Constant job losses

Why the South Is Rebelling Again

Rural voters are mad about constant job losses, and they’ve had it with the party establishment.

By Mason Adams

John Bassett III, hero of the forthcoming HBO series Factory Man—based on a 2014 book of the same title and produced by Tom Hanks—was one of the few to try to stanch the flood of disappearing jobs in the South. The chairman of Vaughan-Bassett Co., a furniture maker in the small town of Galax, Virginia, Bassett battled Chinese competition, Wall Street bankers and his own family members to keep his factory running, and through sheer will and grit he succeeded. But Bassett was one of the few to hold back the tide, and it was a fight he felt very alone in waging—not even his own government in Washington would help. Today, Bassett says, he understands what is about to happen politically in the rural South: a wholesale rejection of failed policies by both parties.

“Politically, I don’t care whether you’re on the right over there, or if you’re on the left, all the way over to Bernie Sanders, I think you’ll find not only anger, you’ll find frustration,” Bassett says. “We have a whole segment of our population that has been forgotten. They have been left behind.”

Call them the beer track, or non-Acela crowd—or simply rural, or whatever term can be loosely applied to the people who live in small towns and the countryside across the southern United States. The American South is about to put its stamp on the 2016 campaign—a stamp that could all but end the presidential primary race. On Super Tuesday it will be the South—specifically, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—that will decide two-thirds of the day’s vote for both Democrats and Republicans, definitively framing the campaign and perhaps ending it.

It’s not just Atlanta, Dallas and Houston that will decide party nominees, but huge swaths of countryside where people have been left behind. The anxiety, frustration and anger that’s resulted from globalization is driving the insurgent candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and has turned the 2016 election upside down.

The rural South is haunted by empty factories and warehouses that symbolize the once-dominant businesses that have long since departed for more profitable locales. Economic instability has left those who haven’t fled to the metro areas feeling anxious and unrepresented. The resulting frustration has propelled politicians who have harnessed that angst into outsider campaigns by attacking those at fault. The right blames illegal immigrants, President Barack Obama and congressional leadership that hasn’t fought Obama hard enough. The left blames big banks, the rich and a Republican Congress that only obstructs. Everyone wants to overhaul, if not dismantle, political and economic systems that they see as rigged against them.

And maybe build a wall or two against the outside world.

It’s not unalloyed rebellion down here. President Barack Obama won Virginia, the swingiest of those six states, in 2008 and 2012, and the results each time closely matched that of the nationwide popular vote. And despite Sanders’ insurgency, Hillary Clinton leads in Southern states. Polls released by Monmouth University and Roanoke College last week show her with a sizable lead in Virginia, a key state both on Super Tuesday and in the general election. She still runs strong among African-American and older white voters in the South. After all, it’s not too long ago that conservative, Blue Dog Democrats represented a significant portion of the region. To them, Clinton looks like the safer bet. But plainly, Clinton, too, is herself responding to the angry mood, coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal she had formerly touted as secretary of state.

In Virginia, most analysis focuses on more moderate areas in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, giving Democrats a growing advantage. But it’s the rest of Virginia—variously called “the real world of Virginia” (by George Allen during his 2006 “macaca” moment), “RoVa” (by Northern Virginians tired of hearing their region shorthanded to “NoVa”) and even “Old Virginia” (by FiveThirtyEight)—that mostly closely resembles the rest of the South. It trends heavily Republican, and it’s giving Trump a double-digit lead in Virginia polls headed into Super Tuesday.

In Pulaski County, manufacturing employment has fallen by half since 1990, and the town is still haunted by shuttered furniture and clothing factories. The same forces that swept those operations out of town have ushered in foreign-owned companies, including a Mexican greenhouse tomato business, a firearms manufacturer founded by a British armorer, and a Volvo Trucks facility. These companies don’t employ nearly the numbers that the factories used to, and they’re vulnerable to the shifting currents of the global economy: A little more than a year after announcing it would create 200 jobs through new investment, Volvo announced it would lay off 600 workers due to a decline in demand for its trucks.

Travel farther into Virginia’s southwest corner, and you’ll get into coal country, where the industry is grappling with its steepest, longest downturn in memory. Cratering Chinese and Brazilian economies have caused a dramatic decline in demand for met coal, used to make steel, and steam coal, used to make power, has been hit with the double-whammy of federal clean air regulations and competition from low-cost natural gas. In bankruptcy proceedings, Alpha Natural Resources, a coal company headquartered in Bristol, Virginia, went after miner retirement funds while continuing to pay executives million-dollar bonuses.

Eastward, past the edge of the Blue Ridge Plateau and the eastern edge of Appalachia, lay the rolling hills of Southside Virginia, which stretches across the state through its southern Piedmont. Once a massive producer of tobacco, then furniture and textiles, today Southside wrestles with stubbornly high unemployment rates. Martinsville, home to two NASCAR races, once was Virginia’s biggest manufacturing center, home to the nation’s highest number of millionaires per capita. Since the 1960s it has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. In December, its unemployment rate sat at 7.4 percent, more than 3 three percentage points higher than the Virginia average of 4.2 percent—and that represents marked progress from where it was just a few years ago.

Throughout Virginia and around the South, longtime employers where generations of families could be assured of steady work have sloughed off jobs, shuttered their factories and shifted operations overseas. In its place is what’s known as the “gig economy,” where workers must reinvent themselves several times within a lifetime. The chaotic—and unequal economic—transition continues to create anxiety, frustration and fear across rural communities.

“I see a lot of anger out there on both sides,” says Beth Macy, the former Roanoke Times reporter whose account of Bassett’s lonely battle, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town, piqued Tom Hanks’ interest. “You don’t see that much about trade mentioned, but I think it’s buttressing a lot of the anger.”

The anger is not just over lost jobs, but the indifference of Washington in watching them go. One scene in Macy’s book depicts a 2007 meeting between the titular hero, Bassett, and the assistant to a U.S. trade representative. Bassett grows increasingly angry as the assistant details the concern of each country that wanted to kill an amendment that distributed revenue from duties to domestic companies injured by globalization.

Finally, Bassett slams down his legal pad and asks the bureaucrats. “What country do you represent?” When they responded “the United States,” he lit into them: “We’ve been here 45 minutes, and you haven’t mentioned our country once. Listen, you are not paid to look after these other countries; you’re paid to look after us.”

It sounds like a line that could have come from the mouth of Sanders or Trump.

The empty factory towns of Southside Virginia are mirrored in Piedmont North Carolina, too. It’s no coincidence that John Edwards, the disgraced former Democratic presidential candidate and senator from the Tar Heel State, made the message of his 2004 convention speech about social inequity between the “two Americas.”

That gap has only grown in the 12 years since. Obama was elected on a campaign of hope, but in the South, it’s given way to a bright red, burning anger.

What happened? The American South saw tremendous growth in manufacturing and industry during the first half of the 20th century, luring factories from the North with right-to-work laws that helped them sidestep labor unions. That same principle—lower labor costs—turned against the South when companies began to find even better deals overseas.

The North American Free Trade Agreement and a series of related pacts in the ’90s opened the floodgates for departing jobs. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the pace quickened even more. In smaller cities and towns, where factories were the dominant employer, chronic hard times ensued, squeezing the middle class.

“In places that were really slammed hard by trade, like Galax and Lenoir, North Carolina, and Hickory and Bassett and Martinsville, it’s going to be decades before they recover,” Macy says. “These jobs went away through no fault of these workers, and we didn’t do much to help them.”

Then, the Great Recession made things much worse—and very quickly.

People saw their pensions dismantled and their 401(k) savings plunge with the stock market. The federal government intervened to bail out banks and passed a stimulus plan with the promise of shovel-ready jobs, but the middle class saw only ruined credit scores, outsized mortgages and skyrocketing levels of student debt.

Younger voters face an uncertain job environment, with industry disruption becoming the rule. Most new jobs require a high degree of education and skill, and it’s become more expensive to get either. Student debt has soared with the cost of higher education, placing limitations on options for graduates, starting with the time they leave school.

There’s more to rural anger than just frustration at the global economy, of course. Culture plays into it, too.

Last year, after Dylann Roof killed nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, his photos posing with the Confederate battle flag became a flash point. Government officials pulled down flags from state capitols and retailers pulled them from shelves. Houses across the rural South raised the battle flag—I pass a half-dozen on my morning commute each day—and people set up shop selling flags from tables on the roadside. Social media fights played out across millions of people’s screens, occasionally spilling into the real world at high schools and Christmas parades. Almost universally, everyone came away angry and nothing got resolved.

Cultural and racial tensions play an important role in this potent cocktail of anger, especially with ubiquitous computer access via smartphones increasing the role of media in lives. The global economic shift, however, deeply affects the foundation that underpins the future of Southern voters and their children.

“You’ve got a bunch of folks that grew up in families that made a good living, worked at the local factory, worked in the coal mines, even the white collar folks, at banks and railroads,” says Billy Bova, a Democratic consultant in Mississippi. “The American dream, as it was taught and they knew it, was that if you kept your head down and did a good job and worked hard, you could do better than your parents had done. There’s a historic disconnect with what we’ve been taught as the American dream, and they feel like the people they elect sell them out.”

That disconnect clearly infects both sides of the political spectrum. It’s why Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s strident criticism of banks and the ultrarich galvanized a national following in the Democratic Party that Sanders has made his own. Clinton has adjusted her positions accordingly, coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement after previously supporting it.

Virgil Goode knows both sides of that spectrum. He spent the ’80s and early ’90s as a Democratic state legislator who supported Gov. Douglas Wilder before being elected to Congress to represent a district that includes extensive swaths of Southside Virginia. While in Congress, Goode shifted from a Democrat to an independent and then a Republican. After a narrow loss in the 2008 Obama wave, Goode ran for president in 2012 as a Constitution Party candidate.

Despite his shifting party allegiance, Goode has consistently spoken out against illegal immigrants, decrying “anchor babies” and advocating the revocation of birthright citizenship a solid decade before today’s presidential contenders. Of course, Goode is backing Trump.

“Trump is the only one among the Republicans that’s right on free trade,” Goode says. “We had trade surpluses with Mexico. Now we have trade deficits, due to NAFTA. To make the superrich richer, you have to give these countries something, and what you give them is factory jobs.”

Trump leads the field by substantial margins in the Monmouth University and Roanoke College polls, although Marco Rubio is playing hard for Virginia and Ted Cruz for Texas. Although some establishment figures such as Chris Christie have endorsed Trump, others say they’ll sit out the election rather than vote for him.

“There are a number of Republicans, myself included, who will not vote for Donald Trump,” says Shaun Kenney, an editor at the GOP blog Bearing Drift and former director of the Republican Party of Virginia.

Wilder, a canny politician who won election as the first black governor by campaigning as hard in rural areas as he did in urban ones, says the party that can most successfully consolidate after the primaries has the advantage headed to November. He warns, however, that independent voters will decide who wins Virginia, and perhaps the country.

“I resist this belief that there is a group of people who are so beholden to any ideology that all you have to do is wave a wand and they follow it,” Wilder says. “The rising vote in this age is the independent-thinking voter.”

The response of independents to these populist insurgents may well realign the political landscape post-Obama. A candidate who can respond to the frustration and fury of rural voters has the opportunity to reset the table, or maybe just burn it down.

“The population that I think is giving rise to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has every right to be mad as hell,” says Republican political consultant Tucker Martin, who worked for Chris Christie’s super PAC and before that for Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. “Maybe the upside of this is, it forces people to actually look at these communities.”