In Rhode Island, where half of the voters don’t pick a party preference, Sanders and Trump got independents to vote in primary – and both picked up wins

Without traffic, it takes less than an hour to drive from the southern tip of Rhode Island, near the beachfront town of Watch Hill that Taylor Swift calls home part of the year, to the former mill town of Pawtucket in the north, where the Pawtucket Red Sox, the AAA affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, play ball at McCoy stadium.



But historically, Rhode Island hasn’t offered many attractions for presidential candidates during the primary season. A Republican needs 1,237 delegates to clinch the nomination; the state can offer him only 19. To win the Democratic nomination, a candidate requires commitments from 2,383 delegates. Rhode Island can deliver 33, seven of them superdelegates.

Add to that calculus the question of timing. Typically, by the time Rhode Island’s primary election rolls around in late April, a tiny handful of votes rarely tip the balance.

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But then, this isn’t a typical election year. This is a year in which the middle class has declared, to cite Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s iconic 1976 film Network, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” What those who quote that line often forget is what Beale (played by Peter Finch), says beforehand. “Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust … there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. … All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.”

Is anyone hearing an echo? I, for one, feel that this is what I’ve been writing about steadily since 2008. Now we’re in an election season in which everyone other than the wealthiest Americans is feeling the pinch, and finally getting very, very mad indeed.

A well-known author and critic, Neal Gabler, has just penned an essay for the Atlantic confessing that he is one of those suffering from “financial impotence”, or the inability even to find $400 to cover an emergency. As he points out, he’s far from alone: 47% of Americans find themselves in that plight, according to one study. And millions of Americans are succumbing to a form of economic despair, a factor that has been cited as one of the contributing factors in sending the US suicide rate to a 30-year high.

This campaign features two candidates tapping into Americans’ economic despair, and their renewed fury, in different ways.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump promises to “make America great again”. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders pledges to oversee a revolution in both politics and business – and to cut the ties between them. Regardless of whether it’s reasonable to expect that either man could actually fix these problems, the rhetoric and promises of these two “anger candidates” have fallen on many receptive ears. That’s why Trump is the Republican frontrunner, and Sanders is still mounting a determined challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

As the winter of American discontent stretched into spring, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise the battle for Rhode Island’s tiny handful of votes – even with four other elections taking place in much larger adjacent states on the same day in what became known as the “Acela primary” – brought both Trump and Sanders into the state to campaign vigorously, to the surprise of some of my neighbors, unaccustomed to all this attention.

Even more astonishing was the fact that Clinton and her husband, both of whom might have been supposed to be able to count on the state (her supporters include the state’s governor, Gina Raimondo, and polls tipped her to win) both made high-profile appearances in the final days before the primary.

“Hillary’s coming?” the librarian at the main branch of the public library said, doubtfully, collecting my overdue books and fines last week. “Really? I can’t remember seeing her here last time around. Wow…”

The state’s primary results show just how tough and unpredictable the battle for the presidency will be this year, all the way to the White House. Of the five states in the Acela primary, Rhode Island is the only one that Bernie Sanders won, hands down, while Donald Trump’s margin of victory here was the biggest of his campaign so far.

There are two important, and related, messages to draw from this. The first is the importance of voter turnout, and independent voters, in the process. The second, the magnitude of the economic anger, and its role in getting those independent voters to the polls to voter for populist or outsider candidates, such as Sanders or Trump.

Even though the state opened only about a third of the usual number of polling locations – I had to walk a mile and a half each way to reach mine – and the primary was the first time that a new voter ID law was in place, requiring voters to show an approved form of photo ID in order to cast a ballot, Rhode Island’s voter turnout was very, very high – around 25%. In 2008, 27,237 Republicans voted statewide, a figure that fell to 14,564 in 2012, and soared to 61,703 this year, a 118% increase. In a solidly Democratic state, 125,846 cast their ballots for either Sanders or Clinton.

Notably, Rhode Island had a “semi-open” primary, unlike the other four states that voted on Tuesday. As an independent (or in Rhode Island parlance, unaffiliated) voter, as 42% of Americans now describe themselves, I was able to vote in a primary election for the first time in my life. “And how will you be voting today?” the cheery election worker asked me, clutching a yellow (Republican) batch of papers in one hand and a blue (Democratic) sheaf in her other, sounding oddly as if she were offering me the choice between two dinner entrées.

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Half of Rhode Island’s registered voters, by some calculations, don’t pick a party preference when they register to vote. And for many of them, clearly, the flavor of the day on Tuesday, whether they opted for the yellow or the blue forms, was anger.

To win, both Sanders and Trump had to succeed in motivating those independent voters to channel their anger and do more than yell “I’m not going to take it any more.” get to the polls and cast their ballots in favor of change. They accomplished that.

The reasons are rooted deeply in what has happened in Rhode Island, where Raimondo, in her second year as governor, is struggling to lure middle-class jobs (and tax revenue) to the state. Manufacturing has vanished from the state; Rhode Island lost 8% of its jobs during the recession, twice as many as its neighbor to the north, Massachusetts. Taxes are high, and so is the level of political cronyism. Providence’s business leaders even urge the city to consider bankruptcy, while the mayor fights frantically to avoid it. To those who lost their manufacturing jobs, the existence of a growing, vibrant arts and creative scene, full of people lured here by the low cost of living, doesn’t make up for the lack of a living wage. Rhode Island is a microcosm of the kind of economic trauma that too many American families struggle with nationwide.

Going forward, the test will be whether that economic anger will continue to power both candidates. If Sanders can’t beat Clinton to the nomination, will the combined fury of millions of disaffected independent voters or alienated Democrats, unwilling to sign up for what they see as “more of the same” incremental changes in economic policy, be enough to send Trump to the White House?

Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be celebrating her victories in four states. She should be drawing lessons from her Rhode Island loss.