From the parking lots of Pennsylvania steel country to the megachurches of Michigan, a new book traces a great political migration that has transformed the US electoral landscape
Consider the following social science experiment: go into a unionized steel mill parking lot in western Pennsylvania, look at the bumper stickers and track the political messages. Given the longstanding bond between unions and the Democratic party, you might predict widespread support for Democratic candidates. Yet when the then Harvard undergraduate Lainey Newman conducted such unconventional field research during the Covid pandemic, encouraged by her faculty mentor Theda Skocpol, results indicated otherwise. There was a QAnon sticker here, a Back the Blue flag there. But one name proliferated: Donald Trump.
It all supported a surprising claim: industrial union members in the shrunken manufacturing hubs of the US are abandoning their historic loyalty to the Democrats for the Republican party.