I just finished doing something I almost never do, I listened to an hour-long podcast of Steven Hayward of Power Line interviewing two political scientists who have a new book out, Trump's Democrats. They spent significant time in three locations, one each in IA, RI, and KY, which had voted Democrat for years and went for Trump and the GOP in 2016. The location in KY had never before voted for a Republican, since it became a county a hundred+ years ago.
Their data collection method was interviewing, chatting up leaders and regular folks in these different places. Their findings are impressionistic, but not dismissive. They don't look down on, or put down the people they talked with at all.
Their findings, to the TDs Trump sounded more like their kind of people, their kind of leader, than did either Hillary or the recent Republican presidential candidates. Drilling down into what made this the case, a couple of their findings made particular sense.
These are places with an "honor culture," which means a place where any slight, any disrespect must be rebuffed publicly and soon. If you let it slide, you're seen as weak and the opposition piles on. Our current President operates that way, and we often wish he wouldn't. Obviously, the TDs feel his ignore-no-insult approach is the right one, what they're accustomed to locally.
They are also places peopled by what Alvin W. Gouldner called "locals," as opposed to "cosmopolitans." Locals can't imagine living somewhere else, they identify with a particular place. It becomes part of their identity.
It turns out Trump was speaking to the TDs' lives, their beliefs and their sense of American exceptionalism in ways Hillary Clinton did not. The authors say each of these places is, one way or another, in decline and their citizen resent it. They believe the TDs interpreted MAGA as "make MY place great again."
