Why Is Minnesota Reddening?

In several places, I've seen folks say that Minnesota is state must likely to flip from Clinton to Trump in 2020.

Even for someone like me, who's generally confident about Biden's chance in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, it's hard to argue for an alternative (New Hampshire, maybe?). And Minnesota has hardly been some Democratic bastion over the past few years. It's had recent Republican Governors and Senators; in 2018 it was the only state where the GOP picked up Democratic-held House seats (two of them, in fact; off-set by two losses elsewhere in the state).

Yet for some reason, it still feels odd to me that Minnesota seems to be reddening. The Twin Cities are a redoubt of highly-educated urban professionals -- a demographic that ha turned sharply to the left in recent years. This doesn't mean it is a perfect progressive paradise (recall George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis), but to the extent that Minnesota's population is anchored around the Twin Cities and its suburbs, those are areas where Democrats should be performing better, not worse.

The answer to the riddle, I suspect, is that rural Minnesota took longer to go Republican than other rural areas. Collin Peterson has for 30 years held down a western Minnesota seat that is, by far, the Trumpiest in the country occupied by a Democrat. Until recently, Democrats were dominant in the "iron range" of northern Minnesota -- that region was where one of the two seats the GOP took in 2018 sat. It remains the case that Democrats remain solid in Minnesota's cities and are improving in the suburbs. But Minnesota's long tradition of prairie populism may finally be fading out, and that's made a bunch of historically blue voters finally swap to the GOP.

I don't, to be clear, think it will be enough for the GOP to win the state in 2020 (either at the presidential level, or in Jason Lewis' challenge to incumbent Democratic Senator Tina Smith). I do think that Collin Peterson's luck likely will run-out -- he's got a top-tier opponent and Trump's coattails are just too long to resist in a presidential year. And it's possible that Democratic gains in the suburbs will offset losses in rural locales.

But that's all just hypothesis at this point. Any other candidates for the apparent trend are welcome.

Taking Rural To School: The Carleton/Minnesota Case

MinnPost has an interesting article detailing the various programs and practices Minnesota private schools (including my beloved Carleton College) use to bring more students from rural communities to campus.

One thing I think the article does a good job of emphasizing is that attracting rural students, specifically, means being attentive to particular range of problems, concerns, or obstacles which transcend a simple, naked, "we're open to everyone" outlook. Obviously, scholarships are helpful -- and some schools have scholarship programs specifically open to students from rural backgrounds.

But another issue that is pointed out in the article goes to recruitment: when sending admissions representatives on recruiting trips around the country, it's obviously more efficient to visit densely populated sub/urban areas (particularly in relatively wealthy high-performing school districts) that are likely to yield more applicants. Hence, rural students may be less likely to hear about (say) Carleton or get information as to why they should attend or how it will be financially possible to attend. This is a structural disadvantage students from rural communities might face, and so it is incumbent on college admissions offices to take proactive steps to counteract it. Likewise, rural school districts may lack the range of extracurricular activities or programs that are found in their suburban counterparts, and so figuring out who are the true "stars" coming out of rural districts may require more work than simply an apples-to-apples comparison of applicant profiles. And for some schools (particularly those which are not themselves nestled in rural communities), there might also be some attention to mitigating the effects of culture shock -- the delicate balancing between wanting to expand horizons while also respecting that adjustment to new and different communities is something that requires work and support.

All of this is to say, to the extent a school like Carleton desires geographic diversity -- and it does, and it should -- it will have to take specific steps to make itself available and accessible to that community. Tailored scholarship programs, extra attention to non-traditional recruiting, and holistic appraisals of applications are just some of the ways Carleton might take these steps.

There's one last thing worth remarking on. Frequently, when talking about "affirmative action" programs, we hear a stock refrain about the "rural White kid from a small town in South Dakota -- what about him?"  As this article makes clear, the myth that colleges don't care about diversity when it comes to rural kids is just that -- a myth. But there's a bigger issue here. The implication of this critique is that concern for rural students is something competitive with, and antagonistic to, affirmative action programs which seek to increase enrollment of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. In reality, they're two peas in a pod.

The strategies discussed in this article include scholarships that are just "for" rural kids (I wouldn't have been able to access them), specific efforts to recruit from these communities, and even certain types of "weighting" when assessing their application (why should their two extracurricular activities be more impressive than my seven?). These are no different in form than how racial affirmative action works. In neither case is the strategy simply a facial neutrality where we tally up GPAs and standardized test scores and rank accordingly. It isn't even a simple reduction of the entire program to class -- scholarships for people (regardless of race or location) below a certain income. Rather, both the race and the geography case involve taking specific actions that are tailored to, and sometimes restricted to, the particular underrepresented community.

Yet I think this article will elicit very few complaints about "special privileges", or the need for "location-blindness", or odes to the lost meritocracy of yore. I suspect most people will read this article and think these are salutary efforts to improve educational accessibility for a community that is often-overlooked in higher education.

For the record: it's the latter reaction that's the right one. While I myself come from the suburbs, and thus did not receive any of the scholarship money or specialized recruitment or tailored review of my application, I still consider myself a beneficiary of these programs. Why? Well, most obviously, I'm engaged to a fellow Carl who comes from what the article calls "Greater Minnesota" -- that turned out to be a great benefit for me. And of course, one of the many virtues of a truly great liberal arts education is getting to meet and learn from people who hail from a variety of different backgrounds.

My life and learning is better than it otherwise would have been because I got to meet and become friends with people from rural communities. It's also better than it otherwise would have been because I got to meet and become friends with people from lots of other communities, many of which were quite distant (spatially and otherwise) from where I grew up in the DC suburbs. Carleton's efforts to promote this sort of diversity are part of what makes it strong -- in all cases, not just some.

Subbing Out Roundup

I took my final subfield exam today, in the History of Political Thought. For those of you who don't know, "subfield exams" were introduced as a means of exploring the "chicken" game: the student really doesn't want to study (for obvious reasons), and the examiner really doesn't want to fail the student (since that would necessitate writing and grading another exam). The equilibrium is for the student to level a deeply mediocre exam, and the examiner in turn to excoriate the student in comments before passing him or her. How it made the jump to Political Theory remains unknown.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm feeling good about my History of Political Thought Exam. But I am very tired, and about to hop on a plane to celebrate a friend's engagement. So ... roundup!

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Leon Wieseltier on Charlottesville, Trump, and the alt-right. He doesn't pull punches. Definitely worth a read.

Somebody finally did a profile piece on rural people of color.

Fascinating article on Egyptian Israeli Arabs, and their strained relationship with a state nominally at peace with Israel.

Zachary Braiterman gives his spin on the perennial "are Jews White" topic.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy on why antisemitism needs to be seen as a distinct axis of oppression.

Very much enjoying this article by Rae Langton on "Blocking as Counterspeech."

What's worse than refusing to pay out valid worker's compensation claims to undocumented immigrants? Refusing it and using the claim as an excuse to deport them from the country. Grotesque.

Hi, I'm David, and I Don't Drink Almond Milk

Michael Tomasky gives us the latest installment of an everflowering series: crudely caricaturing "coastal elites" while purporting to educate them on middle Americans:

[E]lite liberals need to recognize a fundamental truth: All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts.

First of all, middle Americans go to church. Not temple. Church. God and Jesus Christ play important roles in their lives....

Second, politics simply doesn’t consume middle Americans the way it does elites on the coasts.... They talk kids, and local gossip, and pop culture, and sports....

Third, their daily lives are pretty different from the lives of elite liberals. Few of them buy fair trade coffee or organic almond milk. Some of them served in the armed forces. Some of them own guns, and like to shoot them and teach their kids how to shoot them. Some of them hold jobs in the service of global capital and feel proud of their work.

Fourth, they’re patriotic in the way that most Americans are patriotic. They don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag. They don’t like it when people bad-mouth our country. They believe that America is mostly good, and that the rest of the world should look more like America.

I find these very frustrating, not because of what they say about middle Americans, but because of what they say about me -- born inside the beltway on the east coast, currently living in the ultimate liberal bubble of Berkeley on the west coast.

I don't drink almond milk (I've tried it, once, and think it's disgusting). I don't buy fair trade coffee or sip lattes of any variety. I've fired a gun, and while I don't have any real interest in doing it again, I don't begrudge others who do. I have friends from both high school and college who served in the armed forces. I can chat pop culture with the best of them (ask me about my breakdown of  Gordon Ramsay shows). There is plenty that I find great about America, and am quite happy to kvell about.

Admittedly, I talk politics a lot (I am a political blogger), and I go to synagogue, not church. But I just got back from a funeral (my fiance's grandmother) which was held at a church in a town of less than 2,000 in rural Minnesota (Goodhue County went for Trump by 18, FYI). I survive such locales just fine. And while I always knew of how important her Christian faith was to her life, when I found out that she had specifically included me in her deathbed prayers, I was deeply moved.

Maybe this feels like protesting too much. But it's not just about me. It's also about the folks here at UC-Berkeley -- yes, hyper-lefty Berkeley -- that falsify that coastal bubble hypothesis.

When I started at Berkeley Law, my most liberal student was an alum of the University of South Carolina, and my most conservative was literally the scion of a wine dynasty. In between I taught decorated combat veterans and the daughter of an inland empire county sheriff. This is typical. UC-Berkeley is one of the world's great public universities, and our students accordingly come to us from all over the state and all over the world. They come from suburban Orange County, yes, but also inland ranch towns and impoverished LA neighborhoods. It is no surprise at all that Berkeley ranks ninth in the New York Times college access index measuring economic diversity amongst enrolled students, nor that UC schools comprise the entirety of the top 5.

So maybe we're asking the wrong questions. We know that students come from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic locations and pedigrees to attend to Berkeley. Indeed, I suspect that more Berkeley students and alumni know a sizeable chunk of folks who grew up in small towns than persons who grew up in small towns know a sizeable chunk of folks who attended schools like Berkeley. And we know that the resulting campus culture here at Berkeley is very liberal. And yes, self-selection plays a part in that, as does the relative ideological uniformity of the faculty. But maybe, just maybe, it's also evidence that when you expose people to a rich tapestry of human diversity encompassing people of a wide range of backgrounds, hometowns, and pedigrees -- the result is a tendency towards liberalism.

The fact is, our students aren't born on the Berkeley campus. Some of them come from those rural towns (in California or elsewhere). Or they don't, but their parents did. Or their best friend. Or their roommate. Or their future spouse. To act like Berkeley students have never met anyone who doesn't eat gluten-free is a grotesque parody of who actually comprises our "bubble".

So of course we should respect each and every part of America -- urban, suburban, and rural, north and south, coastal and middle. But the "coastal elites" who supposedly sniff down upon middle Americans from atop their soy lattes? They weren't born in a Starbucks. They might have been born in that small town in rural Minnesota that they supposedly cannot possibly understand.

Who Benefits from a National Popular Vote?

Hillary Clinton will win the national popular vote.

This is a lot less relevant than it seems. Legally, of course, it's entirely irrelevant: we elect our President through the electoral college system, not the popular vote. And even as a talking point, its bark is worth more than its bite. Just because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote under  the system we have (where the popular vote isn't the prize) doesn't mean she would have won had a popular vote plurality been the deciding factor. Both candidates' strategy would have been very different had the popular vote been the deciding factor; perhaps if Trump had an incentive to focus on ginning up more votes in, say, Los Angeles, the numbers would work out differently. It's not implausible that Clinton would have won the popular vote anyway, but it's a hypothesis supported by moderate -- not overwhelming -- evidence.

Nonetheless, the fact that we've now had two elections in 16 years where the popular vote winner was the electoral college loser has put our status quo system under unprecedented scrutiny. My inclination is to support reform: it's hard to justify the electoral college (particularly since it is about to fail at one of its original justifications -- ensuring that a wave of populist demagoguery doesn't put a manifestly unqualified hack in the oval office).

Perhaps the only plausible contemporary justification for the electoral college I've seen is that it forces candidates to appeal to a wide range of Americans, instead of just concentrating on big cities. Who would spend time in rural states like Iowa or New Hampshire were it not for the electoral college incentive? The claim is that, if we only decided things by the popular vote, our presidential election campaigns would be fought out only in our biggest cities, leaving many Americans on the outside looking in.

I don't find this objection compelling for two reasons. First, the electoral college also very obviously causes large swaths of America to be overlooked. "Safe states" like California or Texas (or Delaware or Wyoming) are entirely ignored. And if certain regions have to be ignored in a democratic system, in a democracy it seems like "having fewer people" is a pretty decent metric for allocating our attention.

But second, I'm actually unconvinced that we'd see widespread neglect of rural America in a popular vote model. The way actual presidential campaigns operate in swing states is illustrative. In Wisconsin, for example, it's not like Democrats and Republicans spend all their time fighting for votes in Milwaukee and Madison, and ignore the rest of the state entirely. Rather, there is plenty of attention paid to the outlying regions -- particularly by Republicans, who try to drum up support from many smaller counties to counteract huge Democratic margins in the cities. This seems to be pretty standard across most contested states. So why wouldn't we see the same dynamic play out nationwide: Republicans rallying many small-population regions to try to overcome large Democratic margins in cities?

And this brings me to my final observation. I support a national popular vote model because it seems more democratic than our status quo. But I think people are being mislead in thinking that it necessarily benefits the Democratic Party. Many large urban centers are in blue states that are not currently contested. Many rural areas, by contrast, are in purple states which are absolutely contested. In other words, our political system right now has Democrats and Republicans nip-and-tuck in a situation where Democrats do try to appeal to rural and exurban voters, and Republicans basically don't try to appeal to urban voters. It seems like the GOP has a lot more room to grow if, as it'd have an incentive to do in a popular vote system, it starts making a serious play for city votes (it's also true that in doing so it may have an incentive to moderate itself by appealing to a more diverse constituency that it currently ignores).

Again, my small-d democratic preferences aren't based on what helps the large-D Democratic Party. But this is a note of caution about thinking that a popular vote model will necessarily be a boon for progressives. It may well help the GOP more (though it also might help the GOP break out of its increasingly radical shell).

Post-Election Roundup: The Bad Place or the Darkest Timeline?

Jill says we're in the darkest timeline. I say we're in The Bad Place. Either way, it ain't good, and my browser is clogging up.

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If there's an award for Most Craven Jewish Organization of 2016, the Republican Jewish Coalition has to be the frontrunner.

Everyone's talking about how coastal elites are in a bubble. But many rural Americans -- who've scarcely met a Muslim or a Jew, or an African-American or an Asian -- are in a huge bubble of their own. And nobody seems all that concerned with urging them to break out, or to take seriously the views of other people unlike them.

Latino Trump voters explain their votes.

A meditation by Joan C. Williams (UC-Hastings Law) on what drives "White working class" (which actually generally means middle class) voters. Basically, they feel like their is a dignity-deficit in their lives, and they hate the professional/managerial (not the rich) class. An interesting read, though I have some reservations.

The anti-Semitization of racism. That's my term, but Phoebe Maltz Bovy explains how racism is beginning to resemble anti-Semitism in that it targets achievement by racial minorities and snarls about their supposed excess of power and influence.

And finally, a truly excellent letter from Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander, a Democrat who only narrowly lost his deep red state in a big GOP year. Well worth reading if you need a jolt.

Liberals (Mis)Theorize the Rural

A few years ago, Lisa Pruitt published an important article in the Utah Law Review entitled Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural. The paper argued that feminists, typically situated in urban centers or university towns, had constructed women's experience in a way that generally did not encompass or encounter women who lived in rural areas. For example, "spatial isolation, lack of anonymity, and a depressed socioeconomic landscape" all are characteristic aspects of rural living that alter the efficacy of particular strategies for women's liberation. Moreover, the (sub)urban bias of dominant feminist theory generally does not engage substantively with cultural aspects of the rural that may be important to many women's identity.

Pruitt's article is in many ways a simple extension of similar criticisms and extensions other outsider-groups had leveled at feminist scholarship for decades. Early feminist constructions of women's experience resonated with a particular type of woman who shared a social strata with the authors -- generally white, middle-class suburban women. These women could relate to the barriers facing women who wished to work rather than stay at home as housewife, or who experienced the "cage" of puritanical sexual norms. But poorer women scoffed at the notion that there was anything radical about women working -- they had been doing so for years. Likewise, Black women whose bodies were considered property of White men and whose sexuality -- far from an image of pure White maidenhood -- was constructed as hyperactive and unconstrained related very differently to the movement toward sexual "liberation".

I was thinking about this when reading the reports of a rural Nebraska school district which is allowing its seniors to pose with guns in their senior yearbook photos. There is a lot of liberal snickering over this policy -- Jezebel is typical -- that I think deserves a prized spot in the dictionary for urban elitism. Jezebel's stock photo, which looks like the poster for a femme fatale action movie, fails utterly in its portrayal of how gun ownership and usage is situated within the community in question. The locals who support this policy note, accurately, that hunting and sport-shooting are important parts of the local culture, and for many of the students these activities are as central to their identities as being a soccer player or trombonist. The school board guidelines block photographic poses which are threatening or sexualize violence (more than one can say for Jezebel's photo -- though incredibly, they turn around and accuse the district of being backwards precisely because it is guarding against the toxic combination of sex and violence). And there's little evidence that the students in question have any interest in incorporating guns into their photos except as an expression of their heritage and cultural practices.

In short, the image of guns is very different where I grew up than in many rural communities. In Broken Bow, a teenager holding a gun is not culturally associated with an imminent school shooting. Citing to the threat of such atrocities suppresses the particularities of rural experience into a "general" (really, specifically urban/suburban) outlook on guns that would be quite foreign to their experience. Importing our own cultural meanings onto rural communities is no different than any sort of hegemony. I don't want folks from Broken Bow dictating how urban-dwellers in DC relate to guns, and I have no intention in doing it back to them.

I'm not personally an enthusiast of guns. I certainly didn't grow up in a gun family; I've shot a gun once in my life (at a range, and not very accurately -- I think I nicked the paper once). My dad swears that in Coast Guard Basic Training he never passed riflery. I support a variety of regulations to ensure guns are kept out of the hands of criminals and to minimize the risk they pose to the American populace. I've co-authored briefs on this score while in private practice, and I even at one point contemplated working for the Brady Center. Yet I've never considered myself "anti-gun" per se. Guns are dangerous and that justifies careful regulation and control, but they're also an important and legitimate part of many people's culture and heritage. Communities, particularly rural communities, have themselves often developed norms of healthy gun ownership and usage which are worthy of respect. Put simply, guns have a different cultural valence in Broken Bow, Nebraska than they do in San Francisco, California or Chicago, Illinois. And that's okay! There's space for pluralism in firearms culture. This doesn't mean there will never be policy disputes over guns, and I think plenty of common-sense gun regulations impose minimal burdens on reputable gun buyers and sellers. But the point is that these debates should not ignore cultural context, regardless of whether that context is Chicago or Broken Bow. This whole discourse risks of making fun of the bumpkins, and it should sit very uncomfortable.

Those Inferior City-Dwellers Need To Stop Being So Elitist!

In all my years of reading CNN, rarely have I seen a column as schizophrenic, offensive, and breath-takingly idiotic as the bit Ruben Navarrette just phoned in "defending" Sarah Palin. Navarrette trots out the tired canard that Palin was "targeted" by the media because she wasn't sufficiently "elite". I'd guess she was targeted because she wasn't sufficiently "talented", but that's just me.

But honestly, that's not what troubles me. What pissed me off to no end was Navarrette's hit job on Colin Powell, whom I lauded earlier this month for striking back against the idea that there is something inferior about the "values" of big cities. "[M]ost of us don't live in small towns," Powell said. "I was raised in the South Bronx, and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx."

Navarrette's response to this is astounding:

You'd think the presidential campaign was about conservatives picking on urbanites. It wasn't. Sure, some Republicans probably made a mistake by using phrases such as "real America" or "real Americans" as a rallying cry for the base. Americans who live in cities might have thought they were being slighted.

Gosh, what an absurd thought! Cast aside that "some Republicans" includes Palin herself, the woman Navarrette feels compelled to stand up for. The idea that the Republican Party isn't anti-urbanist is so fanciful I didn't even realize it was up for discussion anymore. There is virtually no overlap between "city resident" and "Republican" voter. Cities are primarily made up of groups that the GOP has always dripped contempt for: non-Christians, people of color, and GLBT folks. Nobody misses the code: When Republicans talk about "San Francisco values", they mean gay; and when they talk about "cosmopolitan elitists", they mean Jews.

But what's most striking about Navarrette's piece is that -- literally paragraphs after saying that nobody has anything against city people -- he then proceeds to launch into a broad-based attack assailing the values of ... urban dwellers.

After Powell attacked Palin, one of the governor's most vocal defenders, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, returned the favor by attacking Powell.

"What is this hatred for conservatives and small-town people and Sarah Palin?" Limbaugh asked on his radio show. "I know a lot of people that are from the Bronx, Gen. Powell, and if you think the values there in the Bronx today reflect the ones you grew up with, take a trip back and see if the street corners and the activities there are the same as when you were growing up."

Limbaugh got it. When people use phrases such as "small-town values," it's as much about time as it is place. The idea isn't that people who live in small towns have better values than people who live in cities. It's simply an attempt to recall, with nostalgia, what life was like when more Americans lived in small towns.

It used to be that more families ate dinner together and high school students worked summers and after school. It used to be that our schools didn't make excuses for why some kids don't learn because they were too busy trying to teach them.

It used to be that parents weren't interested in being their kids' best friends, only good parents. And it used to be that people pulled their own weight and would never dare ask for a handout.

Rush %*%#ing Limbaugh? And you're trying to pretend like you're the victim here? This defies belief. And you know what life was like when most American's lived in small towns? I couldn't tell you -- Jews often weren't allowed in, and Blacks got lynched. I actually have no problem with contemporary small town values -- but I'll be damned if I let this faux-nostalgia for apartheid America be recast as something noble.

I know people who grew up in inner-ring suburbs (like myself). And we're doing fine. I know people who grew up in small towns in America's heartland (like my girlfriend). And they're doing fine too. And I know people who grew up in the middle of America's great cities. And they're doing fine as well. There's nothing wrong with being from Bethesda, just as there is nothing wrong with being from Owatonna and there is nothing wrong with being from Chicago. And Barack Obama -- who will be our nation's first President with urban roots since at least JFK -- hopefully will let people like Navarrette know that, loud and clear.

I Could Not Be Happy In Rural America

Tyler Cowen hates America. Do you?

Esq. sympathizes, no doubt.