What Pennsylvania’s Crumbling Infrastructure Tells Us About Building a Strong Electoral Coalition
In 2008 they gave their votes to Obama, who kept enough of them to win again in 2012. They favored Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2022. This year, America's “white working class” could once again shape the outcome on Election Day. But who are these voters, and are they really so different from any other demographic?
Josh Shapiro knows bridges matter. In the summer of 2023, the intense heat from a wrecked tanker truck fire caused an I-95 overpass to collapse. The Pennsylvania governor understood the gravity of losing a primary link in the I-95 artery. One of the most trafficked sections of the nation’s busiest interstates, 160,000 vehicles use the overpass every day. Observers predicted months of repair time. This meant billions of dollars in economic damage. Shapiro leapt into action. Twelve days later, the governor “stunned the world” by reopening the bridge.
One year later, another series of other Pennsylvania bridges were wiped out. In August 2024, the remnants of Hurricane Debby deluged the Pennsylvania Wilds, a rural region in the north-central part of the state, with 4-6 inches of rain. Small towns and rural communities across Tioga and Potter counties were devastated. Westfield, Pennsylvania Mayor Faun James said of his town, “Pictures don’t do it justice.” Shapiro dispatched emergency responders and declared a state of emergency. But unlike Philadelphia, he made no immediate in-person visit. As for the region’s bridges, “long term closure” is how area officials term the timeline for their reconstruction.
Shapiro’s masterful response to the I-95 bridge collapse merits praise. When a major economic artery was damaged, political elites rightly acted with extraordinary haste. But when a storm wreaked a far-flung and sparsely populated area, those very same elites reacted with a noticeable difference. The episode reminds me of what a Democratic strategist recently told me, “Voters see we are quick to help corporations but not regular people. They think, you aren’t doing anything for me. Well, no shit.” This episode and nugget of insights helps decipher the political riddle that is Trump, Trumpism, and Barack Obama’s political legacy.
The Obama Coalition’s Kryptonite
Donald Trump and Barack Obama define our schizophrenic political era. In 2008 and 2012, Americans made Obama the first Democratic president since FDR to earn consecutive majority-vote presidential victories. Suave, sophisticated and Harvard-educated, the multiracial wunderkind swept into the national limelight and presidency like a political tornado from his maternal family’s native Kansas. Following what was, by any political barometer, a successful presidency, voters sent his utter opposite to the White House in Donald Trump.
Evaluating the Obama Presidency was recently published as Vol. 1 of the De Gruyter Series in Presidential Politics, Leadership, and Policy Making.
A household name since the 1980s, Trump was best known for his marital and business failures. Unlike the post-racial Obama-era, Trump trafficked in the worst sort of racial canards. The “no-drama” Obama White House became, under Trump, a center of tabloid intrigue and trashy gossip. In 2023, Dr. Meena Bose convened the Hofstra University Presidential Conference on the Barack Obama Presidency. At this gathering, I, along with scores of scholars and veterans of the Obama White House, considered the 45th president’s legacy. The result of that gathering is De Gruyter’s recent volume, Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities. My chapter, “The Obama Coalition’s Kryptonite: Ralph Stanley, Bruce Springsteen, and the White Working Class,” considers Obama’s near-miss as a transformational president.
In 2024, our political media breathlessly seeks to understand the political folkways of the white working class. My chapter seeks to explain and define what is our nation’s single largest voting demographic. In this, the personal is most certainly the political. I hail from this demographic. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, I was reared in the Deep South and the Ozarks. My mom worked two minimum wage jobs. Meanwhile, my dad, aunt, uncle and two first cousins drank themselves to death. We knew Deaths of Despair decades before Princeton economists coined the term or J.D. Vance wrote his elegy.
“Our topsy-turvy politics is a result of neither party coalescing an enduring majority.”
In 2008, Barack Obama took direct aim at the white working-class demographic. To win and then govern, he had to woo these voters and add them to his diverse “Obama coalition.” In 2008, Obama assembled an array of musical stars to endorse his candidacy. These musicians reflected the diverse nature of the Obama coalition. Among those musical giants who backed Obama were the kings and queens of Bluegrass (Ralph Stanley), Merengue (Juan Luis Guerra), Rhythm & Blues (Stevie Wonder), Jam Bands (the Grateful Dead), Rock (Bruce Springsteen), and Hip-Hop (Jay-Z & Beyoncé).
In 2008, Obama won a majority vote of the white working class, whom I term Bruce Springsteen voters, in a series of northern states stretching from Minnesota to New Hampshire. Obama may not have won Ralph Stanley’s rural populist, Appalachian voters, but he campaigned ardently for them in southeast Ohio, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina. In fact, his very first campaign stop after securing the Democratic nomination was in rural, Appalachian Virginia. He improved his margins of defeat in those regions enough to win Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina. In 2008, Obama won 53% of the vote, an Electoral College landslide, and big congressional majorities. The Bruce Springsteen and Ralph Stanley voters were key parts of the Obama Coalition.
Four years later, in 2012, Obama retained the loyalty of enough Bruce Springsteen voters to sweep Northern industrial states. His decisive action in rescuing General Motors from bankruptcy, a move the Republican nominee Mitt Romney opposed, earned him the political loyalty of these voters. By 2016, however, this memory had faded. The combined effects of the Great Recession and deindustrialization had demoralized Bruce Springsteen voters in the Rust Belt. Trump capitalized upon this in 2016 and won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and with those states the presidency.
“The more puzzling reality is that after 2008, Obama and his fellow Democrats simply quit showing up in rural America.”
Obama’s small, yet significant, inroads with Ralph Stanley voters disappeared almost from the start. The Great Recession hit an already struggling Appalachia with enormous force. But the more puzzling reality is that after 2008, Obama and his fellow Democrats simply quit showing up in rural America and Appalachia. Ralph Stanley voters turned to the GOP and Trump for a variety of socio-cultural factors that include racism. But after the 2010 midterms, Obama and the entire DNC apparatus pronounced these voters “hopeless.” The Senate and House rural outreach offices were both shuttered. In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the quiet part out loud, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
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Had the Obama coalition retained Bruce Springsteen and Ralph Stanley voters, Barack Obama would have earned the mantle of “transformational” president. Instead, these white working-class voters opted for Trump in 2016. Joe Biden won enough Bruce Springsteen voters in 2020 to take back the presidency. But our topsy-turvy politics is a result of neither party coalescing an enduring majority. Trump has no reasonable chance of doing so. Democrats, as Obama demonstrated, do. And white working-class voters are not so very different from any other demographic. They want a politics that offers them tangible results and a modicum of attention.
Pennsylvanians in Tioga and Potter counties scarcely expect Shapiro to rebuild their bridges and roads in twelve days. They understand that the Philadelphia overpass required the sort of state and national attention that their woes don’t. Shapiro finally visited the region in September – one month after the deluge. Residents received him warmly and accepted his condolences for their losses. But they are watching and waiting for a tangible response. And therein lies the nature of our divided politics.
Jeff Bloodworth’s “The Obama Coalition’s Kryptonite: Ralph Stanley, Bruce Springsteen, and the White Working Class” was recently published in Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities.
Learn more in this related title from De Gruyter
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