Perhaps I am optimistic, in a time when it is very hard to be optimistic, but I do believe that there will be another Democratic President after Trump. I also believe that President will have to clean up the enormous mess left behind; perhaps even one that makes the 2008 Financial Crisis seem small. I also believe that the next President will have a choice whether to save the Elkhart, Indiana’s of the Country.
What’s so Special About Elkhart, Indiana?Elkhart, Indiana is a small City of about 50,000 located on the border with Michigan, 110 miles East of Chicago. It is also the RV Capitol of the United States, with nearly 100 RV manufacturers and 400 RV suppliers. And it was unsurprisingly decimated by the financial crisis, with unemployment at one point reaching 20%.
President Obama responded by directing nearly $170 million in stimulus funds to the City. And the stimulus had an enormous impact:
For years now, customers have been gobbling up mobile homes. Sales are robust. Unemployment is low. And Elkhart, Indiana, the center of it all, is booming. On Middlebury Street along the town’s main stretch, manufacturers and warehouses have full parking lots and “we’re hiring!” signs planted in the grass along the road. Restaurants and bars have popped up downtown. New lofts are coming, too, as is a $65 million aquatic center.
HindsightThe logic of Obama’s decision made sense... at the time. On a macro scale, so much of the RV industry being concentrated in such a small geographic area maximized the economic gain of any Keynesian input, for as we saw with the auto bailout, it is not just the manufacturers, but the auto parts suppliers located around the Country, and their raw material suppliers, and so on. Failure to save the RV industry, for Elkhart really was an RV bailout, would have had a devastating ripple effect across the Country, not unlike what would have happened if Mitt Romney had been President. On a more granular scale, the Northern tier of Indiana seemed like promising territory for Democrats. It voted for a Democratic President for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson, and Obama only narrowly lost the City of Elkhart proper to John McCain.
But despite the bailout, the City of Elkhart never returned the favor. In fact, they refused to believe any favor had been done in the first place.
xStimulus recipients in Elkhart had no idea they’d benefited from the stimulus https://t.co/6TkBLf6fFcpic.twitter.com/kKUW1GSd7o
— Sam Stein (@samstein) June 1, 2016In 2016, Hillary Clinton would lose not just Indiana by 20 points, but the auto bailout states of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin as well. While these states voted for Obama 4 years prior, perhaps the writing was on the wall as early as 2010 that repayment for saving their livelihood would be met with electoral hostility. The Midwest, after all, was the epicenter of the 2010 Tea Party Rebellion, with Republicans winning the popular vote there 53% to 44%.
But Back to ElkhartWe don’t need blinkered interviews with downtrodden Trump voters in Rust Belt diners -- anyone paying attention knows The New York Times (and the serious journalistic outlets that follow their lede) just don’t get it.
xIn admitting what the media missed in 2016, @deanbaquet says: "I don't think we quite had a handle on how much anger there was in the country after the financial collapse of 2008… how much of a desire there was for change. How upset people were with the elites." #AxeFiles
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) August 18, 2018In fact, economic anxiety has become a punchline for everyone besides Dean Baquet. But while The New York Times was fumbling around in diners, Sam Stein had been conducting some amazing journalism for years by following voter opinions in the same City heavily assisted by the stimulus, from passage to Tea Party to Trump. What Stein found is that people in a fairly conservative area of the Country turned to Democrats to help them in 2008, were profoundly assisted, and then turned around to pretend that they’d pulled themselves up by their bootstraps all along in 2016.
“When I say that no serious person in this county gives Barack Obama credit for the recovery, I mean it,” said Holtz, who, nevertheless, gave credit to the Trump tax cuts for the current state of the economy.
I’m reminded by this quote of the amazing change in Gallup economic confidence the day after the 2016 election.
The economy, of course, didn’t improve. But Republican perception of it did. Next TimeThe factors that made the RV industry so susceptible to the last economic downturn haven’t gone away. RV’s are still luxury goods, and pretty much the first thing you toss aside in a downturn. Bruce Bartlett depressingly postulated that we are locked in a perpetual cycle where Republicans wreak economic havoc through tax cuts, and Democrats are blamed for deficits. This may be a bit too specific and cynical, and political cycles are perpetual until they aren’t. But the words out of Elkhart are illuminating: these people turned to Democrats to bail them out of the mess Republicans got them in to, only to return to the comfort of the Republican party once they’re safe from harm.
“What I look at from a personal situation is: how am I personally impacted? How’s my career? How’s my personal security around my area? How’s all of that being impacted?” Miller said, noting that all of his answers to those questions are positive—for now.
As Stein points out, Obama paid particular attention to Elkhart, Indiana, making it the fist City he visited after assuming office in 2009. He would return several times.
But Elkhart, in my opinion, was just too conservative to ever be swayed by the saving of their entire livelihood, especially by a person named Barack Hussein Obama. In 2009, I would have said to the naysayers that these people are our fellow Countrymen and women who deserve assistance regardless of their political ideology. I would have said Obama was making not just the economically logical but politically astute choice. I would have said the President has a duty to all Americans. Today I would say let the City of Elkhart die.
By the time the next Democratic President takes office, the deficit will be larger. The Country will likely be in a far more perilous state. Democrats will have to make choices about where to spend money. Let the City of Elkhart and the RV Industry be a lesson on where not to spend it.