read his requiem for low-alcohol beer.