The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides

Take Van Dyke Avenue north from Eight Mile Road, the line that marks the northern edge of Detroit, and you drive through a stretch of America that political reporters have been visiting for forty years. Warren. Sterling Heights. Roseville. Eastpointe. Brick ranch houses with two-car garages. Union halls. A giant General Motors technical campus. Bowling alleys, diners, and churches with names that tell you where the grandparents came from: Polish, Italian, German, Belgian, Irish.

This is Macomb County, Michigan, and if you want to understand why a Hollywood actor who had been the head of a union won the votes of millions of Democrats, this is where you start. Reporters called these voters Reagan Democrats, and the label stuck because it described something real: people who had never voted Republican in their lives, whose fathers had been New Dealers and Kennedy backers, and who looked at the party of their parents and decided it no longer represented them.

I want to tell this story honestly, because the two parties tell it differently, and both versions leave something out. The Democrats say it was about culture. The Republicans say it was about the economy. The voters, if you could ask all of them, would say it was about both and also about respect.

Why Macomb

Macomb County sits just north of Detroit. In the decades after World War II, as Detroit's industrial economy grew, families moved out from the city to the suburbs along the new roads, bought homes and got jobs in the auto plants, parts suppliers and defense contractors. By 1960 it was solidly Democratic. John F. Kennedy carried it with about 63 percent of the vote, a figure that political scientists cite so often it has become shorthand for how Democratic the place once was.

These voters were not rich. They were union members, many of them in the United Auto Workers, who owned a small house, a boat or a cabin up north, and a car from the company they worked for. They were Catholic in large numbers. They were proud, patriotic and practical. And for a generation, the Democratic Party spoke to them in their own language: jobs, wages, security, a government that watched out for the working man.

That is the baseline. Now watch what happens to it.

The 1970s: inflation, taxes and a sense of being left behind

By the end of the 1970s, many of these families felt that the arrangement had stopped working. Several things came together.

1. Inflation. Prices were rising faster than paychecks. For a family living on a factory wage, a few years of double-digit inflation meant the car, the groceries and the mortgage all cost more while the raise was eaten up. Annual consumer price inflation averaged above 13 percent in 1980.
2. Taxes. Bracket creep, which we explain in Inflation is the one tax that never needs a vote in Congress, pushed working families into higher brackets without raising their buying power. The tax revolt that started with Proposition 13 in California in 1978 was a national mood, not a regional one.
3. Auto industry troubles. Imports were rising, plants were cutting back, and in 1980 Congress passed a loan-guarantee law to keep Chrysler alive. When the car industry catches a cold, Macomb County gets pneumonia.
4. Crime and disorder. The 1967 riot in Detroit and the decades of change in the city were a few miles away, and many families had left the city in those years, partly because of them. The sense that government could not keep neighborhoods safe was strong.
5. A sense of national drift. The country had come out of Vietnam and Watergate, and then there was the energy crisis and the hostage crisis. In July 1979 President Carter gave a televised speech about a crisis of confidence in the country. He never used the word malaise, though the speech has been remembered under that label ever since, and that label tells you how it was heard.

Put those together and you can see how a voter might feel. He is not asking for charity. He is asking that the government stay out of his paycheck, keep the streets safe and keep the country strong. And he thinks the people running the Democratic Party have stopped listening.

A hypothetical household shows what that felt like. Say a Macomb County couple earns $22,000 in 1979 and the union contract delivers a respectable 10 percent raise, so they earn $24,200 in 1980. That sounds like a win. But prices rose about 13.5 percent that year. Divide $24,200 by 1.135 and you get about $21,320 in 1979 dollars. The couple got a raise of $2,200 on paper and a pay cut of roughly $680 in what the money buys, about 3 percent. Add the tax effect and the cut is bigger. No politician told them this. They saw it at the checkout counter.

Enter Reagan

Ronald Reagan understood this audience. He had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, which makes him one of the few presidents to have led a union. He spoke simply and without condescension about taxes, work and national pride. The 1980 Republican National Convention was held in Detroit, a few miles from Macomb County.

In the October 1980 debate, he asked voters a question that the Carter campaign could not answer: are you better off than you were four years ago? For a family in Macomb County, in a year of 13 percent inflation and layoffs, it was not a rhetorical question.

He won Michigan in 1980 and carried Macomb County. He did it again in 1984, in a landslide, nationally and in the county. In 1984 he won 49 states and 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale's 13. Macomb voted for him by a wide margin. These were the people who had gone from Kennedy to Reagan in 20 years, and the question everyone asked was why.

The union households

One more thing deserves a paragraph, because it surprises people who think of unions and Republicans as permanent enemies. In 1980 the Teamsters endorsed Reagan, and so did the air traffic controllers' union, PATCO. A good number of rank-and-file union members voted for him whatever their leaders said. That relationship soured within months. In August 1981 the controllers struck in violation of federal law, and Reagan fired the strikers who did not return to work. Conservatives have defended that decision on the ground that public employees cannot be allowed to shut down a safety-critical service, and many unions remember it as a betrayal. Both memories are accurate. The point for this story is that union households were not a bloc that moved as one. They were families making their own calculations about jobs, taxes and trust.

The study that gave them a name

The man most often credited with answering that question was a Democrat. Stanley Greenberg, a pollster and political scientist, went to Macomb County after the 1984 election and ran focus groups with Democratic voters who had defected to Reagan. His findings, written up in a report in 1985 and expanded later in his book Middle Class Dreams, are still read by both parties.

What Greenberg reported, in broad terms, is worth stating carefully, since both sides have used it selectively.

• These voters saw the Democratic Party as the party of those who took from them. They believed it taxed working families to pay for programs aimed at others, and they felt that no one in the party spoke up for people like them.
• Race was a factor in how they saw the party, and Greenberg said so plainly. Many of the voters viewed the party as favoring black Americans over working-class whites, and the memory of busing and of the city's racial divisions was strong. Greenberg did not hide that finding, and neither should we.
• They did not necessarily love Republicans. Many saw Reagan as a strong and plain-spoken man who stood up for them, rather than as a champion of the Republican Party.

I'd add one caution. A focus group is not a poll, and Greenberg's work describes a group of people in a place at a time. It does not describe every voter who ever switched. But it is the best close-up we have, and it points in a clear direction.

Two readings of the shift

Here is where the parties part company.

The Democratic reading says the shift was cultural. Voters who had benefited from the New Deal turned against the party over race, over crime, over social change, and over what they saw as government favoring others. In this telling, economics was the cover story.

The Republican reading says the shift was economic. Voters were hit by inflation, taxes and a stagnant job market, and the party in power had no answer. They looked at Reagan's tax cuts and his message of growth and thought he would do better.

My view is that both are right and that neither is complete. The voters I've described felt the economy and the culture as one thing. A man who works 50 hours a week and sees his taxes rise, his neighborhood change and his government apologize for his country does not sort his complaints into separate boxes. What ties them together is a feeling of being taken for granted.

And here is a point a fair-minded conservative should make. If the Democrats are right that race played a role, that does not make the whole shift illegitimate. Millions of voters moved because of inflation, taxes, jobs and national strength, and those are legitimate reasons that deserve a hearing, not a diagnosis. Condescension about why working-class voters vote the way they do has been one of the most reliable ways to lose them.

What Reagan offered them

A good way to see what Reagan Democrats were buying is to look at what the Reagan administration did. We cover the details in Seven myths about Reagan's economy that both sides still repeat and reagan's 1981 tax cut and the quiet end of bracket creep, but here's the short version:

• Lower tax rates, and brackets that stopped creeping up with inflation.
• A war on inflation, supported by the Federal Reserve, that brought price increases down by 1983.
• A defense buildup and a tougher line with the Soviet Union, which appealed to veterans and families with a tradition of military service.
• A message that the people who work for a living are the heart of the country.

Not every promise was kept. The early 1980s brought a deep recession, and Michigan was hit harder than most states. Factory jobs did not come back in the numbers people hoped. Those are facts that cut against the Republican reading, and honest conservatives should say so.

The lesson for winning the same voters again

Blue-collar voters have moved back and forth between the parties many times since. The lesson of Macomb is not that these voters belong to Republicans. It is that they respond to a party that treats them with respect and offers something concrete. Here is what I take from the record.

1. Lead with work. The strongest argument to a working family is that Washington should help them keep more of what they earn, protect their jobs and let them build a future. A message about wages, taxes and opportunity wins hearings.
2. Talk about skilled trades with the same respect as college. Many families in Macomb County have a son or daughter in the trades. A party that celebrates apprenticeships, as we argue in College, Apprenticeship or Trade School, How to Compare Your Options, is talking to them.
3. Mean it about family. The the child tax credit from $400 to $2,000, told bill by bill shows how the tax code can support parents directly.
4. Don't talk down. The quickest way to lose a voter is to explain to him that he doesn't understand his own interests.
5. Remember the coalition is borrowed. Voters who switch can switch back. A party that wins them has to earn them again every cycle. The same pattern appears in How Donald Trump won the three states Republicans had lost for a generation, and in the long view offered by The Trump Coalition in Historical Context, from Country Club to Cracker Barrel.

What it means for Michigan

Michigan has been a state both parties fight to win, and the Macomb County voters are among the people they fight over. Reporters still look at the county on election night because it has stayed a place where working-class politics shows up early. I won't tell you which way it will go. What I will tell you is that it rewards the party that talks about jobs, taxes, safe neighborhoods and respect, and punishes the one that doesn't.

The bottom line

• Reagan Democrats were real people in real places, such as the factory suburbs of Macomb County, who left the party of their parents over inflation, taxes, crime and a feeling of being ignored.
• The Democratic reading says culture; the Republican reading says economics. The honest answer is that these voters felt them together, and Stanley Greenberg's 1985 study found race was part of the picture.
• Don't claim these voters as a permanent Republican bloc. They go where they are respected and where the promises are concrete.
• If you want to talk to a working-class neighbor about politics, start with wages, taxes, the cost of raising kids, and whether anyone in Washington is listening.
• Read Greenberg's work yourself. A conservative who knows what the other side learned from these voters is better prepared to keep them.