The Midwest Will Decide the Presidential Battle

GIUSEPPE BERTA PORTRAITS DETROIT, ONCE BOOMING MOTOWN TODAY DEINDUSTRIALIZED AND DILAPIDATED BUT SET IN A STATE, MICHIGAN, WHICH IS CRUCIAL FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE

In the 2016 elections, the US Midwest proved decisive in the race for the White House, handing Donald Trump an astonishing number of electoral votes, considering that states like Indiana, Wisconsin or Michigan traditionally vote for the Democrats. At the time, the prevailing interpretation was that  Republicans were r interpret the mood of the "forgotten men" and of the manufacturing heartlands emptied out by the deindustrialization in the wake of globalization. "It didn't go exactly like that, as I explained by analyzing the emblematic case of Motown, in my recent book Detroit. Viaggio nella città degli estremi (Detroit. A Journey into the City of Extremes),” says Giuseppe Berta, who teaches history of the 20^th century at Bocconi.

“Today things have not changed much; the plea of the Rust Belt still goes unanswered and neither Trump nor the Democrats have so far been able to provide the answers that people expect from them. I don't know what the final electoral outcome will be, but I'm sure that the presidential race will again be decided there". The Midwest, and in particular the car-making area, which according to the current president would be revitalized, is still suffering from economic and employment crisis while the beating heart of the US economy has moved to the West Coast.
 
"The hi-tech boom, however, is not something that Trump can take credit for; it is a completely independent phenomenon," comments Berta. “California is not a red state, and Silicon Valley doesn't think Republican. The president will therefore still have to rely on the Midwestern votes and exploit the yawning gap that exists between rural areas and urban centers". In fact, already in 2016 Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland remained solid blue; in Detroit, where African-Americans are over 80% of the total population, Hillary Clinton won 67% of the vote. But in the white suburbs and the countryside, the vote was in favor of Trump. "Although some polls indicate that, for example, in Michigan this kind of geographical and social stratification could still favor Trump because the US electoral system has historically been influenced by the desire to give greater representation to rural areas seen as carriers of most cherished political traditions”, continues the academic. “The Democrats, moreover, have so far shown little personality; in dealing with either the Covid emergency or the Black Lives Matter protests, Congress has looked less active than the presidency.
 
In this too, Trump has shown himself more unscrupulous, adopting a stance typical of Modern Monetary Theory whereby money is always printed to cover deficits, regardless of inflation. This injection of liquidity favors Big State and pours money into the pockets of citizens, cushioning unemployment and boosting Wall Street which, in fact, keeps rising and burning records, in spite of the fact that the number of companies is shrinking. Sooner or later somebody will have to pick up the tab, but in the meantime fiscal expansion could play in his favor, at least for this election cycle".

by Emanuele Elli