Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District has seen more than its fair share of economic ups and downs. If you go back to 2009 Census economic data, at the peak of the recession, and zoom in on Elkhart County, one of the population centers of the 2nd, you would have seen a catastrophically high unemployment rate of 16.1 percent, well over the national average that year of 9.9 percent. If you look at 2014 data (the most recent that the Census has reported), Elkhart County’s unemployment is down to 4.6 percent, considerably lower than that year’s national average of 7.2 percent. It’s such a turnaround success story that Barack Obama, who made Elkhart one of his first stops after being inaugurated to sell the stimulus package, took a victory lap, returning to Elkhart in June to tout its recovery.
So what’s going on in Elkhart that caused it to fall so far and bounce so high again? It’s something of a company town, heavily reliant on one unusual industry: The manufacture of recreational vehicles, as well as modular and mobile homes. RV purchases were already troubled in the 2000s because of spiraling gas prices, and then once the financial crisis unfolded, luxury purchases like RVs became the last thing on anyone’s mind (and the housing supply overhang certainly cut into demand for new mobile homes). But with income bouncing back and gasoline at historically low prices, guess what people are buying again? (Elkhart is also known, to a lesser extent, for the manufacture of brass — not just industrial equipment, but also band instruments, another item that got quickly pitched over the side of the lifeboat in a time of crisis.)
While Elkhart is especially known for its mobile home industry, there are specialized manufacturers all over the 2nd district, including in South Bend, the other major city in the district. While most of the district’s population is concentrated in these two cities near the Michigan border, there are also a lot of small towns in the more sparsely-populated southern part of the 2nd with their own specialties. Your water meter, for instance, was, in all likelihood, manufactured here, in the town of Wabash. Add that all up, and you have the district with the highest percentage of people working in manufacturing jobs: 26 percent of the civilian work force in 2014, more than double the national average of 10.3 percent.
When you think “manufacturing,” you probably think really heavy industry, or “smokestack industry” as pundits often call it: steel mills, or auto plants, or other dystopian-looking facilities that sprawl across a lot of land, dominate the skyline, belch a lot of smoke. Along those lines, if asked where the manufacturing jobs are, you’d probably volunteer Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland. But that’s just not the case any more—much of the heavy industry in those places has left those cities, and as major population centers, there are lots of people there employed in the FIRE sector, in health care, and at universities.
Instead, much of what’s left in manufacturing in America these days is “light manufacturing,” which is mostly concentrated in smaller cities, often lurking in low-profile industrial parks that don’t catch the eye of passersby. Other cities besides Elkhart that always show up near the top of the “highest rate of manufacturing jobs” are such out-of-the-way places as Hickory, North Carolina (which provides much of the nation’s fiber optic cable), Dalton, Georgia (one of the few places left in the south with a lot of textiles jobs), and Green Bay, Wisconsin (where there are still a lot of packers, i.e., of meat).
The 2000s version of Indiana’s 2nd district was a true swing district, represented by Republican Chris Chocola from 2002 to 2006, when he was defeated by moderate Democrat Joe Donnelly. Donnelly gave up the seat in 2012 for two reasons: one, the district became quite a bit redder during Republican-controlled redistricting, as it lost the lakefront industrial town of Michigan City and gained more rural terrain instead. The 2000s version of IN-02 went 54-45 for Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, but the 2008 election, under the post-2012 lines, would’ve gone only 50-49. Without Obama making a ‘08-style push in Indiana in 2012, he lost the district 42-56 to Mitt Romney. And the second reason: Donnelly sensed an opening, in case incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Lugar got knocked off in a primary by a right-wing challenger. That’s exactly what happened, which is why we now have Sen. Joe Donnelly.
Unfortunately, the downside of Donnelly’s departure is that IN-02 is now controlled by Republican Jackie Walorski, who received the sobriquet “Wacky Jackie” for sponsoring legislation in the Indiana Legislature that pushed the right side of the envelope. In a semi-swingy House district, though, she’s evolved into an establishment-friendly member who rarely makes waves. Walorski faces Democrat and former mayoral aide Lynn Coleman in November; this race is low on the national parties’ priority lists, though it could conceivably move onto the map if things break late, across the boards, for the Democrats.
“The Most District” is an ongoing series devoted to highlighting congressional district superlatives around the nation. Click here for all posts in this series.