Open Collections

Lambrecht, Megan Victoria

University of British Columbia

In both the 2016 and 2020 United States of America (US) presidential elections, residents of Macomb County, Michigan overwhelmingly supported Republican candidate Donald Trump, departing from the county’s previous support for democratic candidates. This thesis seeks to provide a timely explanation on the cusp of the 2024 presidential election as to why the working-class residents of Macomb County have shifted away from the union-supported Democratic Party and grasped onto the protectionist Right-wing ideology of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Drawing on feminist poststructuralist political economy, this thesis studies how processes of deindustrialization, neoliberalism, structural racism, and white supremacy have influenced the political economy of Macomb County prior to and during the 2016 presidential election. Further, this thesis examines how discourses of economic and political abandonment within Macomb County’s political economy resulted in the election of Donald Trump. This thesis seeks to better understand taken-for-granted systems of power within Macomb County’s political economy. Using the methodology of feminist poststructuralist political economy, each chapter describes how the processes of deindustrialization, neoliberalism, structural racism, and white supremacy have combined to form a powerful discursive framework within the community that has led many residents to embrace Trumpism. Using critical discourse analysis to examine the public write-in sections of the local newspaper the Macomb Daily, this thesis describes and critically examines how key events like the 2008 Automotive Industry Crisis, the Detroit Public Schools financial crisis, and a federally increased immigration quota in 2015 have informed Macomb County’s political economy. Through this analysis of these events and their connections with deindustrialization, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and white supremacy, this thesis seeks to understand how these processes within Macomb County’s political economy led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Text

2024-09-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89222

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/