Democrats expand their grip on the productive economy

By some measures, Joe Biden won the presidential election by a relatively narrow margin, drawing down-ticket Democratic candidates along in a fairly weak wake.

Biden and the Democrats, however, convincingly solidified their commanding lead in a key metric: Victory in the nation’s most economically important regions.

That’s the inescapable conclusion to be drawn by mapping Biden’s electoral strength against contributions to national gross domestic product, by county.

According to Mark Muro and his colleagues at the Brookings Institution, who did the mapping, the 477 counties that Biden won accounted for 70% of U.S. GDP in 2018, leaving the rest to the 2,497 counties won by President Donald Trump.

Biden’s victory outdid the record of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Clinton’s 472 counties contributed 64% of GDP (in 2014), while Trump’s 2,584 counties contributed only 36%. In other words, the nation’s economic divide is even more stark now than it was four years ago.

“Biden flipped half of the 10 most economically significant counties Trump won in 2016, including Phoenix’s Maricopa County; Dallas-Fort Worth’s Tarrant County; Jacksonville, Fla.’s Duval County; Morris County in New Jersey; and Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.’s Pinellas County,” observe Muro et al.

This isn’t merely a post-election parlor game. The productivity divide isn’t between layabouts and hard workers, but between the traditional economy and the new: In the simplest terms, between agriculture and legacy manufacturing oriented toward durable hardware on the one hand, and high-technology and professional occupations on the other.

These distinctions tend to be reflected, if imperfectly, in geography. The old economy is rural and small-town, the new is metropolitan and cosmopolitan. In turn, that geography points to sharply divergent policy needs.

Voters in the Democratic economic centers, the Brookings team observes, “tend to prioritize housing affordability, an improved social safety net, transportation infrastructure, and racial justice.” Their jobs “also disproportionately rely on national R&D investment, technology leadership, and services exports.”

Such concerns either seem irrelevant or inimical to the interests of Trump county residents. When your entire community is struggling to make ends meet, building metropolitan infrastructure or helping discrete groups raise themselves up by their bootstraps don’t rank high among policy demands.

Free trade principles, which are favored by new-economy participants, look like threats to steal jobs from old-economy workforces.

In 2016, Trump rode this economic divide to electoral map victory. He built his strategy around a direct appeal to voters in the industrial and agricultural heartland, particularly through an overt attack on globalization.

Whether he could ride the same strategy to victory four years later was always in doubt, largely because he failed to deliver on his promises to rebuild the old economy in its traditional self-image.

Manufacturing did not recover — Trump papered over its continued stagnation with lies, as when he claimed at a rally in Saginaw, Mich., to have “brought you a lot of car plants” while in reality only one new auto assembly plant had been announced in the entire state during Trump’s term, and auto and auto parts manufacturing had actually shrunk even before the pandemic.

Trump’s trade war failed to deliver measurable gains and imposed heavy costs on agriculture in regions that had become dependent on produce exports, especially to China.

Those failings may have helped to drive Biden’s flip of more economically important counties, though the residual strength of Trump and the Republican Party in the old-economy regions is visible in the 2020 results.

The economic map of the 2020 vote illustrates shortcomings of policy and messaging by Democrats that should concern the party.

Democrats still are not addressing rural and small-town concerns. They seem to accept the transformative motion of the American economy toward service and high-tech industries, and the outflow of manufacturing jobs to other lands offering cheap labor without developing a program to bring an equivalent transformation to Americans left behind.

“Democrats have to speak to these people,” Ruy Teixeira, the political analyst who has tracked the demographic changes contributing to Democratic strength in recent decades, said just before Election Day. “They haven’t been doing well for decades. Their communities have suffered declines, jobs problems, health care problems.”

Just because they’re disgruntled and voting Republican, doesn’t mean their concerns should be dismissed.

America’s economic divide presents a great opportunity for Biden to make good on his commitment to bringing the nation together. Defeating the politics of hate-mongering and resentment that Trump exploited to divide Americans has to start by recognizing that America is already divided along an economic line, and Job 1 has to be eradicating that line, for everybody’s good.

Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.