2016 Postmortem

I don't believe there is one word in your post that is untrue. The Democratic Party took the votes of western Pennsylvania for granted year after year, cycle after cycle, union endorsement after union endorsement and it came back to bite the apparatchiks in the ass for a great number of reasons. I imagine the same can be said for formerly reliable Democratic voters in Michigan and Wisconsin; it happened much sooner in West Virginia.

To be fair, Democratic voters in these states are suckers for faux patriotic populism. They are the original Reagan Democrats. They have proven since the early 1980s to vote against their interests until almost all of western Pennsylvania has turned red, but it is also the Democratic Party's fault for ignoring these voters' economic interests for so long. We've gotten a heaping help of lip service from Washington. When Trump combined faux patriotic populism with an attention to the voters' economic situation greatly ignored for decades by the Democratic Party (and, yes, it's all bullshit, but it smelled sweet here in these parts), it was a winning combination.