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Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)

September 29, 2020 by Claude Fischer

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.)  

wom vote

New women voters circa 1920

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.

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  • Pages

    • About the book
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  • Previous Posts

    • How Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part I
    • The Covid Experience Reveals How Weird America Is
    • Americans Continue to Associate. For What Cause?
    • Slavery, Capitalism, and Reparations
    • Opening Day, 2022: Still Unresolved
    • No Peace, No Justice
    • The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example
    • The Culture Has Moved Left… So the Right has Mobilized
    • Overcoming Distance and Embracing Place: Personal Ties in the Age of Persistent and Pervasive Communication
    • The Death Surge Before Covid-19: Who, What, and Why.
    • Women Rising: Life Stories from the Last Century
    • Whither Big Tech, or When Novelties Become (Regulated) Necessities
    • Opening Day, 2021: Baseball’s Crises
    • First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?
    • The Political Census
    • First Takes on the Election: #1, What Happened?
    • Now for Something Different: Is Sex Wilting?
    • Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)
    • Covid-19: Exceptionalism with a Vengeance
    • Is Left Cancel Culture Cancelling Left Culture?
    • BLM Protests: Surprisingly Successful… So Far. Why?
    • White Liberals’ Political Correctness Could Help Trump Get Re-Elected
    • Asteroidal Change or Glacial Change? Peering Over the Covid-19 Horizon
    • Opening Day Under Covid-19: Do Fans Matter?
    • COVID-19: Balancing Short-Term Solutions and Long-Term Effects. Are There Lessons from 1918?
    • Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote
    • AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?
    • One Year Down, One to Go: Still Explaining Trump
    • Lead, Brains, and Behavior: Sociology Meets Biology
    • The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?
    • [Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]
    • Parental Love, Opportunity Markets, and Inequality
    • Brain Twisting, or How We Evolved
    • Opening Day, 2019: Data-Crunching, Inequality, and Baseball
    • Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer
    • A Christian America? The Talk and the Walk
    • Shareholder Value: Law, Inequality, and the Doubting Justice
    • After the Election: More Polarization or Less?
    • Searching for the Authentic Self (… and Finding Trump)
    • The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins
    • Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?
    • Get by with a Little Help from…
    • Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics
    • Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?
    • How Can Size of Community Still Matter?
    • Sending a Message by Pollster
    • Loneliness Scare Again… and Again… and…
    • Where Have You Gone, “Alienation”?
    • Opening Day, 2018: Politics, Race, and Baseball
    • Local Cultures
    • Chain Migration
    • Explaining Trump Some More
    • “Okie from Muskogee” a Half-Century On
    • Reversing American Voluntarism
    • National Character? A Reply to Stearns
    • Do We (Still) Value Family?
    • Is Marriage Over? For Whom?
    • Bannon, Brown, and the Identity Debate
    • The Great “American” (or is it New York?) Songbook
    • Is Health Care a Right?
    • Church Social
    • Inequality is about Security and Opportunity
    • Democracy in America, France, and “Hamilton”
    • Opening Day, 2017: Inequality on the Field, in the Stands
    • Voting for the Five Percent
    • More (on) Polarization
    • Americans and the Unassimilables
    • Explaining Trump
    • ***** Hiatus *****
    • The Great Settling Down
    • Election Reflection
    • Is the U.S. No Longer Religiously Exceptional?
    • Technology and Housework: Other Tasks for Mother?
    • Can Sociability Blunt Political Polarization?
    • The End of Good Work?
    • RFD, Media, and Democracy
    • Long Tails, Big Cities, Critical Masses
    • A Woman President?
    • Magazines: 19th Century Internet
    • Friends and “FB Friends”
    • Reversal of Fortune: American Cities
    • Does Education Work?
    • A Tony by Any Other Name…
    • Bernie, Hillary, and Historical Memory
    • Driving Cattle, Driving Exceptionalism
    • Build Bigger Wall? Get More Undocumented.
    • Opening Day 2016
    • Great Again
    • A Celebrity Strong Man
    • Survey Says . . .
    • Veterans and Suicides?
    • Odd Man In
    • The Pace, the Pace
    • A Street Divided
    • A History of Health and Health Inequalities
    • Why Diversity
    • Family Wages
    • What Happened When They Came?
    • The Grandma (and pa) Effect
    • Turkle, Times, Technology, Trauma–Yet Again
    • Just Deserts
    • Cell Phone Etiquette
    • Changing Hearts, Changing Matters, 2011-2015
    • American Self-Creation
    • The Immigrant-Crime Connection
    • Black by Choice?
    • The Marriage Contract
    • Attaining Adulthood
    • Left Out: Working-Class Kids
    • Life is a Stage, or Several
    • Family Farms vs. Americanism
    • Censor This, Political Correctness
    • Opening Day 2015
    • Science vs. Religion… or Science and Religion?
    • Building the Natural Market
    • Dressing Down
    • Untangling the Race Gap
    • Finding Public Relief
    • Surveying Change
    • Snap Decisions and Race
    • Holy-Day Exceptionalism
    • Where Does the “Don’t Shoot” Movement Go?
    • Reporting from America’s “Slums”
    • Racism as Mental Illness?
    • Which University?
    • The “Shared” Economy
    • Of Places Past
    • Long Story of the “Long Tail”
    • The Blameless Only
    • When Epidemic Hysteria Made Sense
    • Latest News on “No Religion”
    • Vocabulary Retrogression
    • American Way-Differentism: More a Club than a Family
    • Do Ideas Matter?
    • Alternative to Empathy
    • Women Dining
    • Too Much Social Science?
    • Ferguson and Social Media
    • Blame Who or What
    • “Libertarianism is Strange” Revisited
    • All Tech Is Social
    • How Ideas Make Themselves Matter
    • Women in Politics 1780-2014
    • Government Works
    • Telling Stories vs. Telling Data
    • Persistence of Race, 2014
    • Selfishness or Self-Awareness?
    • Virtuous Debt
    • Work Hours and the Pay Gap
    • Life in Public, Then and Now
    • Mourning 9/11 Victorian Style
    • A “Friends” Gripe
    • Bible Readings
    • Old Days, Fast Times
    • De-Democratizing?
    • Eco-Puritanism
    • Bring Me Your….
    • Thinking Inequality
    • Which Radical Ideas Come True?
    • Pastime – Opening Day 2014
    • Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?
    • Kitty Genovese: The Emblematic Story
    • Public Health
    • Exceptionalism Ending?
    • Risk-Sharing
    • Folktales of the Policy Elites
    • Male (Job) Insecurity
    • Libertarianism is Very Strange
    • Art and the Machined World
    • The Public Housing Experiment
    • The S-Curve of Cultural Change
    • Artful History
    • Inventing the Social Network
    • American Dream, Twisting
    • Deservingness
    • Place Matters More
    • Squirrely History
    • Atheist Evangelism: “Nothing New Under the Sun”
    • The Giving Season… and Era
    • Cell Phone Science
    • Boo! Americans and the Occult
    • You Call That a Shutdown?
    • More Inequality Updates
    • Political Responses to the Crash
    • Child Labors
    • Word Counts and What Counts
    • Loss of Economic Exceptionalism
    • Learning Sympathy
    • Respecting the Science
    • Economic Equality, 1774 and Beyond
    • Declaring You’re a “None”
    • Extremely Local
    • Robert Bellah
    • Inequality Hits Home
    • The Supreme Court Ducks Immutability
    • Postcard from Paris
    • America’s Religious Market
    • American-Made Ethnic-Americans
    • New Media and Old Manifestations
    • Novel Data: Promise and Perils
    • Immigrants and Historical Amnesia
    • Inequality Update
    • Psychologically Damaged
    • Race in the Eye of the Beholder
    • Getting Smarter
    • Suicide Boom?
    • Tweedledee-Tweedledum Nostalgia
    • Sexual License, Sexual Limits
    • Markets, Prices, and Justice
    • Immigration and Political Clout
    • Is the Gender Revolution Over?
    • Writerly Baseball – Opening Day 2013
    • Back Home
    • Catholic Schism
    • How Material Are We?
    • Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church
    • The ’60s Turn 50
    • The Left’s Religion Problem
    • Paying Attention to the Kids
    • We’re # Last!
    • Risk Taking
    • The Elderly and Their Children
    • Guns
    • A Modern “Antebellum Puzzle”?
    • Makes One Anxious
    • Psychological Labeling … and Enabling?
    • The Giving Nation? Philanthropy’s Problems
    • Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail
    • The Happiness Boom
    • What Americans Have Been Thinking
    • The Verdict on Class and Voting
    • Panderocracy
    • 9/11 Reaction and Resilience
    • A Cost of Inequality: Growth
    • Obama’s Racial Penalty
    • Choose Your Choice
    • To the Poorhouse
    • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
    • The 47% Charge in U.S. History
    • The Survey Crisis
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Execution Songs
    • Spiritual and/or Religious
    • “Who Built That?”: Chance and History
    • Meeting, Mating, and the Web
    • Live Long and Prosper — and Plan
    • Voting Violence
    • Sex and the American Car
    • The Assets Gap
    • Differences Under the Differences
    • Why Americans Don’t Vacation
    • Virtuous Voting
    • Clothes Make the Common Man
    • Driving Blind
    • Geography of Inequality
    • Slavery’s Heavy Hand
    • Gay Vows
    • Explaining Poverty (Again)
    • Out- and Insourcing
    • Still Under God
    • The Loneliness Scare is Back
    • Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith
    • Between Dole and Market
    • Opening Day 2012 – Worldwide
    • Tolerating Americans
    • What’s the Common in the Common Good?
    • End Times and Presidents
    • The Abortion Puzzle
    • The Army of Black Liberation
    • The South Has Risen
    • Can’t Believe It
    • Marrying — Up, Down, Sideways
    • Occupy 2012: Another 1968?
    • Over-Impacted
    • How Bad is “European”?
    • Unique, Sovereign, American
    • The Working Class’s Party
    • Reconstructing Memory
    • Make-Your-Own Religion
    • Consume This
    • Self-Absorbed: Emerson & Thoreau
    • What Works? Votes.
    • Stumbling in the Dark
    • More on Occupy
    • Occupy! Now What?
    • Lost Children
    • Cheerful Yanks?
    • Tolerating Ambiguity
    • New News, Old News
    • Unequal Denial
    • Timing is (Not?) Everything
    • Breastfeeding History
    • What’s a Life Worth?
    • Homesick Blues
    • Summer Break
    • Spinsters No More
    • Missing Tramps
    • City Crime; Country Crime
    • Living Togetherness
    • Naturally Clean
    • Women Graduating
    • Home Owning Dreams
    • Technology and Fundamentals
    • Protected Class
    • Faith Endures
    • American Exceptionalism
    • Buying a Head Start
    • A. Lincoln, Socialist?
    • Opening Day 2011
    • Shaken but Secure
    • Jobs Go and Come
    • Heavy Hand
    • The Big Change
    • American Ties (III)
    • Money and Character
    • Going Out–or Home?
    • Degree Inequality
    • American Ties (II)
    • Ugly or Needy
    • 18th-Century Twitterfeed
    • American Ties (I)
    • Grammar Rules
    • Christmas Struggle
    • Ancestor Worship
    • Was Slavery, Is Slavery
    • Hanukkah or Vanish?
    • Pilgrims, Puritans, Americans?
    • Return on Investment
    • Solidarity, Soldiers, and Baseball
    • Win Stay, Lose Change
    • Why Vote?
    • We’re All Geniuses
    • Caring More or Less
    • Life Begins
    • Equal Visions
    • No Dinner Invitations?
    • Depressing Comparisons
    • Labor’s Laboring Efforts
    • Multiculturalism Lite and Right
    • Who Has Your Back
    • A Natural Romance
    • Alone or Lonely?
    • Sentimental Journey
    • LeBron & the 10th
    • We’re #1 !
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 2
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 1
    • Fighting for the 4th
    • Gentrified Memories
    • Juneteenth: Race? Slavery?
    • Boomer Blues
    • No Longer the Tall American
    • A Crime Puzzle
    • Memorial-izing Day
    • Angry Old White Men
    • Sisters Take the Streets
    • Brooks, Policy, and History
    • Tongue-Tied to America
    • Happiness Happy
    • Inventing Friendship
    • American Individualism – Really?
    • Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System
    • Opening Day 2010
    • Did “Consumerism” Blow Up the Economy?
    • A Christian America? What History Shows
    • The Myth that Never Moves
    • Good Health, Long Life, and Big Government
    • Announcing the “Made in America” Site

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