Janesville Gary
 | |
| Era | The 2000s |
|---|---|
| Age | 50-59 |
| Home | Janesville, WI |
| Demographic | white, autoworker, UAW |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
| Predecessor | Ozark Wayne |
| Successor | Rust Belt Rick |
Gary is a General Motors assembly worker in southern Wisconsin with thirty years on the line, representing the union swing voters of the Rust Belt. He holds both economic nationalist and socially conservative views, so each party appeals to only half of his politics.
Who they stand for
The General Motors plant in Janesville was the company's oldest, open since 1919, building full-size sport-utility vehicles. Petrol passed three dollars a gallon in 2005 and four dollars in 2008. General Motors announced the plant's closure in June 2008, and the last Chevrolet Tahoe came off the line in December, even as a federal rescue kept the wider company alive. Paul Ryan, the local congressman, made the closure central to his 2012 campaign. In 2005 the United Auto Workers gave back some health benefits. Gary backed Ross Perot in 1992, as did a fifth of Wisconsin voters, and has opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement since. Wisconsin voted Democratic by fewer than six thousand votes in 2000 and eleven thousand in 2004; voters like Gary decided both results. Senator Russ Feingold's lone vote against the Patriot Act earned Gary's loyalty, and Gary backed the 2006 amendment banning gay marriage. In the 2012 recall against Governor Scott Walker, union households split, because Walker's Act 10 law had spared Gary's local.
In the lineage of personas, Gary is the middle of three voters. The first supported Ross Perot, and the third supports Donald Trump. Gary has not yet settled between them.
Playing to them
Gary responds well to Buy American policies, tariffs on Chinese-made auto parts, a president who fights publicly to save his plant, a guaranteed pension, an untouched union health plan, and no new restrictions on guns. The 2008 federal rescue of the auto industry is his model for what government should do, even though it did not save his own plant; he still reads it as evidence that Washington chose his side. He will not forgive a new trade agreement, gun control, a cut to Social Security, or contempt for men who work with their hands. He accepts criticism of the war only from someone who first honours relatives who served, such as his own nephew. Neither side's culture-war issues move him.
Winning Gary's support costs the cast's free-trade supporters, such as Country Club Whit, Startup Seth, Abilene Ray and Fremont Anjali, and its supporters of gun control, such as Park Slope Dana and Berkeley Leonard. Chattanooga Travis holds similar views but settled with the Republicans through his church. Gary's church attendance has lapsed and his plant is dying, so trade can still bring him to a Democrat, as it did when he supported Feingold and Obama.
Where they live
The five states where Janesville Gary makes up the largest share of the electorate in the 2000s:
- Wisconsin
- Michigan
- Indiana
- Ohio
- West Virginia
Lineage
Ozark Wayne → Janesville Gary → Rust Belt Rick
The Perot voter who becomes the Trump voter. Wayne is patriotic and hostile to the federal government at the same time, and votes Perot. Gary voted Perot, hates NAFTA, and votes Bush as the lesser evil. Rick votes Trump, who campaigns on exactly Rick's grievances: tariffs, Buy American, contempt for the college-educated. The grievance is the same throughout, and moves from the Vietnam aftermath, to the plant closing, to the country's decline. By 2016 a major party runs on it. Rick is the first of the three who is not a swing voter.