How did a political novice with no governing experience and a faint grasp of policy become the Republican presidential nominee? The rise of Donald Trump becomes less of a mystery once you’ve done what I’ve been doing these last few years: Talk to the voters. What I’ve found is a burbling disdain that has now been given voice by the Trump campaign.
Since 2007, I’ve spent time in diners, restaurants, churches, and gas stations, among other places, across Wisconsin, listening to groups of men and women, retirees and workers. This undertaking has yielded a bounty of information about what makes voters tick — and what ticks them off. The overwhelming feeling that has been expressed is resentment — particularly resentment toward cities and the people who live there. Understanding this resentment might well be the key to understanding Trump.
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
Wisconsin has two main metro areas: Madison, the state capital and home to the state’s flagship university, and Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. These two cities are relatively close to one another, and there is a lot of geography and roughly 60 percent of the population in the rest of the state.
The resentment I heard toward the cities in this so-called outstate part of Wisconsin had three main components. First, many people in small towns felt they were not getting their fair share of power. Second, they believed that public funds were not distributed fairly. Many voiced their view that tax dollars were being spent on Madison and Milwaukee and not shared with the rest of the state. Finally, they sensed that they did not get their fair share of something else: respect. Many told me that city people just do not understand rural folks. “I mean, we are, like, strange to Madison,” one woman in the far northern part of the state said during one of my first visits to her group.
This sentiment, and the economic stress and uncertainty that underpin it, create fertile ground for the types of arguments that Trump is making. Trump is saying, in effect: “You are right. You’re not getting your fair share. You’re a hard-working American and your life is not what it should be. You are working as hard as your parents and grandparents, and not enjoying anywhere near the quality of life that they did.” And then, the capper, “Those people are to blame.”
That last part is crucial. As Trump’s success is demonstrating, it is much easier to point the finger at certain people in the population — immigrants, Muslims, out-of-touch elites — than to explain the complex and varied forces of globalization, urbanization, and changing demographics. About a month ago, one man at a service station in central Wisconsin acknowledged that some of the things Trump says are offensive. But he added, “He has said what many of the blue-collar people in the country wanted to say.”
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has successfully used this politics of resentment, targeting public employees and the major metro areas in Wisconsin when he first ran for governor in 2010, and again during the recall election of 2012 and re-election campaign of 2014. Trump is betting that he can tap that same resentment to vault to the highest office in the land.
Katherine Cramer is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and author of The Politics of Resentment (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
