Kerry in the Midwest

[Arbitrage1980]

W Bush was never that strong with working class whites in the Midwest. Even as an incumbent POTUS after 9/11 with a recovering economy, he won OH by just 2%, IA by less than 1%, and lost MN/MI/WI/PA. He lost WI by just 0.4% due to his strong performance in WOW counties, but he underperformed in the working class areas in the southwest of the state where Trump did extremely well. In PA, Bush did better in the Philly suburbs than Trump but did worse in the rural areas. In OH, Bush won Hamilton County and did fairly well in Columbus but did worse than Trump in the eastern part of the state that got destroyed by bad trade deals with China.

[Arbitrage1980]

The Kerry-Edwards ticket may have been seen as more populist than the nation-building Bush-Cheney ticket.

In Macomb, MI, Kerry lost to Bush by just 1.5 points. By comparison, Trump won the county by 11.5 points. My neighbor's yard sported a Kerry-Edwards sign in 2004 and a Trump-Pence sign in 2016.

I was stunned that Trump won Macomb by a larger margin than Obama 08.