After the economic shutdown in March, we had a strange sense of déjà vu as we walked past empty shops in our once bustling California college town. We felt as if we were back in Ottumwa, a small rustbelt city in Iowa where we had been doing fieldwork for our new book, “Trump’s Democrats.” Like many solidly Democratic places that voted for Trump, Ottumwa’s once thriving Main Street was lined with crumbling sidewalks and boarded storefronts long before COVID-19 shuttered millions of American businesses.
Although COVID-19 hit disadvantaged individuals the hardest, it has also been a kind of equalizer by spreading economic ruin far and wide. And, so, as we walked through our college town, we wondered if the plague, for all the carnage and destruction it has wrought, might nevertheless help bridge the social divide between Democratic communities like our own and those that supported Trump.
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