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Flat Wages Add to Allure of the ‘Anti-Politician’ in Reliably Red States

Ray and Melissa Lewie in the tractor-trailer that Mr. Lewie owns. “For me to prosper, the economy has to prosper, and it’s the rich people that produce jobs,” Mr. Lewie said.Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

Ken Ard, South Carolina’s former lieutenant governor, has an accent that is the audio equivalent of a chummy slap on the back. Everything he says sounds folksy and congenial. This is true even when he is berating Washington’s political establishment, which he does often these days as the host of a morning show on Live 95.3, a talk-radio station in Florence, S.C.

“There is a large part of me that wants to blow it up,” he said on air recently. “That’s the Donald Trump side. A large part of me says, ‘Hey, man, we’ve got a plutocracy that’s bought and sold to special interests. It’s crony capitalism.’ And here comes this crazy fool that doesn’t stand anywhere on any policy other than all over the place. But I believe he’d blow up the building.”

By “the building,” Mr. Ard means the federal political system, broadly speaking. Though he joked that if Mr. Trump blew up the White House, he’d construct a hotel on the premises and then crow about it: “He’d say, ‘That’s one of the great addresses of all time, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and I’ve got a property there.’ ”

Mr. Ard’s co-host, Dave Baker, chuckled. Then Mr. Ard turned more serious.

“What I struggle with is, how bad do I want to blow it up?” he asked. “Or am I willing to do more like a cruise ship and turn it a little bit at a time?”

At the moment, Republican voters seem to favor the more eruptive option. That’s one explanation for the popularity of Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, who are now collectively the choice of about 50 percent of registered Republican voters, according to a variety of national polls. The three candidates are free of the stigma of elective office. If Washington is the problem, goes the thinking, the solution is sure to come from somewhere else.

Anti-establishment fervor has been a recurring theme in American politics for decades. Its catalysts seemed more obvious in the run-up to the two previous presidential elections, when the economy was entering the Great Recession in 2008, or coping with its aftermath in 2012. Economic despair is a potent political force. But we’re now a few years into a recovery, the economy is expanding, albeit modestly, and the jobless rate has dropped to 5.1 percent from a peak of 10 percent in 2009. This makes the indignation of voters a little mystifying.

Until you listen to indignant voters. Despite the still nascent recovery, a huge number of people in the middle and lower classes say their wages have not budged in years. For most Americans who are paid by the hour, wages have either fallen or remained flat for more than a decade, according to a report issued by the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank based in Washington. The institute called wage stagnation “the country’s central economic challenge.”

“It tends to be assumed that if we have growth, people’s hourly wages will improve,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute. “In fact, that has not been the case since 2002, whether you have a college degree or not. And for the most part, this issue has not been confronted by economic policy makers.”

On the Democratic side, there have been speeches by the presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has spoken about wage stagnation, largely in the context of wealth inequality. But the topic matters to Republicans, too. When asked in a poll to choose one issue that is paramount in deciding their vote, Republicans named the economy and jobs ahead of terrorism, immigration, health care and foreign policy.

But Republican candidates have either ignored the issue or tiptoed around its edges, as Mr. Trump does when he talks about the offshoring of jobs to China and Mexico.

It is an odd mismatch — flat wages seem to matter a lot to Republican voters, but Republican candidates are all but mum on the subject.

Recently, I visited South Carolina, a reliably red state, to get a better sense of why “anti-politicians” have experienced such a sustained surge in Republican polls. In a week of conversations, I heard much more than just venting about wages. There were lamentations that the United States is headed in the wrong direction, either because of failures by President Obama — good luck finding fans of his health care reform — or demographic changes that, in many voters’ estimations, are changing the country too quickly. (Even people who said they had no problem with Mexican immigrants worried that the children of these immigrants would eventually tilt elections in favor of Democrats.) There was a lot of talk about dysfunction and stasis in Washington, as well as concerns about the national debt and annual deficits. Others fretted that the United States now plays a diminished role on the world stage.

The mood was pretty glum, and this was before a deluge of rain shut down highways and flooded the state.

Along with social and political grievances, the economy in general and flat wages in particular came up time and again. They are part of a large inventory of issues that may explain the appeal of outsider presidential candidates, if only because they earn political capital from anything that has people roiled, because they had no hand in policies that led to the roiling.

“I think all three are making a pitch, ‘I’m not what you’re disgusted with,’ ” said Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard University. “In the G.O.P. base, there is a strong sense that their own party hasn’t done what they wanted them to.”

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Henry Swink, an owner of McCall Farms, says of his hourly employees, “They’ve been given a cost-of-living increase. But that’s about it.”Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

The same day that Mr. Ard wondered whether to raze Washington or nudge it in a different direction, he had lunch with two friends at Red Bone Alley, a local restaurant. When the subject of wages came up, Mr. Ard started to reminisce in a way that I had heard more than a few times.

“I remember growing up, a man could work at DuPont, a big plant here in town,” he said, “and the wife would teach school, and before you knew it, they had a beach house. They’d send a kid to University of South Carolina. They’d send a kid to Clemson. They weren’t up to their eyeballs in debt.”

“And somewhere in the past 30 years, we’ve lost that,” he said. “I’m not blaming Republicans. I’m not blaming Democrats. But if you’re working at DuPont making 50 grand a year, if you’re teaching, making 40 grand a year, you’re doing all you can to keep your head above water.”

“Donald Trump is talking to that family,” he continued. “It’s the family that says, ‘Man, I don’t know what else I can do. I can’t get ahead.’ I think that there is an undercurrent of anger that is far more severe than most politicians ever imagined it was. That’s what Trump has tapped into.”

A few days after that lunch, Mr. Trump appeared in Columbia, the state capital. The event was billed as a town hall, with questions from voters presented by Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. A near-capacity crowd filled the Koger Center for the Arts, an auditorium that seats about 2,200 people.

On their way into the event, Ray and Melissa Lewie, a married couple, stopped and explained why they were attending.

“We’re here to hear what he has to say,” said Mr. Lewie, a broad-shouldered man in his early 50s. “I’m so tired of politicians who just do what’s in their best interest, to further their career.”

“He’s not a professional politician,” Ms. Lewie said.

As for optimism about the economy, neither of them felt any.

“You watch the news, and day in, day out, you hear people are getting jobs,” Mr. Lewie said. “I drive a truck for a living, and I drive all around the area, and I don’t see it. The economy’s growing? Not around here, it isn’t.”

The Lewies agreed to meet me for dinner a few days later with another couple, their longtime friends Carlos and Leah Veldhoven. Mr. Lewie’s verdict on the Trump event? “Unimpressed,” he said, an opinion shared by his wife. Both found the hour so bereft of particulars that they could hardly take it seriously.

For five years, Mr. Veldhoven and Mr. Lewie were long-haul trucking partners. “We were driving as a team,” said Mr. Veldhoven, at the restaurant Bonefish Grill. “Eight hours on, eight hours off. We could make it from L.A. to New York City in a day and a half, two days.”

Mr. Veldhoven eventually quit that job to join a car dealership, where he is now manager of the used-car department. Mr. Lewie became a solo driver of an 18-wheeler, a job that has given him a front-seat view of global economic forces at work. For years, one of his regular assignments was hauling disassembled textile mills to container ports in Charleston, where they were floated to Mexico.

“Before the equipment was taken apart,” Mr. Lewie said, “the companies would bring people up from Mexico up to South Carolina to learn the jobs. Everyone knew they were being replaced, but they needed the paycheck, and they’d teach the Mexicans until the place closed down.”

Today, Mr. Lewie hauls steel construction rods, about 47,000 pounds of them a day. He is an independent contractor who owns his own truck and gets assignments from a company that keeps 23 percent of the revenue generated by each haul. He gets paid by the mile — $1.67 — no matter how many hours he’s on the road.

He can burn through up to 600 gallons of fuel a week, a hefty part of his overhead. Fuel prices have come down, which is great news, but maintenance on his truck cost him $26,000 in 2014, and despite low inflation, the price of a new tire has doubled, to $400, in recent years. When we met, he’d earned $1,560 the previous week, before taxes.

This is a good living, but when all the numbers are tallied, Mr. Lewie says he is pocketing the same annual income that he did right before the recession. None of this makes him the least bit interested in Bernie Sanders, the candidate who, at least on paper, seems to speak most directly about what ails Mr. Lewie. There’s no way he would vote for someone who calls himself a socialist, Mr. Lewie said. Nor did Mr. Sanders’s policies appeal to him, not even raising the minimum wage. Mr. Lewie’s hauls come from large corporations, and he worries about their financial health more than any frontline employee’s.

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Ken Ard, South Carolina’s former lieutenant governor, hosts a talk-radio show, on which he discusses Washington’s political establishment.Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

“For me to prosper, the economy has to prosper,” Mr. Lewie said, “and it’s the rich people that produce jobs.”

When asked to assign blame for stagnating wages, he and his wife pointed to the federal government. Regulations and high taxes, he said, not lower wages abroad, led those textile mill companies to move to Mexico.

“I was at a mill where the E.P.A. did a walk-around and found oil on the ground and fined the company tens of thousands of dollars,” he said. “You go to Mexico, they don’t have that.” Then again, he acknowledged that he didn’t know what Mexican textile workers were paid, making it hard to pinpoint what role wages played in decisions to relocate.

The Lewies and Veldhovens share a visceral dislike for President Obama, and much of their animosity for Washington seems entwined with their ill feelings about the president. The state of the nation, in their eyes, was at an all-time low.

“I think we’re at the bottom,” Ms. Lewie said. “It’s everything. Taxes, the economy, the government.”

“Our money is being wasted, wasted, wasted,” she added. “And now we’re paying more and more, and our debts are going up and up, and we need to stop the debt. We have to find someone that’s going to actually take control and say, ‘Stop spending.’ ”

Her husband said, “I don’t think it could get any worse.”

“The government is taking 39 percent now,” said Mr. Lewie, a little morosely, referring to the top income tax bracket. Not for the first time during the meal, he worried that high taxes would discourage the wealthy from producing jobs. “If they want 45 percent, they’ll take that and spend more. If they want 60 percent, they’ll take that and spend more. How much is enough?”

The Lewies haven’t settled on a candidate. But they know that their choice would probably be someone who had never worked in Washington.

There are political scientists who believe that neither the economy nor paychecks actually motivate voter behavior. They say cultural and social issues, like race relations, immigration and same-sex marriage, are the principal drivers of political choices.

“It’s this sense, said Christopher S. Parker, of the University of Washington, “that the country is not what it used to be.”

In South Carolina, it is certainly true that holding a dim view of the federal government is something of a tradition. In the span of five days, three different people remarked that South Carolina fired the first shots in the Civil War. Pollsters say that any optimism about the economy here is regarded as the work of state politicians who have succeeded despite the Democrat in the White House.

“When you hear any confidence among Republicans,” said Scott Huffmon, a professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., “none of it is attributed to the Obama administration. It’s sort of like, ‘Thank God we have a wall of conservative protection to keep Obama from pushing through.’ ”

Florence County, which has a population of about 140,000, has lured some large companies, including Otis Elevator, QVC and General Electric, through aggressive economic outreach and statewide laws that strongly discourage unionization. And some of the county’s 19th-century buildings are being renovated, including a 50,000-square-foot project that includes condos, a restaurant and a rooftop bar.

The counties that surround Florence, however, are ailing. The unemployment rate in nearby Marion County, for instance, is about 9.5 percent. And in addition to those seeking jobs, there are the so-called discouraged workers who have stopped looking. Nationwide, there are about seven million or eight million discouraged workers, said Timothy Kane, an economist at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution.

“If supply of labor is ample,” he added, “there is no wage pressure. It’s not a coldhearted attitude to say that employees will be paid what they’re worth to a firm.”

That ethos explains the mind-set about wages at McCall Farms, a fruit and vegetable canning company in Effingham, about 10 miles from Florence. The company operates a one-million-square-foot factory, selling 60 items — sweet potatoes, string beans, peaches, apple sauce, and so on — to supermarket chains.

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Donald Trump, left, at a campaign event in Columbia, S.C., with Senator Tim Scott.Credit...Sean Rayford/Getty Images

“We try to add five or six new products a year,” said Henry Swink, the company’s 70-year-old co-owner. It is a low-margin business, about 2 or 3 percent, and prices haven’t risen much in recent years. But McCall, which is privately held, has done well, Mr. Swink said, though he declined to go into the details. He did, however, explain how McCall has grown.

“We’ve invested heavily in our plant,” he said. Specifically, McCall has been upgrading the machines that put lids on cans, and McCall now cans 600 products a minute, double the rate of a few years ago.

McCall has also been buying up less nimble rivals — in effect, acquiring their product lines and customers. Interest rates have remained low, a boon to a business that needs to borrow money to invest in equipment. Volume and productivity are up. That means more revenue and profits.

On the labor side, the picture is different. The company’s payroll has doubled, to 1,000 employees, in recent years, about 80 percent of whom are hourly earners, Mr. Swink said. They average about $12.50 an hour.

“They’ve been given a cost-of-living increase,” he explained. “But that’s about it.”

McCall has kept wages steady for hourly employees because there has been little competition for their jobs, and thus no upward pressure on their wages.

Their jobs tend to be low skilled — spotting defective vegetables and removing them from production lines, for instance — and McCall would have little problem replacing anyone who wanted to leave.

“We do feel some competition for employees,” Mr. Swink said. “Honda has opened a plant here. Roche, the pharmaceutical company, is here. But we are able to get the caliber of employees that we need without an issue.”

The 20 percent of salaried employees at McCall have fared better. They tend to be in higher-skilled positions in the maintenance or electrical departments, or working with computers. They could easily jump to a different company. In the last eight years or so, those employees have been given raises of about 15 percent.

“I had not thought about it until we discussed it,” Mr. Swink said on the phone, in a follow-up conversation. “The average hourly wage earner here, their lifestyle isn’t getting better. It’s staying the same.”

Economists differ about what exactly would help raise wages for hourly workers. Progressive economists urge more government intervention; right-leaning economists urge less. The former say that raising the minimum wage would have ripple effects on the paychecks of employees higher on the pay scale. The latter, such as Edward P. Lazear of the Hoover Institution, argue that increased regulations and capital gains taxes are to blame for stagnant wages and suppressed job creation.

The phrase “no silver bullet” came up a lot in discussions on the topic. And the elusiveness of solutions to the wage issue, perhaps, also leads voters to candidates with no Washington experience. In the absence of action and answers, a deep exasperation with the status quo sets in.

The day of that meal at the Bonefish Grill, John Boehner, the House speaker, announced that he would resign from Congress, citing a faction within his party that stood against deal-making of any kind with Democrats. It was a reminder that an insurrectionist, “throw the bums out” movement had, in 2010, put a few dozen Republican lawmakers with Tea Party leanings into office. Some were first-time office seekers; all of them had campaigned against Washington.

Which makes some wonder: Why would yet another populist wave cure what ails the economy? And why isn’t anger, like that expressed by the Lewies and the Veldhovens, directed at the Republicans?

“There is anger at the G.O.P.,” Mr. Lewie said. “That’s why we’re not looking at politicians anymore. What has the Tea Party done? I voted for those candidates.”

“We want them out,” his wife said. “We want people.”

But isn’t everyone a person until elected, at which point they become a politician?

You can never tell what someone will become after they get into office, Mr. Lewie said. “The ones that are entrenched,” he explained, “need to go.”

A correction was made on 
Oct. 10, 2015

An earlier version of this article reversed the captions for pictures of Ken Ard and Henry Swink.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pursuing the ‘Anti-Politician’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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