In the wake of the Donald Trump election, many people have said that his support came from working class whites that are economically struggling or desperate. This article from Cracked seems to make that case. However, the exit polls don't seem to support this: Clinton won a majority of voters earning less than $50,000 per year and a majority of voters saying the economy was the biggest problem facing the country. However, Trump voters were more likely to say that the economy was in bad shape and are more likely to be affected in the future, even if they aren't suffering yet.
This is something I've been intrigued by for the past year as a political junkie. And as a Bernie supporter, it was convenient to attribute the rise of Trump to dissatisfaction with the neoliberal agreement of establishment Republicans and Democrats, as many liberals have. But I'm also a data junkie, and what I've found is that the data doesn't support this narrative.
There's a really good rundown from a high level at Vox on what drives Trump supporters (it's essentially a meta-analysis of several different analyses) here.
But I want to break down the data a bit more. Firstly, we go to a study by FiveThirtyEight on Trump primary voters. In particular, Nate Silver finds that Trump supporters aren't disproportionately poor when compared to Cruz voters, GOP voters, or white voters overall (only compared to Kasich and Rubio voters), and in fact, are better off than most Americans and most white Democrats. Per his analysis:
Class in America is a complicated concept, and it may be that Trump supporters see themselves as having been left behind in other respects. Since almost all of Trump’s voters so far in the primaries have been non-Hispanic whites, we can ask whether they make lower incomes than other white Americans, for instance. The answer is “no.” The median household income for non-Hispanic whites is about $62,000, still a fair bit lower than the $72,000 median for Trump voters.
Likewise, although about 44 percent of Trump supporters have college degrees, according to exit polls — lower than the 50 percent for Cruz supporters or 64 percent for Kasich supporters — that’s still higher than the 33 percent of non-Hispanic white adults, or the 29 percent of American adults overall, who have at least a bachelor’s degree.
This is not to say that Trump voters are happy about the condition of the economy. Substantial majorities of Republicans in every state so far have said they’re “very worried” about the condition of the U.S. economy, according to exit polls, and these voters have been more likely to vote for Trump. But that anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect their personal economic circumstances, which for many Trump voters, at least in a relative sense, are reasonably good."
A more detailed analysis by Gallup shows similar trends, or in fact higher levels of income for Trump primary supporters. But this study does point out something interesting: that there is a trend of people supporting Trump living in areas with slowing opportunity for their children; so while they're well off, they don't see that as being the case for their children. Interestingly, however, among people younger than 29 (that is the people actually being harmed by this reduced opportunity), Trump polls in fourth place, sometimes in the single digits.
Further, we can look at what's happening across the pond as more evidence for what is really driving the rise of Trump. As the Vox article points out, the countries in Europe that are doing well - Germany, Sweden, Austria, the UK - are all experiencing right wing political parties rising. On the other hand, countries experiencing severe economic issues like Greece and Spain (both over 20% unemployment, worse than the US in the throes of the Great Depression), it is left-wing parties that are ascendent (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain). That's similar to what happened with Democrats sweeping office during the 2008 crash here.
Similarly, in the UK, there was an attempt to attribute the shocking "Leave" vote to economic distress of working class whites. But as we now know, it wasn't about the economy at all. Class only accounted for 1-2% of variation in the Leave vote, and knowing a voters Income+Class only allowed about a 54% chance of guessing their vote - i.e. a tossup. Further, most Leave voters were in the more affluent South, rather than the North. But what was a good predictor of a Leave vote? As the article describes:
For me, what really stands out about figure 2 is the importance of support for the death penalty. Nobody has been out campaigning on this issue, yet it strongly correlates with Brexit voting intention. This speaks to a deeper personality dimension which social psychologists like Bob Altemeyer – unfortunately in my view – dub Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). A less judgmental way of thinking about RWA is order versus openness. The order-openness divide is emerging as the key political cleavage, overshadowing the left-right economic dimension. This was noticed as early as the mid-1970s by Daniel Bell, but has become more pronounced as the aging West’s ethnic transformation has accelerated.
Similarly, data has shown that Trump also benefits from this order-openness divide. As a study by Matthew MacWilliams of University of Massachusetts found, "authoritarian" or "orderly" tendencies was a very good predictor of support for Trump:
For some time, I have studied authoritarian attitudes among Americans. This December, under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I conducted a national poll measuring authoritarianism, along with more typical demographic and political factors. It found that, nationally, only authoritarian attitudes and fear of terrorism — not income, age, education, or even race — predict with statistical significance whether someone will support Trump.
And, of course, the other statistically significant predictor for someone that supports Trump? Racial resentment. Note that this is not racism outright, but rather a strong belief that the problems of racial minorities are due to their own inadequacies. Or, as the questions in the study were worded:
Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without any special favors.
It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if black people would only try harder they could be just as well off as white people.
And the result:
Furthermore, the impact of these variables is generally greater than that of the economic variables. For example, moving from the least to the most resentful view of African Americans increases support for Trump by 44 points, those who think Obama is a Muslim (54 percent of all Republicans) are 24 points more favorable to Trump, and those who think the word "violent" describes Muslims extremely well are about 13 points more pro-Trump than those who think it doesn’t describe them well at all.
This compares with an 11-point difference between those who are most opposed to free trade deals and those who are most in favor, and a 23-point gap between those who think the economy had gotten much better and those who think it had gotten much worse in the previous year.
So it is important to understand the motivations of Trump supporters. But chalking it up to the economy isn't helping anyone understand what is happening, because the data simply doesn't support it. Trump is a by-product of increasing right-wing tendencies across the West, dominated by a desire for order and cultural hegemony compared to cultural progressivism. As globalism continues to advance, we will have to deal with this sooner rather than later.
Here I'm reminded of the Cracked article, which proclaimed "To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help." Based on this data, it would appear, instead, that Trump supporters use white cries for help (i.e. declining opportunity for their children or poor outlook for the economy) to bat away claims of racial resentment or to dismiss systemic inequalities. The real whites crying out for help - the desperately poor and the young - aren't voting for Trump; they're voting Democrat or not at all.