MENOMONIE, Wis.: On election night, when Donald Trump claimed victory in Wisconsin, Shay Chamberlain was so excited she passed out.
Chamberlain believes Trump is her savior, sent by God to save America from ruin. She owns a women’s clothing store in this remote town; her husband runs a construction company. They have two children and barely get by on $44,000 a year, living paycheck to paycheck.
In his victory speech, Trump called people like Chamberlain and her family America’s “forgotten men and women” — the blue-collar workers in the manufacturing towns of the Rust Belt and the hallowing coalfields of Appalachia who propelled him to an improbable victory. They felt left behind by progress, laughed at by the elite, and so put their faith in the billionaire businessman with a sharp tongue and short temper who promised to Make America Great Again.
When Trump first ran, Chamberlain thought to herself: “That’s the man everybody has been praying for.” And she now feels vindicated by his victory.
“This is a movement,” she said. “This isn’t a candidate anymore. This is a movement.”
Not all of Trump’s support came from the blue-collar downtrodden. But the Republican’s overwhelming backing among whites with less than a college education is at least partly a reflection of how little the economic recovery since the Great Recession has benefited them. Their job opportunities have dwindled and their incomes have fallen, even as broader measures of the nation’s job market show improvement. But they also turned to him to hold back the tide of social change: same-sex marriage, transgender rights, a society growing more racially diverse.
The working class, long ignored, found an unlikely spokesman in Donald Trump. He promised to build the wall to keep out immigrants. He promised to tear up trade deals that have ushered American factory jobs overseas. He promised to put blue-collar America back to work and restore the country to a time when the white working class felt appreciated and fulfilled.
“I feel like, not just most, but all Trump supporters are true patriots,” said 59-year-old Ginger Austin, who owns a graphics company in a tiny town in Jones County, one of the poorest places in North Carolina. “They love this country. But they’re taking our country away, and they’re changing it. They’re just changing everything. All our rights are just slowly being dwindled away.”
She’s angry at the Republican Party she has supported all her life. She is angry at Obama and the Affordable Care Act. She is angry that America is changing, and worried that her grandchildren are growing up in a world too liberal and too politically correct.
The nation woke up Wednesday morning to learn just how starkly divided it has grown: Clinton won the popular vote by less than 200,000 ballots. But Trump won battleground states that had voted for Democrat Barack Obama twice. Thousands of registered Democrats, including many former union workers from the mines and factories, crossed party lines and sided with Trump.
For example, in Dunn County, where Shay Chamberlain lives, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney 53 percent to 46 percent in 2012, and John McCain 57 percent to 42 percent four years earlier. But it flipped to back Trump, 52 percent to 41 percent, over Hillary Clinton.
Scott Hiltgen, a 66-year-old small business owner in Wisconsin, called Washington a “cesspool” of career politicians, aware and indifferent to the plight of the American worker.
“We are considered flyover country, as you well know, and they don’t care about us,” he said. “And I think it was the silent majority that finally said, ‘Enough’s enough. We want a change. We don’t like the way things are going.’ ”
Middle-aged white men with only high school degrees — the core of Trump’s support — saw their inflation-adjusted incomes plummet 9 percent from 1996 through 2014, according to Sentier Research, a data analytics firm founded by former Census Bureau officials. White male college graduates in the same age bracket, by contrast, saw their incomes jump 23 percent.
The Great Recession wiped out millions of middle-income jobs in manufacturing, office administrative work and construction, and those jobs haven’t returned, even as the nation now has 6.5 million more jobs than it did before the recession began. In many parts of the country, they have been replaced with lower-income work in restaurants, hotels, and in home health care.