It’s over a year now, but academics, journalists, and political junkies still cannot get their fill–nor can I–of addressing the question, Why Trump? The obsession is understandable. Aside from the clear and present dangers his administration poses to the nation, there is the compelling puzzle of how so many Americans could vote for a man who…. well, whose own leading appointees call him an “idiot” and a “f**king moron.” As I wrote before, the social science question is not why he won. Trump’s electoral college victory can be blamed on many small incidentals (and, perhaps most deeply, on the Founding Fathers’ suspicion of popular democracy). The big question is why Trump did so much better than other also out-of-the-mainstream but less outlandish candidates like Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Ross Perot.
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Discussion has largely focused on whether Trump’s special appeal to white working class (WWC) voters which helped him win the Republican nomination and then key swing states arose more from those voters’ economic anxieties or more from their cultural anxieties. Journalist German Lopez’s recent review in Vox of several studies leads him to conclude that “the evidence that Trump’s rise was driven by racism and racial resentment is fairly stacked.” That “Trump! Trump! Trump!” has become a racial taunt underlines Lopez’s claim.
In response to such assertions, conservative columnist Ross Douthat reasonably responded that both motivations mattered and that economic concerns should not be dismissed as an important source of Trump’s appeal. Liberal columnist Kevin Drum responded that Trump’s racist support was no different than that of past GOP candidates and, anyway, it’s all besides the point, because his election is former FBI Director Comey’s fault. Neither Douthat’s nor Drum’s responses is compelling–nor is it compelling to reduce Trumps’ supporters to racists. Better understanding of the Trump phenomenon is both intellectually interesting and potentially important. So, I return to the topic of a post about a year old, “Explaining Trump,” only this time with much new data and debate to integrate.
As before, distinctions must be made, even after setting aside the question of why Trump won the electoral college. We must separately address the question of who became key Trump enthusiasts from the question of why he managed to get 46 percent of final vote (while Goldwater in ‘64 got only 38 percent, Wallace in ‘68 14 percent, and Perot in ‘92 19 percent).
Trump’s Core
Lopez is roughly right: Studies have accumulated showing that the distinctiveness of Trump’s core supporters in the primaries and among new or swing voters in the general election lies less in his fans’ economic insecurity than in their cultural insecurity: concerns that the life-ways of white working-class Christians are being threatened by a set of “others”: immigrants, blacks, Muslims, feminists, Washington bureaucrats, Wall Street operators, and over-educated coastal elites.
Recent analyses of surveys show that Trump voters can be distinguished–aside from their demographics, skewing white, male, less educated, and old–most precisely by their view that native-born whites are being treated unfairly while others are being given unearned advantages (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Trump exceeded Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance most emphatically in small, all-white communities (here; here). Similarly, Trump’s especially strong showing among rural and farm voters–the country-city difference in Trump support was larger than the gender gap or the college-graduate gap and about as large as the Latino-white gap–is more consistent with a cultural explanation for Trump enthusiasm than one having to do with a crisis in industrial jobs.
Certainly, many Trump loyalists had substantive economic complaints and for a Republican he drew an unexpectedly large percentage of the WWC. But, economic complaints are standard in elections outside of wartime. (“It’s the economy, stupid,” said Bill Clinton’s campaign managers in 1992.) Also, on the eve of Trump’s victory, the economy was growing and the unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in 10 years. Yes, WWC men had been getting shafted for a generation, but that does not necessarily mean that their financial travails is what drove so many of them to cheer for a New York City Republican billionaire. (Moreover, it is well-established that political position determines people’s ratings of the economy more than vice-versa.)
But what about the voters who shifted from voting for Obama to voting for Trump?, some analysts ask. Do they not demonstrate the greater importance of economic complaints over racism? First, it is not clear that there were really that many such switchers, although they may well have been exquisitely located in the Great Lakes region (see here versus here). Second, the anomaly was not their Trump vote, but their Obama vote. Remember that in November, 2008 the economy seemed to be in free fall and fear of a crash moved some would-have-been McCain voters to Obama. In 2012, some of those stayed with the incumbent as the economy slowly rebounded. But the two Obama elections seemed to mask a longer, deeper trend–displayed in the rise of the Tea Party–of growing cultural grievances driving votes for the GOP.[1]
Economic worries get entwined with cultural ones in people’s minds; they feed one another. One crossnational study found that people who said that they had low social standing were likelier than others to support right-wing populist parties and right-wing populist ideas. Their feelings of status disadvantage mattered irrespective of their actual class positions and, the authors argue, emerged from comparing themselves to “others,” like immigrants (and for men, women). Despite its overlap with class concerns, white nationalism marked the Trump core much more than did economic populism. And that nationalism was the Steve Bannon strategy, after all.
Trump’s Fellow Travelers
However gripping the story of the WWC, its members account for a minor portion of Trump’s eventual 46 percent. One analysis estimates that WWC voters made up only about one-eighth of the 2016 electorate, a bit less than they did in 2012. The bigger story is that middle class Republicans overwhelmingly voted for Trump. According to exit polls, 90 percent of all Republicans voted for Trump.
As I noted a year ago, in 1964 only about 80 percent of Republicans voted for Senator Barry Goldwater, who may have been a self-admitted political extremist (“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”), but was not a self-admitted sexual predator. In 1968, only 5 percent of Republicans abandoned Richard Nixon–yet untainted by Watergate–for the independent white nationalist campaign of Governor George Wallace. In 1992, 17 percent of Republicans did abandon Vice-President George H. W. Bush for the independent economic nationalist businessman Ross Perot, although in the next election, only 6 percent picked Perot over the GOP’s Senator Robert Dole. In the last 40 years of the twentieth century, then, enough Republicans shied away from even mildly tainted candidates of whatever party (as did Democrats, by the way) to sink those candidates’ chances of election.
But 2016 was different. As was 2017, when 91 percent of Alabama Republicans voted for Roy Moore, a twice-dismissed former judge and quite plausibly a child molester, in a special election for Senator. And so one returns to the argument that the critical feature of 2016 election was not the modest, albeit critically-located, surge of rural and WWC voters for Trump, but 21st century political polarization, particularly strong on the Republican side, the sort of polarization that leads a GOP congressman to defend Trump by saying that “He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”
A pause for clarification: In the social science literature, “polarization” is a complex idea (see, e.g., here and here). What I am discussing is more properly referred to as “sorting” or “partisanship,” the increasing separation and mutual rejection of Democrats and Republicans. Relatively few Americans hold informed and systematic positions on issues, so the widening disagreements are based more on symbolic matters and partisans’ sense of identity than on political philosophy. (Classic examples of philosophical inconsistencies are older conservative voters’ attachment to their Medicare and do-your-own-thing liberals support for many government regulations.)
I discussed growing partisanship before (in 2012 and early 2017). Further research confirms that Republicans and Democrats have been increasingly lining up on opposing sides of various issues and have been developing increasingly hostile views of one another (see, for example, here, here, here, and here.) Americans are moving around the country in ways that lead to greater physical distance from those of the other party, segregating more by coincidence–for example, some kinds of people prefer places with a choice of ethnic restaurants and other kinds prefer places with outdoor sports–but perhaps moving apart on purpose as well (see here and here). Finally, there are some indications that what scholars call “racial resentment” (feeling that minorities are being too pushy) has been–even before Trump–increasingly part of the Republican-Democratic divide (here and note[1]).
Mainstream Republican voters’ growing partisanship, then, is the key to why Trump’s appeal was not circumscribed in the way that Perot’s, Wallace’s, or Goldwater’s were. Now, mainstream Republican legislators are making the same sort of decisions that their voters did. They are tolerating a president many of whose statements and actions their predecessors would have found intolerable 40 years ago. (Case in point: Watergate.) Similarly, conservative intellectuals who opposed Trump’s nomination are now occupied writing attacks on liberals who attack Trump.
Implications
For many, solving the intellectual puzzle Trump poses is much less important than figuring out how to unseat him. Many argue that Democrats must empathetically address the economic anxieties of Trump’s base. But most Democrats, including but not only Hillary Clinton, thought they were doing exactly that in 2016, only to learn that if the audience distrusts the messenger, the message does not matter. Moreover, if cultural, not economic, anxieties most obsess the Trump core, then expressing empathy for those concerns would, even if that audience paid any attention, endanger Democrats’ appeal to the very groups about whom the Trump core is aggrieved.
One alternative is to focus on mobilizing the liberal core. That can be a winning strategy in close elections, but may have the knock-on effect of further polarizing American politics. Another strategy would be to peel off just some of the more moderate Republicans, the sort whose predecessors in the 1960s voted for Johnson over Goldwater. That seems to have been the winning approach of Alabama Senator-Elect Doug Jones.
Notes
[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild and Michael Hout, “Was Trump a Meteor or a Volcano? Racial Resentment, Immigration, and the Environment Built Up as Strong Predictors of Whites’ Votes Before the 2016 Election,” Paper presented to the American Sociological Association, Montreal, 2017.
Updates:
Jan. 15, 2018: White’s racial attitudes have since 1988 increasingly correlated with their other political views and with Republican partisanship: Enders and Scott on Monkey Cage.
Jan. 29, 2018: Sociologist Andrew Perrin has an interesting essay on the slew of recent books introducing elite readers to the “authentic” white working class, pointing out their unexamined assumption that their subjects’ worldviews are inherent and natural (rather than a political position of the moment).
Feb. 1, 2018: Analysis of the special election in Alabama suggests that counties where “racial resentment” was lowest shifted a bit more to the Democratic candidate than counties with higher “resentment.”
Sept. 16, 2018: Journalist Dan Balz reports on a new book by political scientists trying to summarize the evidence on and propose an explanation for the Trump victory. They focus on identity politics foremost and where economics comes into play, they argue, it is “racialized economics”–“the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.”
MADE IN AMERICA 