10 Special reportThe Midwest The EconomistJuly 25th 2020
21reminder that early education remains a challenge. In Chicago Mr
Emanuel struggled to lift the high-school graduation rate from a
dismal 56% in 2012 to a somewhat better 78% last year. He also got
more people to take vocational training in community colleges.
That matters partly because firms come for Chicago’s supply of
educated workers. Every June, he says, 140,000 graduates from
across the Midwest flock in to start jobs.
Third, universities can refocus a city’s economy. John Cranley,
Cincinnati’s mayor, says “By far the best driver is the co-location of
an urban, diverse population near a tier-one research and develop-
ment institution.” Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor, calls the Uni-
versity of Chicago “one of our crown jewels”. The university says
that in two decades it helped found over 300 companies (including
Grubhub, a food-delivery firm), with $1.2bn in funding.
The University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (uof i) offers a
study in a lost chance to commercialise research. One of its com-
puter-science students, Marc Andreessen, created the world’s first
widely used web browser, Mosaic, while studying there in 1992.
Sadly for Illinois, he went on to commercial success, co-founding
Netscape and more, only after moving to the west coast. Laura
Frerichs, head of development at uof i, says her university—with
13,000 engineering students and more mathematics phds than
anywhere in America—learned from that experience. It has since
put up 17 buildings for entrepreneurial students and recent gradu-
ates. These contain over 120 small companies, employing 2,200,
often partnering with large firms such as State Farm. One student
from Iran, whose firm has 35 staff, uses aito create 3dimages for
construction companies around the world. Another uses a super-
computer to help cancer patients plan treatment. A third produces
“ultra-compact robots” to walk through fields monitoring crops.
The plan is to scale up. The University of Chicago says it expects
to become a centre for quantum information engineering, a new
form of computing. This year the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker,
said he would direct $500m to launch the Discovery Partners Insti-
tute (dpi), in southern Chicago, where university research can be
commercialised and tech graduates trained. Robert Jones, uof i’s
chancellor, likens the plan to Tech Park on Roosevelt Island in New
York, saying it will lift Chicago “from being a lower-tier city for in-
novation to the first tier”.
Another model is Pittsburgh, a once-dying steel city now nick-
named “Roboburgh” for a boom in robotics, artificial intelligence,
self-driving cars and biomedical research. Zoom, a video-confer-
encing firm, recently said it would open a research centre there.
Tom Murphy, a former mayor, says the way to understand Pitts-
burgh’s success is to look at Carnegie Mellon University and its en-
trepreneurial culture. Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak see Pitts-
burgh as a case study in regeneration driven by a university. They
trace much of it to a robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon’s com-
puter-science school, which got attention by working on the Three
Mile Island nuclear accident. It inspired a cluster of local tech
firms. Rather than choosing which company should flourish, the
city and university concentrated on producing lots of graduates,
and importing more, a process the authors call “talent sprouting”.
In turn, they encouraged entrepreneurial activity.
Can these trends go on? Not every city can bank on a university.
And many smaller colleges are threatened by demographic
change, lower immigration, the pandemic and, for public ones,
looming cuts in funding. But federal authorities, seeking ways to
recharge the economy, could adopt an idea of professors at mitto
“jumpstart America” through $100bn of investment in 20 new cen-
tres of high-technology, innovation and commercialised research,
similar to dpiin Chicago. The idea is that lots of rivals to Silicon
Valley could bloom. Of the top 20 candidates in the professors’ list,
13 were around universities in the Midwest. With luck it will take
less than 200 years to produce results. 7T
he bestexplanation of how Donald Trump took the Midwest,
and so the White House, came in a book published eight
months before he did it. Kathy Cramer at the University of Wiscon-
sin-Madison spent years interviewing small-town voters, such as
retired farmers in rural petrol stations chatting over bad coffee.
She asked how Wisconsin, a once-placid sort of place, had become
bitterly confrontational. Her book, “The Politics of Resentment”,
tracked how Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor who
left office in 2019, inspired fury from half the population and ado-
ration from the other half. In every election of the past decade, vot-
ers were herded into rival camps. Democrats in populous cities,
notably Madison and Milwaukee, were enraged as Republicans
weakened unions and cut education funding. Their opponents in
small towns in the north, centre and west were more resentful of
urban folk and their overly liberal ways.
Small-town folk saw a recall election in 2012 (Mr Walker nar-
rowly survived) as an unfair play by Democrats. The rural and low-
paid imagined pampered office workers, especially public offi-
cials, living high on the hog in the city. Some conservatives were
put off by debates on rights for minorities. Mr Trump’s approach—
divisive and focused on firing up his base—fitted in perfectly, as it
did in much of the Midwest. He took Wisconsin, Michigan and
Pennsylvania on a low turnout. He tapped into the resentment that
Ms Cramer found, while spreading cynicism among black voters
in Milwaukee. The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, inspired
little affection. “She didn’t show up and ask for our vote, the first
rule of politics,” grumbles one Midwestern voter. As Dan Kaufman
points out in his book “The Fall of Wisconsin”, she blundered tacti-
cally, not campaigning (the first candidate to neglect the state
since 1972) and spending little on television ads.Could it happen again?
Four years on, might the Midwest again put Mr Trump in the White
House? Of traditional swing states, Ohio was long the best-known
of all. Mr Trump took it by eight points, a large margin, piling up
votes from working-class, old manufacturing places along the Ma-
honing river, while also winning lots of rural votes, such as in 28
counties in the south. Ohio has a record of choosing who occupies
the White House. But it has become more Republican. As in Wis-
consin, Republicans have in the past two decades managed to take
more votes from small-town, suburban and exurban places, no
longer bothering with cities. Yet Ohio could switch back in 2020.
Sherrod Brown, a senator from the state, says the economic slump
and anger over Mr Trump’s handling of racism mean it is likelier
than not to flip. As of early July, polls sug-
gest it is a toss-up. But the state’s signifi-
cance has slipped: Mr Trump could hold it
and still handily lose the national contest.
Other Midwestern places may be more
important. Though small, Iowa could be up
for grabs. Barack Obama was popular with
small-town voters in northern, once-in-
dustrial places. That area is notoriously
disloyal to both parties. America’s greatest
concentration of “pivot counties”, whereAmerica’s divided middle
The Midwest is still the political arena to watchPoliticsFour years on,
might the Mid-
west again put
Mr Trump in the
White House?