The Forgotten review: Ben Bradlee Jr delivers 2020 lessons for Democrats

Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, was a key vote for Trump. The midterm results show the Democratic comeback is incomplete

Donald Trump’s electoral college victory rests on the shoulders of more than 200 so-called “pivot counties” across the US. That is, counties that voted for Barack Obama only four years earlier. The most decisive of these swings occurred in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county, nestled in the north-east part of the state, an area bisected by interstate highways that stretch from New Jersey to California and Canada to Tennessee, with places named Wilkes-Barre, Hazelton and Mountain Top.

There, voters gave Trump a nearly 20-point victory after going for Obama by almost 5% in 2012. But Trump’s win in Luzerne was also noteworthy for its magnitude. His 26,000 vote plurality in Luzerne comprised almost three-fifths of his plurality in the state as a whole, and with it Pennsylvania’s 20 coveted electoral votes.

In The Forgotten – subtitled How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America – Ben Bradlee Jr, a former editor at the Boston Globe and the son of the Washington Post legend, chronicles his interviews with Luzerne residents. It is essential and disturbing reading.

The Forgotten documents the ravages of deindustrialization, lost jobs, crime and drugs. It captures the sense of displacement tied to a changing and less monochromatic America. Once upon a time, Luzerne was home to coal and textiles, dominated by Protestants from Wales and Catholics from Ireland and continental Europe. Not any more. Luzerne is poorer and smaller, for many a less recognizable place.

Not surprisingly, immigration and Nafta come in for constant criticism. The grievances cannot simply be written off solely as the product of collective imaginations or prejudices, although “race” makes a recurring appearance.

The Forgotten’s subjects speak for themselves and they don’t hold back. They range from Lou Barletta, a GOP congressman, early Trump supporter and Hazelton’s anti-immigration ex-mayor; to Tiffany Cloud, a political activist, and her husband Erik Olson, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan; to Steve Smith, an unapologetic publicity-seeking white nationalist.

Kim Woodrosky, a successful real-estate investor, a “flashy, attractive blond and self-described bigmouth”, according to Bradlee, is upset by the region’s “bleak” economic outlook and the bureaucratic burdens imposed by the Affordable Care Act. She voted for Obama in 2008, passed in 2012 and then backed Trump.

Woodrosky attributes Trump’s rise to his ability to voice understanding of their problems. As she put it: “Trump told the working class what they wanted to hear. ‘You’re the forgotten ones. You’re the ones Washington doesn’t care about.’”

To be sure, not everyone interviewed by Bradlee is thriving. One couple, the Harkers, have seen their lives upended by the Trump presidency. The Forgotten captures their escape from substance abuse to their embrace of Christ, and pages later narrates Trump’s emergence as a wedge in their lives.

Jessica Harker talks of how Ray, her husband, went from backing Ted Cruz to watching MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow nightly and enduring a “psychiatric breakdown because of Trump”. As for a Trump effect on their marriage: “It has torn, ripped at, and tried to squash anything we built.”

Donna Kowalczyk, a former Democrat, runs a hair salon on a decaying street in Wilkes-Barre’s red-light district. She is married with older children, her own family is intact. Still, with a “sigh of resignation” Kowalczyk complains about drugs and crime: a bullet crashed through her daughter’s window.

As for her own life: “Now I have a house that I have mortgaged to the hilt, and I can’t leave.” Turning to Trump, Kowalczyk “liked his whole stance on immigration. Maybe I’m a racist … I didn’t think I was.”

Against this backdrop, Bradlee embraces the taxonomy offered in a February 2016 Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan. There, Noonan presciently divided the electorate into the “protected and unprotected”.

To drive the point home, Bradlee quotes an anonymous email that “amounted to a Trump voters’ creed”. In it, an unidentified author takes Hillary Clinton’s elite supporters to task for their alleged unbenign neglect, cultural disdain and refusal to accept the results of the last election, a litany of grievance that ends: “YOU created ‘US’. It is really that simple.”

Wisely, The Forgotten focuses primarily on people with Democratic pasts. They are Trump voters far more than they are Republicans. Indeed, the results of Pennsylvania’s recent races for governor and senator bear this out.

Tom Wolf, the incumbent governor, swept to double-digit re-election, carrying Luzerne by nearly five points, just as Obama did six years ago.

In the Senate race, the incumbent Democrat Bob Casey easily beat back Barletta, defeating him by almost 630,000 votes. But Barletta won Luzerne, his home turf, a reminder to the Democrats of their continued difficulties with white non-college graduates.

Still, Barletta’s margin of less than 9,000 votes and 9% is a reminder that Trump is a tough act to follow. Though Trump showcased Barletta, Pennsylvanians were left underwhelmed. Even Trump’s embrace has its limits, his endorsement not always received as a command.

Bradlee counsels Democrats to pay greater heed to white working-class voters, particularly on cultural issues. The party “will need to make more room for centrist voices if it wants to reach voters who now feel culturally alienated from its prevailing liberal orthodoxy,” he writes.

The bottom line is that political correctness is a turn-off. Slagging on so-called “deplorables” and lamenting attachments to God and guns is self-defeating. Like it or not, flyover country will continue to play an outsized and determinative role in presidential elections.

Yes, the Democrats flipped the House and consolidated their hold on college graduates and suburbanites. In the absence of a recession, however, the party stands to face the same electoral map it did in 2016. In fact, Ohio now looks an even tougher nut to crack. Much as the Democratic base loathes the president, reality cannot be wished away. Luzerne would be a good place for the party to start addressing this reality.