This blog has periodically summarized some of the hundreds of studies analyzing Trump’s 2016 success and of his continuing popularity. This particular post will be, I trust, the almost-final one. (I’ll no doubt be sucked into reading the studies following up on the 2020 election.)
My last update was about a year ago. The research then basically confirmed even earlier findings that Trump effectively combined a blatant appeal to the cultural anxieties of native-born, white Christians, together with overwhelming Republican party loyalty in this era of polarization and with the Founding Father’s kludge, the electoral college, to eke out a win. New research largely elaborates that explanation. So, after a brief review, I’ll turn to asking what this recent history might say about the forthcoming election.
Origins of Trumpism
Newer studies–the literature is voluminous, so I only touch on bits of it– again show that what seemed to most distinguish strong Trump supporters in 2016 and since 2016 is their anxiety about the cultural changes of the last couple of decades. Racial resentment contributes to this unease (see, e.g., here and here), something Obama’s presidency accentuated. But to reduce the cultural anxiety simply into racism is an error and unfair. For a couple of generations now, increasingly more Americans have personally adopted and increasingly more American institutions–media, large corporations, courts, even the NBA, MLB, and NFL–have affirmed values that traditional, mainstream Americans see as threats to their ways of life. These are values such as feminism, Black pride, multiculturalism, indifference or even hostility toward religion, skepticism about American history, uncensored speech, and a variety of sexual liberations.
Over the last few decades, the Republican party spoke out more loudly on behalf of the traditionalists (e.g., here and here). Trump projected by far the loudest, bluntest voice (e.g., here and here). So deep are the cultural anxieties he addressed that Christian evangelicals have made their peace with Trump. A good portion of them believe that, whatever his moral flaws, Trump has been anointed by God. If nothing less than American Christendom is at stake, even a morally corrupt “Cyrus” is heaven-sent. (Thus, pious figures like A.G. Barr do Trump’s dirty work.)
In their 2019 book, Cultural Backlash, political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart place Trump in the context of other “populist-authoritarian” leaders around the world who have recently risen to power–or gotten close to it. I am not sure that populist is the right label for Trump, but the authors bring together a lot of the data to justify their interpretation that his ascendancy was a product of cultural backlash:
[L]ong-term cultural changes have reached a ‘tipping point’ where members of the former cultural majority, who still adhere to traditional norms, have come to feel like strangers in their own land…, activating feelings of resentment toward groups blamed for change…. [In 2016], white working-class fears of cultural replacement and immigration were more powerful factors in predicting support for Trump than [their] economic concerns….
The authors show that in the years running up to 2016, cultural more than economic issues largely defined party divisions:
[D]uring the last two decades the policy platforms of both major parties have come to offer increasingly divergent positions on a wide range of social issues, such as reproductive rights and affirmative action, race relations and criminal justice, same sex marriage and transsexual rights, … and immigration…
These cultural differences are not easily bridged, Norris and Inglehart point out, because they are matters of good and evil. Norris and Inglehart conclude about 2016: “Overall, we find support for both the economic grievances theory and the cultural backlash theory. They seem to reinforce each other – but cultural backlash clearly played the dominant role in people’s decision to vote for Trump….”
Looking Ahead
2020 is not like 2016, in great part because Trump himself has changed the landscape. Of course, he is the incumbent, with that position’s advantages and disadvantages. Beyond that, he has generated a new backlash to the cultural backlash and has accelerated the polarization between Republicans and Democrats. Divisions between the two have widened on race, gender, national pride, and a wide range of political and social topics–even on the proper health practices regarding Covid-19 (e.g., here and here). And in the Trump years the proportion of Republicans who approve of strongman or military rule has jumped up (Ch. 12 in the Norris and Inglehart book), raising fundamental issues about our political system.
What will this witches’ brew of increasingly harsh partisanship bring this November? I have no standing to predict. For one, there are weeks to go and any number of events can happen (a new scandal, a stroke to one of the septuagenarians, a wag-the-tail war, a coup d’etat–who knows?). For another, there are people far more expert than I in predictions. The poll aggregators were actually pretty close in 2016 and yet better in 2018. But, being off by a mere point or two when that margin straddles 50:50 means getting some calls wrong and that does not even include possibly massive voter suppression or legal challenges. As I write (9/28/20, 9pm PDT), here are a few major forecasts:
– Nate Silver’s 538: Odds of a Biden win, 78%, with about 330 electoral votes;
– Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium: Biden, with about 353 electoral votes;
– Elliot Morris’s and Andy Gelman’s for The Economist: Odds of Biden win, 85%, with about 332 electoral votes.
Those are the best, well-informed guesses, but even they change from hour to hour.
Some political basic facts to remember are:
– To win the electoral college, Biden would probably have to win the popular vote by 4 or more percentage points. Even then, the legal shenanigans being planned by the Trump campaign suggests a margin of 5+ might really be needed to signal a definitive win.
– The electorate is sharply divided, with relatively few voters–say, fewer than 1 of every 10–possibly movable. (A mid-September Marist poll of likely voters had only 5 percent undecided or favoring a third candidate. In an August Pew poll, 2 percent expressed no preference and only about 5 percent of both Biden and Trump voters said that they might change their minds.)
– Decades of political science research portray these undecided and waffling possible voters as less interested and less informed about politics than those who are committed. Yet, in a close election, these few largely detached folks will make the difference(as in the the Midwest in 2016).
– Rouse the base to come out and vote or convert the wafflers? This is a basic choice for most campaigns. Funds may allow the Biden campaign to afford doing both, but the messaging that draws one group may repel the other (e.g., Black Lives Matter).
– Converting a 2016 Trump voter to 2020 Biden voter is worth twice as much–perhaps more than twice as much given the electoral college–as converting a 2016 non-voter into a Biden voter.
Some on the left have been particularly vulnerable to putting symbolic politics over practical politics. (For example, in 2000, Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida; George W. Bush won Florida–and thus the presidency–by only 537 votes.) Anecdotally, it seems that fewer on the left are willing this time to put purity over pragmatism. One hopes so. After all, the future of democracy in America and of hundreds of thousands of lives around the world are at stake.
Update, Oct. 12, 2020
A few things are becoming clearer in the polls. One is that Biden’s lead–at this writing about 10-11 points nationally–is largely thanks to (a) the conversion of some 2016 Trump voters and (b) to a lesser degree, the conversion of 2016 third-party voters. As yet, it is not that much due to mobilization of new voters.
