Let's Find Common Ground - Understanding Trump Voters and American Populism. Salena Zito

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Unlike the vast majority of journalists who cover U.S. politics, columnist Salena Zito lives far away from the centers of power and wealth. Twice a year she leaves her home in western Pennsylvania and drives thousands of miles across the country on back roads, visiting towns and rural communities that are often ignored by the national media. In this episode, we learn about the perspectives of voters who support Donald Trump and the populist coalition that reshaped the Republican Party.  Selena, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the New York Post is the author of "The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics”. She previously wrote for The Atlantic and Pittsburgh Tribune Review.  While on the road, Zito goes to high school football games, attends church services, and eats at local diners. "One of the things that makes my reporting different is that I try to treat each story that I write as though I am from the locality," she tells us.  Hear some of the insights and views of those who live in what Salena calls 'the middle of somewhere.' 

Unlike the vast majority of journalists who cover American politics, Selina Zito lives far away from the centers of power and wealth. Some would argue she lives in the middle of nowhere. But Selina says, this is America. Everywhere is the middle of somewhere. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies.

And I'm Ashley Nontite. Twice a year, Selina Zito leaves her home in Western Pennsylvania and drives thousands of miles across the country on back roads, visiting towns and rural communities often ignored by the national media. In this episode, we learn more about those towns and communities, as well as those who supported Donald Trump and the populist coalition that reshaped the Republican Party. Selena writes columns on politics for the Washington Examiner and the New York Post. She's the author of the Great Revolt, inside the populist coalition reshaping American politics. Richard, you get the first question.

Selena, you write commentary and report on politics from a different perspective than most journalists. What do you say is distinctive about your writing? Well, I think a couple of things are distinctive. I don't live in the center of power and wealth. That's where the biggest newsrooms are in this country. I'm not inside the wire. I'm not inside the bubble. And that doesn't make my reporting better. It just makes my perspective a little bit different in how I cover people. One of the things I think that makes my reporting different is that I try to treat each story that I write as though I'm from the locality. And so I travel across the country.

I just got back from 7,000 miles across the country. I usually do a north-south one in this spring and towards the end of the summer east-west. And I don't take back roads. I don't fly. I don't need take-back roads. I don't fly. I don't take interstates. And I try to really get a sense and a feeling of the places that I'm covering and the people I'm covering by acting like the local,

by going to church there or going to local high school football game or basketball game. People make fun of this. A lot of reporters in G.C. make fun of the fact that I go into diners. Well, first of all, that's the only restaurant that's out there. And second of all, diner food is darn good food. The other thing that is different is that I grew up in this area and I never left it. That's the area around Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania. What's special about the city?

It's sort of the Paris of Appalachia. However, it still has culturally connected to both Appalachia and the Midwest. So I have a general understanding of how of people think and their behaviors anywhere from religion being way more important to them and family connections way more important to them than political activism such as maybe like climate change. And when you report, when you mentioned you've come back

from this 7,000 mile road trip, how long do you spend in each place? I mean, do you embed more than you would say the average journalist does from DC or New York? Yeah, definitely. Well, first of all, there's a lot of times that a lot of areas, it's a repeat for me, right? Because I've been around and I've gone to a lot

of these areas throughout my career. I usually try to spend a few days there. I always dedicate a lot of research into the route I'm taking. A lot of reporting is just spontaneous, right? You see someone interesting, you strike up a conversation, and it turns into something interesting.

So, you know, I make sure that I have really researched before I leave, but also after I get back, I make sure that I understood what I saw. That sort of led on to this, Selena, something you wrote in a recent piece. This piece is called the restorative power of the American people, and you wrote, turn on social media, cable news or the national news networks, and you would be inclined to believe that we loathe those who are different than us. You would also be inclined to believe that everyone who lives outside the urban centres is backward, stupid and racist. I was so interested that you wrote We in there. Tell me about that.

Well, I was talking collectively about how we view the American news product. If I had to reflect on what our biggest problem is right now in terms of the divide widening rather than coming back together is that the people that report on you and I and everyone across the country are also living in the same places that all of our cultural curators live. I mean corporations, institutions, academia, but also sports entities. Most of their headquarters are in these super zip codes and everyone that lives around them

and works around them have the same shared values. They went to the same kind of school. Their kids go to the same kind of school. Their kids go to the same kind of school. They shop at the same place and they have shared values. There is nothing wrong with that. However, what it is is completely different than the people they're covering. And a lot of these reporters, you know, don't sit in a pew every Sunday. They don't own a gun. They don't know how to operate a gun. They don't own a gun.

They don't know how to operate a gun. They don't know how to shoot a gun. So they don't understand, they didn't go to a state school. They didn't go to a community college. So when they're writing about the other people, the outsiders, they're writing it from their point of view and their experiences. And I think that's what makes my experiences, my viewpoint a little different because I've

done all of those things. You mentioned community college. One statistic that jumped out at me recently is that over 40% of all undergraduates in America go to community colleges, but you never know that from the coverage of higher education in much of the media. Right, because the coverage is coming from people that went to these elite schools, but you have a different perspective. Someone is going to feel completely foreign to you who went to a community college or a

trade school. And there are a lot of incredibly successful people out there that never stepped foot in the halls of higher education. And I think we have been fed this ideal since our troops came back from World War II, that the only way to be successful is to attend college and that grew and grew and grew. But along the way, we started looking down at people who went to a trade school, at people who went to shop class. Well, we still need our washing machines fixed.

We still more importantly, we need our air conditionings and firmnesses fixed. And then what about the people that provide the energy for us to turn the light on? How much have we disparaged people that have worked in coal mines? But we wouldn't be able to pick up this phone if they weren't working in the coal mine. We wouldn't be able to turn our lights on. The same goes with natural gas. So I just think we need to do a better job when we're reporting on things rather than turning people into a villain. Speaking of reporting, what prompted you to become a reporter? Well, it comes from a long line of newspaper people,

my great, great, great grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my grandfather were all newsmen. And it was something that I always wanted to do along the way, having children, got in the way. But once my kids were up and out, I pursued what I wanted to do. And now y'all are stuck with me. And you know, both of my grandparents were great, in particular, grand mothers, were great storytellers.

They come from that long tradition of handing down stories. And I think that's where my love of telling stories comes from. My grandfather was an executive at the Pittsburgh Press. And so he opened my eyes to newspapers and my love of newspapers. And he always brought newspapers from different parts of the country home. And I couldn't wait to dive into them. They were always sort of fascinating to me. But the storytelling comes from my grandmother's. In particular, my Italian grandmother, who didn't have an education beyond fourth grade.

But boy, could she share stories? I'm curious. Do you think what you were just talking about, the divide between who covers, who does the covering, the coverage in America, and who is covered. Did that exist to the same extent in your mind, say, 30 years ago, or has it got progressively worse? Well, it's gotten progressively worse

because we've lost some in local newspapers. So the only time people turned on national news was at six o'clock to watch CBS, ABC, or NBC. When I was growing up, there were three newspapers in the town. In fact, even 10 years ago, when I was working in Pittsburgh at a Pittsburgh newspaper, there were two healthy, thriving, competing local newspapers.

And that's where people got their news. We have now thousands or hundreds of counties, I think even so, the thousands of counties that don't have a local news. We have states where the state capitals aren't covered by local news. I mean, you need someone in a county to cover that school board to cover the water authority. They need to be held accountable. And we just don't have the news organizations to make that happen.

That's why I think we didn't have this problem before. Enter in cable news. That has hastened the divide but I think more than anything what has made the divide on how journalists cover the rest of the country is social media, is in particular Twitter, which by the way I left, because it's a suicide. But the problem with Twitter is, as too many journalists, look at it as a reliable way to understand the whole country.

There is a Pew study. This is from a Pew Research Center. The Pew Research Center study concluded that just 10% of users produce this sounding 92% of all tweets. 69% of the highly prolific users are Democrats. Breaking down that number even further reveals that the Democrats on Twitter are predominantly liberal, far more than Democrats who aren't Twitter users. In other

words, anyone reading Twitter to get any sense of what even average Democrats think will get it skewed impression. And a lot of journalists use Twitter as their barometer of what's going on in the country and it's just not. That begs the question. And it's actually one of the big reasons why we invited you onto this podcast for Common Ground Committee. And that is what misunderstandings are there on the part of metropolitan elites, including journalists, about the people you cover and live with, people who live in rural America, people who

live in small towns and cities that don't get a fair shake when it comes to media coverage. So the majority of them believe that anyone outside of the larger metropolitan areas jump believe in climate change. Of course, everyone believes that the climate has changed. Ever since we were in first grade and they showed us dinosaurs and told us the ice age wiped them out. We understood that the climate has changed. In fact, we were all in this together in the 70s. If anyone is out there old enough to remember this iconic ad with a Native American standing on the shoreline with all this pollution and small, and a tear running down his face.

Wasn't a political ad. We were all wanted to fight pollution so it didn't affect the earth. When it became a sort of battering ram that Democrats use beginning with Al Gore to divide people, that's when the assumption was the image that conservatives do not believe in climate change. Some of the most thoughtful and careful conservationists of the Earth

who are almost all Republicans and our conservatives are farmers. Is fend a day or a week or hours with a farmer and the lengths that they go to to make sure that the water is safe to make sure the soil is safe. And we're talking on small farms is really unbelievable spend any time with people that work in the shell industry or the coal industry, the great lengths that people go to to make sure that that water is clear that goes anywhere near either of those bodies is very important. Selena's Deto speaking with us on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley. I'm Richard. Our podcasts are produced for Common Ground Committee.

This is the 40th episode. Some of our episodes are on the theme of depolarizing America, most recently with USA Today journalist and author Nathan Bohmie. He wrote about bridge builders, people and campaigns that work to reach across rigid political divides and bring people together. We've also recorded episodes on climate, race, and with our partners, the Christian Science Monitor and Convergent Center for Policy Resolution. Here more episodes at commongroundcommity.org slash podcasts. Now more from our interview with Selina Zito.

Moving from climate change to guns, there's polling research from the 2016 election about women who own guns who said that issue influenced their vote. So, Bourbon College educated women cited the second amendment as one of the reasons that they chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Most of these women identified themselves as feminists. So what does feminism mean? It's empowerment. That just was completely went over the head of most journalists. They couldn't understand that a suburban woman that lives in Ashabula County, Ohio, why that woman went a gun and they don't, is just incredibly foreign to them.

The other really important thing is, a lot of people believe that Donald Trump's election caused this conservative populist coalition. No, he's the result of it. But he did not cause it and it is not going away. One of the most consistent things I saw all across the country, in fact, I'm writing about this for the New York Post this week, was the Trump signs that were everywhere in every state. And everyone, you know, a journalist from New York will say, oh, you know, it's a cult of Trump. No, it's a rejection of the status quo.

They're letting people know, hey, y'all, I'm still out here and I'm not going away. It's not about Trump, it's about them. And maybe this question is partially a follow-on to what you've just been talking about, but you've written that there's a crisis of mistrust in the parts of America that you cover. Can you talk about that a little bit? What's going on there? So that's nothing new. I would argue that that began right around Watergate in the end of the

Vietnam War. It has been slow and incremental, but however, it has been consistently growing. 70% of us trusted the media in 1968. Today, that number is completely flipped. Mistrust comes from a lot of things. Beginning with Watergate and beginning with the Vietnall War. And then the media problem has really escalated as cable news has become more dominant. Anybody can go on cable news and say whatever they want.

There's also mistrust around our corporations. If everyone's familiar with a Hoover vacuum cleaner, right? Hoover vacuum cleaner, Meg America, Mr. Hoover lived four blocks from his factory. He not only knew everyone that worked for him, he also knew who his consumers were. He went to church with them every Sunday, his wife sat on the school board.

He knew his company, and he knew the values of the people that bought his product. Today, we don't know anybody that owns a company. It's owned by a bunch of venture capitalists that are either located in Los Angeles and or New York or Chicago or GC and they have no connectivity to the people that are buying their product. Hollywood the same thing.

Hollywood has the exact same problem because there's so out of touch with the people that want to just sit down in front of their television with their family and the entertain. Many listeners, especially from the liberal side, are going to say, oh, you're just speaking as a conservative, but I know that one of the many Democrats who you've interviewed is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is a centrist, who weans left on some matters and leans more conservative on others. What did you learn from him when you interviewed the senator? Well, I've been covering him for decades. One of the most consistent things that I

can tell you about Joe Manchin, he is the same guy who is a state senator in the 90s that he is today. And I will tell you, there are plenty of local Democrats that are out there that are the same as Joe Manchin, that have a buffet of issues that tend to be very rooted and grounded in the areas that they're from. And they reflect that, but with their votes. You see those kinds of Democrats in state legislative bodies, or state Senate, state house, some governors where they more have the freedom to be reflective of the area they represent.

But when it comes to federal office, whether it's Congress or Senate, those kinds of candidates traditionally lose these races to be more progressive candidates in primaries because most of many of our primaries are closed. So only Democrats can vote in those primaries. And the most excited Democrats and or Republicans are always in a primary are always to the light or to the left of their party.

Let's talk about the COVID pandemic. Many red states, especially in the South, currently have lower vaccination rates with the highest numbers of hospitalizations and deaths. What's your view of this? What's your view of the push for vaccinations and the differing views about the pandemic around the country? It depends on what time of the day is what my point of view is. I was one of the first people to sign up for a vaccine.

I was anxious to get it. I wanted the ability to get on with my life, to be able to hug people, to be with my parents, to be with my grandchildren. That was a profound sense of loss for me when I was unable to do any of that. However, I can see both points of view. I understand why people believe everyone should be vaccinated.

I understand why people don't have a trust in the system. I can see their point of view. I think that's what makes me a good reporter as I can put myself in the shoes of someone who does or doesn't want to do it and clearly see why. I think we get down a slippery slope, a dangerous one with mandates. Don't think it's a good idea, but I'll do it. Wish everyone was vaccinated. Sure. I respect people's decision.

Look, you know, in particular in the Black population, it's a real problem. They have and justifiably so are reason to completely mistrust the government and that in terms of a vaccine. And so I understand that hesitancy. I understand the hesitancy of anyone that doesn't want to do it. It's not the decision I made, but I respect and understand that decision. What do we do with this, Selena? How do we try and narrow the gap, improve the understanding, not find agreement, but at least find some common ground, some more trust?

Turn off social media. I saw it everywhere. Common ground, helping each other out, not carting someone for their political party before you had a conversation with them. That happens everywhere in this country. It just doesn't happen on cable news and on social media. Those both of them were designed to divide us. And if you look at a cable news rating, an average cable news show gets anywhere

from one to three million people watching it, well, there's a whole heck of a lot more other people out there. The majority is not what you see on television. The majority is not what you see on Twitter. The majority is not what you see on Twitter and I think those ratings speak to that. Do you think most of that majority are good people? Absolutely. Absolutely. It was at Mount Rushmore and in South Dakota, it was right before Sturgis. So there was a lot of people on motorcycles. Could you just tell us what Sturgis is? Sturgis is an annual rally that's held in Sturgis, South Dakota. Usually it tracks about a half a million

bikers for the week long that it goes and it's like fun and it's festive. Sometimes edgy, sometimes alcohol fueled, but it is a very happy place. And so I'm in Mount Rushmore and I'm by myself. So I'm trying to take a selfie, which is something I never do. And all of a sudden I'm surrounded by about 30 bikers. And they said, girl, you cannot have be in the picture by yourself at Marshmore. They all stood around me and hugged me. And then one of the guys stepped out and took a photo.

And that to me is very reflective of the spirit of the American people. When you get out there, it is energizing. It is wonderful. I mean, that doesn't mean there's not sadness or despair or problems. However, that American spirit of be wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves is evident

in everything that you say. On your travels, do you see people with different perspectives actually physically getting together? Because that is something I wonder about, whether many people's pulling back to a screen is a big part of the problem and that actual in-person gatherings be it at church

or fares or whatever, is part of what helps keep us glued. Yeah, where was I? or fares or whatever is part of what helps keep us glued. Yeah, the where was I? Somewhere outside of St. Louis, and I had gotten gas, and I saw this big family barbecue, big family picnic. The kids were playing like dodgeball, and the adults were having beers, and one was cooking.

And so I went over and just started talking to them and they all introduced themselves and the one guy said, yeah, this is my brother-in-law. He's like our token conservative, but we still love him. And they were like laughing and then they went on to something else. So I don't think he seemed to be alive and healthy

and I think he's going to be fine. I think the family still loves him. And I've seen examples of that. I saw that a group of older gentlemen talking in Gettysburg, three of them voted for Biden, two of them voted for Trump. They meet every morning for coffee. So I think we're fine. Political journalist Salina Zito.

Thanks for joining us on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley Mone Tite. I'm Richard Davies. We produce new episodes every two weeks. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.