There is a reason I don’t jump on the Cancel My Subscription bus regarding The New York Times. There are writers and reporters there—Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Goldberg, Charlie Savage, to name a few—to whom I do not want to lose access. But the real reason is that the NYT is still willing to put its reporters on the road for reasons other than the dreary Cletus Diaries that harsh so many mellows. For example, this is a story that tells us more about the current American political situation than any melodrama concerning the president’s frontal lobes.
America’s so-called “left behind” counties—the once-great manufacturing centers and other distressed places that struggled mightily at the start of this century—have staged a remarkable comeback. In the last three years, they added jobs and new businesses at their fastest pace since Bill Clinton was president.
The turnaround has shocked experts. “This is the kind of thing that we couldn’t have even dreamed about five or six years ago,” said John Lettieri, the president of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank that studies economic distress in the U.S. His group is releasing a report today that details the recovery of left-behind counties.
The last two decades were economically cruel for the 1,000 or so left-behind counties in the U.S.—places like Bay County, Mich.; Dyer County, Tenn.; and Lackawanna County, Pa., home to Scranton, Biden’s birthplace. These counties added jobs and people far more slowly than the nation as a whole. Some lost factories to foreign competitors like China. Many lost residents, including educated young workers, as economic activity concentrated in big cities like New York and San Francisco.
And what happened to these places back when we had the Greatest Economy That Absolutely Ever Was?
As a candidate in 2016, Trump promised to revitalize those areas. In his first three years in office, before the pandemic hit, the national economy was strong. Unemployment was low. Wages were rising. But left-behind counties saw few of those benefits. In 2018, a colleague and I noted that left-behind counties that voted for Trump had not seen any net job gains the previous year. The new Economic Innovation Group analysis shows that, in terms of job growth, left-behind counties experienced three of their four worst years since the Great Recession on Trump’s watch.
And now that the current president is busy wrecking the entire country?
Left-behind counties added jobs five times faster in the first three years of the Biden administration than they did in the first three years of the Trump administration. The flow of residents leaving them for better opportunities slowed. Perhaps most strikingly, they have shared in a new-business boom that has swept the country since the pandemic. That didn’t happen after the Great Recession. From 2009 to 2016, for example, Bay County, Mich., lost 8 percent of its business establishments. Since 2020, it has gained 12 percent.
Of course, there is a joker in the deck, because this is America, and nobody knows anything.
Whatever the explanation, though, Biden probably should not expect voters in those areas to reward him electorally. Many left-behind counties are solidly Republican, or have moved to the right since Trump first ran. And for all their job and business gains, left-behind counties were hurt by high inflation in the early Biden years. In 2021 and 2022, the typical household income in those counties fell, after adjusting for rising prices. Those price increases have left voters unhappy with Biden on the economy, no matter where they live.
“Typical” is hauling a lot of rocks in that sentence. (For that matter, so is “inflation.”) Nevertheless, the disconnect is profound, and it says all that needs to be said about our current state of affairs. Economics never drove the Trump train. (Remember “economic anxiety,” and how it made all those nice people in diners see immigrants under every bed?) It was always powered by bigotry, jealousy, and the misplaced wounds of imagined victimhood. One might even call those Trump cards.
