For many people, watching Donald Trump become a presidential nominee from a major party is rather like waking up one day to find that mountains are floating several miles up in midair, that dogs now walk on two legs, or that rain falls upwards rather than downwards. It’s like some part of accepted reality that had always been true and predictable before has suddenly turned into the exact opposite of what it once was. This leads to a vast number of explanations of the Trump phenomenon. A vast number of clever people telling us that they have discovered the key that explains why so many voters did something that nobody predicted. Of course, none of these key-holders explained the Trump phenomenon before it happened, only after. (That includes the author of this post.)
Generally most of the explanations fit in two main camps. There’s the hostile camp (“They’re a bunch of dumb racists and bigots!”) and the condescending camp (“They’re upset about wage stagnation, income inequality, and a broken political system, which we should be sympathetic to, even though they’re channeling their frustrations in a bad way.”) And many point out that Trump’s appeal is heavily emotional and a bit light on policy detail. But there’s one point that I haven’t seen anyone make.
It relates to a fact about modern American politics. In the primary process, everyone cares about just the first two states to vote, Iowa and New Hampshire, for months. In the general election, there’s a predictable handful of “swing states”, where the candidates spend almost all their time and money. Thus the great majority of states and voters are totally ignored by the presidential candidates.
Trump took advantage of this. While his opponents camped out in Iowa and New Hampshire, he visited places like Vermont, upstate New York, Texas, South Dakota, and Kentucky. Within those states, many of his rallies were in rural, town, or small city areas. It’s easy to see why some people, who haven’t seen a live presidential candidate within fifty miles for decades, would be happy to get some lovin’ for once.
But beyond merely appearing in places where the other candidates don’t go, Trump took advantage of the attitudes that the candidates have towards certain states, such as Hillary saying that “Alabama is living through a blast from the Jim Crow past” or Ted Cruz’s discourse on “New York values”. Those comments are hateful and intended to be. A Democrat has nothing to lose by bashing Alabama and a Republican has no downside to attacking New York, as far as the general election is concerned. But the mainstream media and many others have a schizophrenic relationship with hatred. Hate a race or ethnic group and they get the vapors, hate a state or region of the country and they don’t care. But Trump saw opportunity. He defended New York against Ted Cruz in a primary debate, and one feels that, if called to do so, he would happily pour out praise on Alabama, Vermont, eastern Kentucky, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, San Francisco, North Dakota, the upper peninsula of Michigan, or any other place in the country. And it’s also not hard to see why some people would be drawn to a candidate who embraces all fifty states rather than splitting the country into red and blue halves and trying to whip up hatred for one of those halves.