J.D. Vance and the ‘forgotten’ men and women of Wisconsin

July 17, 2024 – Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Vice President Nominee Senator JD Vance speaks at the Republican National Convention. | Photo by Joeff Davis

Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson got emotional Wednesday night at the conclusion of J.D. Vance’s speech accepting the nomination to be Donald Trump’s running mate. “I was absolutely moved,” Thompson said as he stood with the Wisconsin delegation near the main stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “I got a tear in my eye, but I am so darned impressed. It was a great speech. A great message.”

Vance, Thompson said, is  “everything Trump needs. He’s very humble. He comes from humble beginnings. He comes from a broken home. He went on and succeeded in school … a Marine. Wisconsin loves all of that.” Plus, “his mother was so cute,” Thompson said. He liked the way Vance featured his mom and her triumph over drug addiction at the convention. And he appreciated Vance’s description of his grandmother, her salty language and the collection of loaded firearms the family discovered stashed all over her house when she died.  “Nineteen guns,” Thompson marveled, “All of this together is gonna resonate across this country and in Wisconsin.”

If it doesn’t give you a warm feeling to contemplate Vance’s Mamaw and her house full of guns, you are probably not one of the “forgotten men and women” the Trump campaign is courting. But Vance knows exactly what he’s doing. In his convention speech he claimed a direct family connection to every swing state, saying his relatives migrated “from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.”

Appealing to alienated white working class voters in the Midwest is a smart strategy, Republican political consultant Keith Gilkes said during a “Purple Wisconsin” panel discussion sponsored by WisPolitics. Gilkes pointed out that the toss-up states are all in the Rust Belt. Trump doesn’t need Vance to deliver his home state of Ohio, a Republican stronghold. But his message about representing voters who have been “left behind” resonates in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where the Trump campaign plans to have Vance “camp out,” Gilkes asserted, until the election.

Wisconsin’s former Republican Gov. Scott Walker also praised Vance at the Purple Wisconsin event for recognizing the political power of appealing to voters who “feel forgotten by Washington, not just by one party, but by both parties.”

Vance’s personal history, including his mother’s addiction to drugs and a chaotic childhood marked by poverty, makes him a good messenger to people who have suffered the scourge of opioids and overdose deaths, Walker said. Vance helps Trump make the case that “I’m going to stand up for people like that, for families like his,” Walker said. “And even if others aren’t looking out for them in Washington, even in his own party, that’s the kind of people we’re looking out for — the people who feel forgotten.”

Politics of resentment

But what does it mean to “look out for” working class voters in the Midwest? Wisconsin’s experience under Walker is instructive. 

Walker leveraged the politics of resentment as governor. He owes his political ascendance in Wisconsin to rightwing talk radio personalities in the white-flight suburbs around Milwaukee who stoked racial division. He became nationally famous for attacking teachers and other unionized public sector workers and doing away with collective bargaining rights. He didn’t make life better for the blue collar Wisconsinites he claimed to champion, he just channeled their resentment of their neighbors who had pensions, paid vacation and health care benefits. When he left office, his legacy included making the biggest budget cuts in history to public schools, turning Wisconsin into a right-to-work state and funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into the failed Foxconn project. The 250,000 new private sector jobs he promised never materialized. But the bitterness lingers to this day. Trump, whom Walker supports, spread that toxin nationwide with a rightwing populist campaign that punches down, blaming immigrants and people of color for the woes of white working class voters who have lost jobs, income and social status because of manufacturing flight, the rise of the gig economy and the very anti-union policies Walker championed.

There is real substance to the idea that working class voters in Wisconsin feel alienated from both political parties. I’ve interviewed some of them who said they voted for Trump in 2016 because he spoke out against NAFTA and other global trade deals supported by Democrats and Republicans alike that accelerated the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture and contributed to the flight of manufacturing jobs to other countries. 

Vance spoke directly to those voters when he said in his speech at the RNC, “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.”

But Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA, the USMCA, while it contained some protections for Wisconsin dairy farmers, was viewed by progressives as a “marginal improvement.”

Mostly, what Trump pushed through in the way of economic policy was a massive tax cut for the rich. If Trump’s signature tax cut becomes permanent, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the top 0.1% of earners will get $278,000 in tax cuts while the lowest tier of taxpayers will get an average of $130.

The current Republican platform doesn’t offer much to workers, either. During the convention, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), chair of the platform committee, was on message, declaring, “We produced a different kind of platform, one that is dedicated to the forgotten men and women of America.” In the name of those struggling Americans, Blackburn said, the GOP has dedicated itself to “cutting taxes and regulations” — in other words, the same old Republican program.

Injured masculinity

The populism of the Trump campaign is not economic populism, it’s about restoring white, male social status. 

There was an awful lot of talk at the convention about trans girls in sports, “woke” public school teachers, the dangers posed by the “radical left,” as Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson put it, and, of course, the “invasion” of the southern border. Before Vance spoke on Wednesday night, delegates were waving placards that said “Mass Deportation Now!” and chanting. “Send them back!” 

Never mind the economic impact mass deportation would have on, say, Wisconsin’s dairy industry, where 70% of the labor is performed by undocumented immigrants.

Vance cleverly tied global trade deals supported by both political parties to immigration in his convention speech.“Now, thanks to these policies that Biden and other out-of-touch politicians in Washington gave us,” he said, “our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor.”

Any Wisconsin dairy farmer can tell you that there are not a lot of American workers lining up to milk cows and shovel manure starting at 4 a.m. For decades, dairy farmers have depended on “cheap foreign labor” performed mostly by undocumented workers because, while seasonal workers are permitted to come to the United States legally to pick crops under the H2A program, there is no legal visa available for year-round low-skilled work, including milking cows.

Such fine points of policy were not the point of the Republican convention, however. The themes there were injured masculinity and retribution.

Class war

Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican consultant and founder of the Lincoln Project, is horrified by what Trump has done to his party. He said in a phone interview during the convention from his home in Florida that the “more sophisticated, more educated, more affluent Republican voter pool” is just coming to terms with “the fact that the party that they once knew of Ronald Reagan and George Bush and everybody else has transformed itself into this populist, Christian nationalist party.”

Rebelling against those affluent, “sophisticated” elites is a big part of Trump’s appeal to working class voters. 

Democrats, meanwhile, are outraged by the Trump-Vance ticket’s claim to represent the interests of working people. The White House felt betrayed when Teamsters President Shaun O’Brien gave a prime time speech calling Trump “one tough SOB,” since, as the Washington Post reported, the Biden administration has bailed out the pensions of 350,000 Teamsters, appointed staunchly pro-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board and instituted union labor requirements in federal contracts. 

In Wisconsin, Democratic strategist Melissa Baldauff said, Democrats have launched a door-to-door campaign to explain the concrete benefits the Biden administration is offering working families through the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Carrying calculators, volunteers are contacting individual families to tell them about tax rebates worth a couple of thousand dollars on new windows and appliances, and apprenticeship programs for their kids in high-tech, clean economy jobs, so that “they’re all of a sudden, without having to get a four-year degree and take on any debt, starting to make really good money.”

Those programs do make a tangible difference in people’s lives. But they were far from the minds of Wisconsin delegates at the convention.

Barbara Finger, who was wearing a giant cheesehead hat as Vance was nominated from the floor, said she hails from “40 miles north of Lambeau Field,” where the Green Bay Packers play, and works 40 hours a week at the Walmart in Marinette. A Navy veteran, she said she appreciates Vance’s military service. Her No. 1 concern in the election, she said, is to “stop the voter fraud.” Finger said she doesn’t want students to vote twice, once at college and once back in their hometowns. “And I don’t want illegal aliens having the right to vote; voting is for U.S. citizens,” she added. (Copious research shows that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.)

Finger is exactly the kind of voter the Trump campaign is focused on. Choosing Vance magnified the appeal of a campaign that is reaching out to people who have felt alienated and left out and who like being told that they are the real Americans, that they are part of a noble fight to restore the greatness of America.

“I think that Donald Trump is a man of the people. Even though he’s a rich man he can relate to the common man,” said delegate and state Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee). “I think J.D. Vance came from the common man and is doing great things. So I think he rounds out the ticket very well.”

“It’s the right pick at the right time,” Thompson said as Vance left the stage. “We’re gonna win Wisconsin.”

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