First, an explanation. This piece in no way is an attempt to taint Donald Trump’s election victory or to belittle those who voted for him. It’s an effort to show the dark side of those angry, forgotten voters who gravitated to Trump, especially in rural areas and small-town America.
In the post-election period many pundits have debated over how much of an impact working class voters had on Donald Trump’s victory. But a new study suggests that many of those voters who favored Trump by large margins could be categorized as the barely-working class.
A Penn State study shows that the president-elect performed considerably better than Mitt Romney did in 2012 in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates. These are what the study calls “deaths of despair,” which are particularly acute in economically downtrodden areas.
Shannon Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, found this trend to be true nationally but especially so in two regions. In the industrial Midwest (the Rust Belt) Trump ran ahead of Romney’s numbers by an average of 16.7 percent in the quarter of counties with the highest mortality. That compares to 8.1 percent in the lowest 25 percent in terms of this category of mortality. In New England, Trump fared worse than Romney by an average of 3.1 percent in the lowest mortality counties but better than the former Massachusetts governor by an average of 10 percent in the highest mortality counties.
The opioid and heroin epidemics that have swept pockets of the nation often overlap with the lack of economic hope within a region.
James Hohmann of The Washington Post, in writing about the study, offered this:
Overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are known by experts collectively as “the diseases of despair.” People often (but not always) turn to pills, syringes, the bottle and other self-destructive behaviors when they lose hope, when they don’t have the means to live comfortably or when they don’t get the dignity that comes from work.
It is intuitive that the least economically distressed counties also tend to have the lowest mortality rates, and vice versa. In this way, alcoholism, overdoses and suicide are symptoms of the deeper social decay that was caused by deindustrialization. This decay led to the fears and anxieties which Trump so effectively capitalized on.
In a third region, Appalachia, ground zero for the opioid epidemic, crushing poverty that has existed for decades has spread to towns where factories and coal mines have closed. The GOP already held a firm advantage there by 2012. The study found the differences between high- and low-mortality counties were less pronounced in Appalachia, where Trump over-performed by 10 percent in the highest mortality counties and by 6 percent in the lowest mortality counties.
Overall, Monnat’s research found clear correlations:
These findings reflect larger systemic economic and social problems that go far beyond drug and alcohol abuse and suicide. In many of the counties where Trump did the best, economic (precariousness) has been building and social and family networks have been breaking down for several decades. In these places, there are now far fewer of the manual labor jobs that once provided livable wages, health insurance, and retirement benefits to those without a college degree. Downward mobility is the new normal. Trump’s anti-free trade message likely resonated with voters who saw once-thriving manufacturing plants shut down and minimum wage jobs replace the better jobs available to their parents and grandparents.
These patterns held in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties in all three regions. It’s also important to note that this despair is far more acute among whites than among Hispanics and blacks.
The numbers are disturbing.
Over the past decade, nearly 400,000 people in the U.S. died from accidental drug overdoses and drug-induced diseases. Nearly 400,000 more committed suicide, and over 250,000 died from alcohol-induced diseases. Approximately a fifth of these drug, alcohol and suicide deaths involved opiates (prescription pain relievers or heroin).
Hohmann, who writes for the Post’s “Daily 202” newsletter, tied the study’s findings to three additional reports this week:
- A federal government report released yesterday shows that life expectancy is now declining in America. Other than in times of war or famine, human history has rarely recorded when a nation suffered that fate. Worse yet, it is not happening in other western countries. The National Center for Health Statistics found that death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death in 2015. Death rates rose for white men, white women and black men. This happened despite a drop in the death rate from cancer, thanks to fewer people smoking and better chemotherapy.
- In another study, which relied on tax records and census data, the researchers concluded that about half of 30-year-olds are worse off financially compared to their parents’ standing at age 30.For example, in 1970, 92 percent of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similarage. In 2014, that number was just 51 percent.
- Post fact-checker Glen Kessler found that the White House has been providing a misleading view of a rebound in U.S. manufacturing jobs. The administration notes that 800,000 blue-collar jobs have been created since February 2010. But the U.S. had lost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs prior to then in the 2008-10 Great Recession.
As the Daily 202 explained, “One big reason that elites along the Acela (Amtrak) Corridor were so caught off guard by Trump’s victory is that they’re so insulated from the stomach-churning scourge of addiction and cycle of brokenness. Washington has never been richer or further removed from the pain of everyday Americans …”
