Stephanie Ternullo’s How the Heartland Went Red offers a novel take on the post-industrial rightward turn in American politics, focussing on how the local contexts that people inhabit shape their partisanship. It tackles several perennial questions in political science with practical implications for the United States and beyond. In classic accounts, place and geography become mere composites of individual residents’ behaviour and choices – but Ternullo convincingly argues that place itself helps create and sustain partisan allegiance. Hence, her findings challenge two common arguments. First, that post-industrial feelings of displacement and loss necessarily create resentment and anti-statist behaviour. Second, that, with nationalised media landscapes, coherent party programmes are likely to lead voters with similar socio-demographic characteristics to similar politics. This book will be of keen interest to scholars and students of electoral realignment and the changing voting behaviour in post-industrial democracies, political practitioners, and anyone interested in how people become partisans.
Through Ternullo’s rich, comprehensive, and rather seamlessly written book, the reader gets to know three small towns in the American Midwest: Lutherton, Indiana; Motorville, Wisconsin; and Gravesend, Minnesota. Three places, we learn in Part I, that share a great deal of similarities. From the 1930s, all were part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition with its symbiotic relationship between the Democrats and organised labour. All communities were traditionally largely White and heavily reliant on industry. Focussing on such structural similarities, many recent analyses of US politics and presidential elections tend to subsume these places and their like into a seemingly coherent whole, suggesting that economic transformation and its demographic and societal consequences are responsible for regional discontent and a general Midwest lurch to the Right. Yet, their voting behaviour places these three places in distinct clusters: Lutherton started veering towards the Republican Party with the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, which foregrounded race. The growing influence of the Religious Right over the following decade completed its transformation into a Republican town. Motorville, by contrast, today remains a solidly Democratic town, a peculiar rarity among the original New Deal Counties which Ternullo’s cluster analysis identifies. Gravesend, finally, had remained evenly split between both parties throughout these transformations, until a shift to the Republicans in the 2016 and particularly 2020 elections. It is this puzzling variation among structurally similar towns that Ternullo’s study addresses.
Ultimately, she argues, we must understand these communities from within. While macro events and political positioning are influential, partisanship is most immediately rooted in individuals’ every-day experiences and perceptions of themselves, their communities, and how political parties resonate with these beliefs. Place, thus, produces distinct diagnostic frames and narratives of community identity. The former help residents define their community’s social problems and potential solutions in a place-dependent manner. The latter produces a particular interpretation of ‘what kind of community’ one lives in and how it relates to party politics (p. 6). These frames are not necessarily rooted in material differences: after all, both the historical political economy and present discontents of these post-industrial places are similar. Instead, these three communities have different organisational contexts; differing in how local organisations – especially unions and churches – relate to one another and local politics, and how residents and community leaders experience their community’s challenges as a result.
The reader learns about each town’s networks and how they produce different responses to shared post-industrial social problems through Ternullo’s analysis of 175 interviews and ethnographic observations. Given its longitudinal nature – interviews across several years between 2019 and mid-2021 – and even split between ‘community leaders’ and residents, a rich pattern emerges. Lutherton’s community life is centred around its churches, particularly those in the German Lutheran tradition which created the town. Churches provide and re-distribute private resources to substitute for an absent state. Because this nexus is so longstanding and visible across Lutherton, residents take for granted that social problems ‘can and should find community-based solutions’ (p. 88). The state, quite simply, becomes superfluous in this surprisingly cross-partisan Luthertonian identity: its residents view Lutherton as an ethnoreligious community that does not need the state because, with its established web of local private actors, it appears self-sufficient. Wider social problems become localised, making residents receptive to the Republicans’ blended appeals for White Christianity and local control. Importantly, the preference for localised problem-solving ‘cuts across party lines’ given the specifically Luthertonian experience as a church-going community (p. 94). In Motorville, by contrast, organised labour is an established political movement whose influence extends much beyond collective bargaining. It is rare for political candidates to run locally without active union support. This link between the economic and political produces a diagnostic frame in which local problems become mere symptoms of broader systemic decline – and solutions beyond Motorvillians’ local control. Residents view themselves as part of a community of ‘have-nots’ and the Democrats as the cross-racial working-class coalition which they hope will level the playing-field. Motorville, thus, is a curious case in which the post-industrial sense of loss leads voters to embrace the state.
While very different, Lutherton and Motorville share the stable organisational context that Gravesend lacks: unions are weak and lack a link to local politics, churches – despite higher relative attendance than in Lutherton – do not perform similarly concerted and regularised community activities. Without a mechanism which ‘visibly and routinely provides answers’ to emerging challenges, residents view their town as lost without any hope of potential solutions – even though their community has been relatively successful in revitalising its Main Street (p. 79). In Gravesend’s racialised anti-statism, the town appears threatened by what it perceives as an absent but expanding state concerned more with supporting immigrants at the expense of local residents. By contrast, Luthertonians’ and Motorvillians’ local contexts drive them to view the state as superfluous amid perceived local successes or necessary to address wider systemic challenges, respectively. The lack of such a meaningful frame is what makes Gravesend residents singularly receptive to a Trumpian racialised anti-statism fuelled by narratives of immigration-as-threat. Racial othering and threat rhetoric resonate in Gravesend because residents already see their community as threatened. This confirmation explains their recent rightward shift to Republicanism since 2016, according to Ternullo. Luthertonians, by contrast, view their woes as aberrations in an otherwise functioning system which can be addressed locally, leading them towards the Republicans via the route of their communitarian anti-statism, whereas Motorville’s residents see the state as necessary to overcome their problems.
The most interesting and consequential conclusion of Ternullo’s analysis is how voters from towns with similar structural conditions have substantially different ideas of what parties stand for depending on their immediate context. Thus, Ternullo’s framework cautions against well-rehearsed arguments of which groups turn out for whom: Motorville shows that structural identity markers do not necessarily make places more likely to vote for the Republicans. As both parties simultaneously appeal to voters whose preferences and intersecting group memberships push them in different directions, either party’s platform contains various racial, religious, and class-based elements. Which of these is most prominent or decisive among certain voters depends on how they make sense of their community and how it fits into their perceptions of party platforms. In other words, partisan manoeuvring matters – but it only sticks where it resonates with local meaning-making. This has crucial implications for political strategists, particularly those working towards re-kindling national class-based coalitions: Clear party-positioning on issues and targeted policy-making are insufficient. Ultimately, individuals figure out which party represents ‘their kind of people’ via idiosyncratic, place-based cues (p. 198). The organisational contexts on which these cues rely are much more difficult to change, given how they depend on recurrence and visibility.
These findings are meaningful and fascinating, no less relevant after the 2024 presidential elections. At the same time, the reader is left wondering how the exclusive analytical focus on three former New Deal counties in the Midwest impacts the external validity of Ternullo’s findings. This narrowly contained regional focus is soundly explained and makes sense given the Midwest’s outsize influence in American politics. However, the set of communities with similar post-industrial woes is much broader geographically, including in the Rust Belt. Local identity is naturally embedded within wider regional contexts. Hence, it remains unclear if the findings are just a rich study of the Midwest or indeed applicable to cross-pressured voters beyond it, as Ternullo argues (p. 193). It would also be interesting to learn more about a third option for voters, which receives little consideration: not voting at all. When does the place-based sense of loss and abandonment lead not just to a turn away from the state, which – as Gravesend shows – incentivises residents to vote Republican, but to a retreat into apathy and abstention? Is variation between rightward-moving and de-mobilising communities happening within or across places? Insight into this distinction would elevate the analysis.
Overall, How the Heartland Went Red is an instructive and thought-provoking book which presents a convincing argument about the emergence of individual and community-based partisanship. The author’s well-researched and presented descriptions of people and places make this book a joy to read. Above all, they produce a rich tapestry of towns whose residents appear similar but become different political subjects. Ternullo’s theoretical advance is set to spur reimagined thinking and new research on the roles our communities and their differences have in shaping us as political beings. The interaction between place and political outcomes spurs animated debates well beyond the US. It remains an intriguing puzzle whether the general patterns of how place influences political behaviour are as idiosyncratic as place itself – or travel across contexts. How the Heartland Went Red is, thus, heavily recommended to anyone with an interest in the ongoing political realignment in Western democracies.