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The Puzzling Instinct of Red State Voters to Vote Against Their Own Interests

October 3, 2016


By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNews.com

Depending on who’s counting there are somewhere between 8 and 12 “battleground” states in the 2016 presidential election---states that conceivably can be won either by Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. The outcome in the 38 to 42 other states already is decided, according to nearly all survey research, political pundits and even the campaigns themselves.

That’s where I’m going today. Specifically, to the states of the American South and the Midwest that almost certainly will give Donald Trump and other Republican candidates the majority of their votes. Let’s start with the deeply conservative border and southern states. These happen to be the states that receive a far greater dollar return from Washington than they pay in U.S. taxes.

In 2014, for example, the people living in South Carolina received $7.84 back in federal services for every dollar they paid in taxes. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia were in the top ten. Reliably Republican North Dakota and Indiana also were there.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a rule the states most opposed to Washington “meddling” took the most money and services from the federal government. On the other side of that divide, 27 states paid more in federal taxes than they got back. Most of those states were “blue.” Those who live in Delaware, for instance, get back only 50 cents for every dollar they pay in federal taxes.

This isn’t a new development. In fact, the economic growth the South has enjoyed over the past 50 years was triggered by one of the largest domestic projects ever undertaken by Washington---the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Before the Franklin Roosevelt administration and successive Democratic majority congresses launched TVA the rural South had little in the way of electricity, destructive river flooding was frequent, farm land was becoming unusable, and the region was one of the poorest in the nation. Even before the Great Depression average family income in the TVA region was little more than $600 a year.

Washington poured money into the TVA project, building dams, power plants, stringing electrical grids, helping farmers cultivate crops in sustainable ways. TVA even helped those in newly electrified homes finance appliances at affordable prices. Valuable land was protected for recreation. Valuable resources came under the protection of modern forest management.

In effect, Washington, through TVA, brought tens of millions of Americans, some of the poorest of the poor, into the 20th century, an act made necessary because private capital would not build the dams. Private power companies considered stringing power lines to rural America a losing investment. State and local governments didn’t have the resources to do it on their own.

All of this proved essential later to creating needed raw materials for use in World War II, and to create an economically vibrant South in the post-war decades. Even today, the TVA is America’s largest single power company. And this region---the people of this region---are among the most virulent opponents of Washington.

As are the majority of voters in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. All of these states were in the same boat as the rural South---vast distances between small towns, little financial incentive for private companies to electrify them. The federal Rural Electrification Administration did that. Neither was there incentive for airlines to land there, until the federal Civil Aeronautics Board required them to do it and the federal government built the airports that made rural air travel possible.

And so on.

We’re talking here about voters who year-after-year get more out of Washington than the federal taxes they pay, and election-after-election vote for candidates who rail against Washington spending and big government. The shorthand for describing this puzzling attitude was best expressed during the 2009-2010 fight over the Affordable Care Act. "Washington, keep your hands off my Medicare!"

At the very least you would expect these states to be politically competitive. But in a political year where hardly anything is “normal,” the reliability of the South and Midwest plains states to vote Republican is one of the few constants.

Apparently the instinct to vote against their own self-interest is so strong it even drives them to vote for the most dangerous and least qualified person ever to seriously be considered for president of the United States.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)

Joe Rothstein’s highly-acclaimed new novel, “The Latina President…and The Conspiracy to Destroy Her” is available on Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/joesnovel



Joe Rothstein is a political strategist and media producer who worked in more than 200 campaigns for political office and political causes. He also has served as editor of the Anchorage Daily News and as an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. He has a master's degree in journalism from UCLA. Mr. Rothstein is the author of award-winning political thrillers, The Latina President and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her, The Salvation Project, and The Moment of Menace. For more information, please visit his website at https://www.joerothstein.net/.