Rust Belt union blues : why working-class voters are turning away from the Democratic Party

"The publicly displayed political and associational loyalties of today's workers are far different from the proclaimed affiliations of their predecessors. As Herman, an 80-year old retired steelworker, explains it, "[it's] totally different than it was back then." He continued, "you could not go to the steel mill or mine and find a guy who would vote for a Republican. It was just a given. [Workers back then] figured that there wasn't a Republican in the world who took care of the working guy." Herman's belief about politics is not unique. Through interviews and analysis of local media dating back to the 1950s, Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman find that these solidifying sentiments capture the overall picture of decades long shift in political loyalties among many kinds of American rural, white, blue-collar workers, including those who are still members of unions. What factors lie behind the realignment of political loyalties of many of today's union members? That is the fundamental question that Skocpol and Newman seek to address in Rust-Belt Union Blues. Adding new evidence and lines of argument to earlier efforts to make sense of such sharp shifts in the unionized blue-collar world, they ground their analysis of changing political loyalties-including among still-unionized workers-within a richer analysis of shifting social identities and community-based social ties. By studying one of America's most fabled twentieth-century industrial regions-the 20-county stretch of western Pennsylvania from Erie to Pittsburgh and Johnstown to Aliquippa where steel manufacturing and associated industries were once king-Skocpol and Newman attempt to understand the new conservative-inflected identities and ties that have flourished in growing vacuums left by the receding local and community presence of unions. Rust Belt Union Blues takes the focus from aggregate and national trends down to the places where life and work proceeds day by day."