Milwaukee Marv
| 🔩 | |
| Era | The Seventies |
|---|---|
| Age | 34-39 |
| Home | Milwaukee, WI |
| Demographic | urban Midwest, German stock, skilled trades |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | white |
Marv is a shop foreman in Milwaukee's machine-tool industry, a lapsed Lutheran of German descent who splits his ticket between the parties and trusts the leadership of neither. He is the cast's skilled blue-collar swing voter of the industrial Midwest.
Who they stand for
Marv stands for the skilled white ethnic tradesman of the Great Lakes cities, the largest swing bloc of the decade. Milwaukee is that bloc's capital. Firms such as Allis-Chalmers, Allen-Bradley, Harnischfeger and the machine shops of the Menomonee Valley paid the grandsons of German immigrants enough to buy a house and a boat. He carries a union card, but he does not think of himself as a union man. He was raised a Democrat. He voted for Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and for Carter in 1976, and Wisconsin's statewide vote went the same way each time. Stagflation is what the decade does to a man like him. Nixon's wage and price freeze of 1971 held down his pay rise while prices kept climbing. The recession of 1974-75 brought the industry's first layoffs since the war. By 1980 Japanese imports were undercutting the products he made. School busing and campus radicalism never reached his street, so unlike Macomb Bev or Southie Sean, he has no cultural backlash driving his politics. His politics are decided by his pay and by the military draft.
Playing to them
Marv responds to steady work and a stable currency, and he distrusts rhetoric from either party. A president who keeps the plants running, lets existing contracts stand, and holds prices down keeps his support. A president who imposes wage controls, allows a long strike to run, or lectures him from either party's platform loses his support, and he punishes a president's dogmatism more harshly than a president's honest mistake. He does not need to be courted on Vietnam beyond an end to the draft, and neither law-and-order rhetoric nor civil rights policy moves his vote much either way. Because his vote is won through economic management rather than ideology, winning him costs little support on the left, since Hamtramck Stan and Nonna Concetta want the same jobs and the same stable prices that he does. The cost of winning him falls on the right instead. Deficit spending to keep his plant open loses the support of Muncie Merle and Sheboygan Walt. A president who shares Marv's indifference to the culture war loses the support of Sun City Dot and Southie Sean, who want a side taken on it.
Where they live
The five states where Milwaukee Marv makes up the largest share of the electorate in the seventies:
- Wisconsin
- Illinois
- Missouri
- Indiana
- Ohio