{"id":69750,"date":"2017-01-20T08:08:24","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T13:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=69750"},"modified":"2017-01-20T15:00:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T20:00:32","slug":"explaining-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/01\/20\/explaining-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Made in America<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Explaining\u00a0how such an unfit candidate and such a bizarre candidacy succeeded\u00a0has\u00a0become\u00a0a critical concern\u00a0for\u00a0journalists and scholars. Through sites like Monkey Cage, Vox, and 538, as well as\u00a0academic papers, we can watch political scientists in real time try to answer the question, \u201cWhat the\u00a0Hell Happened?\u201d (There are already at least two catalogs of answers, here <\/a>and here<\/a>,\u00a0and a couple of college-level Trump syllabi<\/a>.) Although a substantial answer will not emerge for years, this post is my own\u00a0morning-after answer\u00a0to the \u201cWTHH?\u201d question.<\/p>\n

<\/a>I make three arguments: First, Trump\u2019s electoral college victory was a fluke, a small accident with vast implications, but from a social science perspective not very interesting. Second, the deeper task is to understand who were the distinctive supporters\u00a0for Trump, in particular\u00a0to sort\u00a0out whether their support was rooted mostly in economic or in cultural grievances; the evidence suggests cultural. Third,\u00a0party\u00a0polarization converted Trump\u2019s small and unusual personal base of support into 46 percent of the popular vote.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Explaining November 8, 2016<\/h3>\n

Why did Donald Trump, an historically flawed candidate even to many of those who voted for him, win? With a small margin in three states (about 100,000 votes strategically located), many explanations are all<\/i> true:<\/p>\n

* Statistical fluke<\/em>: Trump won 2.1 percentage points less of the popular vote than did Clinton, easily the largest negative margin <\/a>of an incoming president in 140 years. (Bush was only 0.5 points behind Gore in 2000.) Given those numbers, Trump\u2019s electoral college win was like getting two or three snake-eye dice rolls in a row. Similarly, political scientists\u2019 structural models\u2013which assume \u201cgeneric\u201d Democratic and Republican candidates and predict outcomes based on party incumbency and economic indicators\u2013forecast a close Republican victory. \u201cIn 2012, the \u2018fundamentals\u2019 predicted a close election and the Democrats won narrowly,\u201d wrote <\/a>Larry Bartels. \u201cIn 2016, the \u2018fundamentals\u2019 predicted a close election and the Republicans won narrowly. That\u2019s how coin tosses go.\u201d But, of course, Donald Trump is far from a generic Republican. That\u2019s what energizes the search for a special explanation.<\/p>\n

* FBI Director Comey\u2019s<\/em> email announcement in the closing days of the election appeared to sway the undecided enough to easily make the 100,000 vote difference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* Russian hacks<\/em> plus Wikileaks.<\/p>\n

* The Clinton campaign<\/em>. Had she visited the Rust Belt more, embraced Black Lives Matter less (or more), or used a slogan that pointed to economics instead of diversity\u2026 who knows? Pundits have been mud-wrestling over whether her campaign was too much about identity politics or whether all politics is identity politics. Anyway, surely some tweak here would have made a difference.<\/p>\n

* Facebook and Fakenews<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

* The weather<\/em>. It was seasonably mild with only light rain in the upper Midwest on November 8. Storms or snow would probably have depressed rural turnout enough to make Clinton president.<\/p>\n

* The Founding Fathers<\/em>. They meant the electoral college to quiet vox populi<\/i> (and so it worked in John Q. Adams\u2019s minus 10 point defeat of Andrew Jackson in 1824).<\/p>\n

* Add almost anything<\/em> you can imagine that could have moved less than one percent of the PA\/MI\/WI votes or of the national vote.<\/p>\n

* Oh, and could Bernie would have won<\/em>? Nah, no way, no how. [1]<\/p>\n

Small causes can have enormous consequences: the precise flight of a bullet on November 22, 1963; missed\u00a0intelligence notes\u00a0about the suspicious student pilots before the 9\/11 attacks; and so on. Donald Trump\u2019s\u00a0victory\u00a0could become extremely consequential, second only to\u00a0Lincoln\u2019s in\u00a01860, argues journalist James Fallows, [2] but the margin that created the victory was\u00a0very\u00a0small, effectively an accident.\u00a0From an historical and social science point of view, there is nothing much interesting in Trump\u2019s electoral college margin.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Legions<\/h3>\n

More interesting is Trump\u2019s energizing and mobilizing so many previously passive voters, notably during the primaries. What was that about?<\/p>\n

One popular answer is that\u00a0Trump\u2019s base is composed\u00a0of people, particularly members of the white working class (WWC), who are suffering economic dislocation. Because their suffering has not been addressed, they rallied to a jobs champion.<\/p>\n

Another answer is that Trump\u2019s core is composed\u00a0of people, largely but not only WWC, with strong cultural resentments. While often suffering economically and voicing economic complaints<\/a>, they are mainly distinguished by holding a connected set of racial, gender, anti-immigrant, and class resentments\u2013resentments against those who presumably undermined America\u2019s past \u201cgreatness,\u201d\u00a0resentments which tend to go together with tendencies toward authoritarianism (see this earlier post<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The empirical evidence so far best supports the second account. Indicators of cultural\u00a0resentment better account for Trump\u00a0support than do indicators of economic hardship or economic anxiety. [3]<\/p>\n

In-depth, in-person reports have appeared that flesh out\u00a0these resentments\u00a0in ways that survey questions only roughly capture. They describe\u00a0feelings of being pushed out of the way by those who are undeserving, by those who are not really Americans; feelings of being neglected and condescended to by over-educated coastal elites; feelings of seeing the America they nostalgically remember falling away. [4]<\/p>\n

\"trump-supporters\"<\/a>Defenders of the economic\u00a0explanation\u00a0would point to the economic strains and\u00a0grievances of the WWC. Those\u00a0difficulties and complaints are true\u2013but they are not new<\/em>. Less-educated workers have been left behind for decades now; the flat-lining of their incomes started in the 1970s, with a bit of a break in the late 1990s. Moreover, the economy\u00a0has been in\u00a0an upswing in the last few years; the unemployment rate was about 8 percent when Obama was re-elected in 2012, but about half of that when Trump was elected. Economic conditions do not explain 2016.<\/p>\n

Nor are complaints about economic insecurity new. For example, the percentage of WWC respondents to the General Social Survey who said that they were dissatisfied with their financial situations has varied around 25 percent (+\/- 5 points) over the last 30 years. The percentage dissatisfied did hit a high in the early\u00a0years of the Great Recession (34 percent in 2010), but it dropped afterwards (to 31% in 2012 when Obama was re-elected and 29% in 2014). Economic discontent\u00a0has been\u00a0trending down<\/em>, not up. [5] That only one-fifth of Trump voters supported raising the minimum wage <\/a>to $15 further undercuts the primacy of economic motives.<\/p>\n

To be sure, journalists can find and record the angry voices of economic distress; they do so virtually every election year. (Remember the painful stories about the foreclosure crisis and about\u00a0lay-offs during the Great Recession?). There was\u00a0little\u00a0distinctive about either the economic distress or the economic anxiety of 2016 to explain Trump.<\/p>\n

Some have noted, however, what appear to be a significant number of voters who supported Obama in 2008 or in 2012 and seemed to have\u00a0switched to\u00a0Trump in 2016\u00a0(e.g., here<\/a>).\u00a0Do these data not undermine a cultural, specifically a racial, explanation for Trump? No. In 2008, Obama received an unusual number of WWC votes because of the financial collapse, the Iraq fiasco, and Bush\u2019s consequent unpopularity. These immediate factors overrode\u00a0race for many\u00a0in the WWC. But WWC votes for Obama dropped in 2012 despite his being the incumbent. Then, last November, the WWC vote for a Democratic candidate reverted back to its pre-Great Recession\u00a0levels. [6] Put another way, Clinton\u2019s support from the WWC was not especially low, Obama\u2019s was unusually high for temporary reasons.<\/p>\n

What was special about 2016 was the candidate: Donald Trump explicitly and loudly voiced the cultural resentments and authoritarian impulses of many in the WWC (and some in the middle class, too) that had been there for years but had had no full-throated champion\u2013not Romney, not McCain, not the Bushes, probably not even Reagan\u2013since perhaps Richard Nixon. What changed was\u00a0not the\u00a0terrain for a politics of resentment but the arrival of an unusual tiller of that soil, someone\u00a0who brought out just enough of these voters to win his party\u2019s nomination and to\u00a0boost turnout in particular places\u00a0for the general election. As one analyst wrote<\/a>, \u201cTrump repeatedly went where prior Republican presidential candidates were unwilling to go: making explicit appeals to racial resentment, religious intolerance, and white identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this is still less than half the story.<\/p>\n

Party Polarization<\/h3>\n

To really how understand how Trump could get 46 percent of the vote, it takes more than identifying the distinctive sorts of people whom Trump attracted, because they are not that numerous. Trump won only a minority of the primary votes and faced intense opposition within his party. In the end, however, almost all Republicans came home to him\u2013even evangelicals<\/a>, to whose moral standards Trump is a living insult. The polarization of American politics in\u00a0recent years\u00a0was critical. Party ended up mattering more\u00a0to college-educated, women, and suburban Republicans than whatever distaste they had for Trump the man.<\/p>\n

Consider how historically new this development is. In 1964, the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was considered to be at the far right end of the political spectrum. About 20 to 25%<\/em> of Republicans crossed over and voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson. (This crossover\u00a0was mirrored by Democrats in the 1972 election. [7]) In 2016, by contrast, fewer than 10%<\/em> of Republicans abandoned Trump\u2013a far more problematic candidate than Goldwater\u2013so much has America become polarized<\/a>\u00a0by party\u00a0in\u00a0the last\u00a0couple of decades. [8]<\/p>\n

Conclusions<\/h3>\n

Readings of the 2016 election as the product of a profound shift in American society or politics are overblown. In particular, notions that the WWC\u2019s fortunes or views shifted so substantially in\u00a0recent years as to account for Trump seem wrong.<\/p>\n

What about the argument that the Trump phenomenon is part of a general rise across\u00a0the\u00a0western world\u00a0of xenophobia? I don\u2019t see much evidence outside of the Trump\u00a0case itself\u00a0for that in the United States. Long-term data suggest a decline\u2013too slowly, for sure\u2013rather than an increase in such attitudes.[9] And let\u2019s not forget: Hillary Clinton\u00a0won the popular vote.<\/p>\n

The best explanation of why Trump got 46% of the ballots:\u00a0Advantages for the out party in a third-term election +<\/strong>\u00a0Trump\u2019s unusual cultural appeal to a minority but still notable number of\u00a0Americans\u00a0+<\/strong> historically high party polarization. That\u00a0Trump actually won the electoral college\u00a0as well is pretty much an accident, albeit a\u00a0hugely consequential one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

NOTES____________________<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

[1] Basically no one, including Trump, said anything bad about Bernie Sanders from the moment it became clear that Sanders would lose the primaries to Clinton. Had he been nominated, that silence would have ended fast and furiously. Moreover as the always astute Kevin Drum pointed out<\/a>,\u00a0Sanders\u00a0is much too far to left to get elected, even way to the left of George McGovern, who got creamed in 1972. Finally, the \u201cBernie Brothers\u201d who avoided Clinton would have been more than outnumbered by Hillary\u2019s pissed-off sisters if she had been once again displaced by a man.<\/p>\n

[2] On the other hand, economist-blogger Tyler Cowen is skeptical: If the doomsayers are right, why aren\u2019t investors dumping equities, shorting the market, or fleeing to safer commodities?<\/p>\n

[3] See these sources: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>, 4<\/a>, 5<\/a>, 6<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[4] For examples: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>,\u00a04<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[5] My analysis of the GSS through 2014. White working class is defined as whites who have not graduated college.<\/p>\n

[6] Again, I used the GSS. In 2000 and 2004, the Democratic candidates, Gore and Kerry,\u00a0got about 35 percent of the WWC vote, about what Bill Clinton got in his first run in 1992. Obama got substantially more, 48%, in 2008, then somewhat less,\u00a042%, in 2012. Hillary Clinton got<\/a>, according to\u00a0a very different sort of survey, the exit polls, 29% of the WWC, but it is hard to compare the two methods. Note that the GSS reports of who people voted for in the previous election tend to skew toward the winners, but the point still stands that Obama\u2019s jump in support from the WWC, especially in 2008, was quite\u00a0unusual, not Hillary Clinton\u2019s apparent slump in support.<\/p>\n

[7] According to Gallup\u2019s last poll<\/a> before the 1964 election, 20% of Republicans were going to vote for Johnson. According to my analysis of the American National Election Survey, which is retrospective, 26% actually did. In 1972, the Democrats nominated the most left-leaning candidate of postwar era. According to Gallup data<\/a>, 33% of Democrats crossed over to vote for Nixon. ANES data suggest that about 40 percent did. Whatever the specifics, there was\u00a0much more\u00a0cross-over voting 40 to 50 years ago, even under milder provocation.<\/p>\n

[8] On the decline of ticket-splitting, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[9] For example, one of the longest-running items in the GSS is the question, \u201cI\u2019d like you to tell me whether you think we\u2019re spending too much money\u00a0\u2026 too little money, or about the right amount\u00a0\u2026\u00a0improving the conditions of Blacks.\u201d In the 1970s, 28% of whites said too much; in the 2000s, 19% did. Another question was asked only through 2002: \u201cDo you agree or disagree\u2026 (Negroes\/blacks\/African-Americans) shouldn\u2019t push themselves where they\u2019re not wanted?\u201d In the 1970s, 74% of whites agreed; from 1990 to 2002, 15% did. More striking, in the 1970s, 11% of whites \u201cstrongly disagreed\u201d;\u00a0from 1990 to 2002, 32% did. On immigrants: David Weakliem has graphed responses <\/a>to a recurrent Gallup Poll question, \u201cShould immigration be kept at its present level, increased or decreased?\u201d. From 1965 to the mid-1990s, the trend was strongly toward \u201cdecreased,\u201d but since then the trend has strongly been toward \u201cincreased\u201d (although that\u2019s still a minority view).<\/p>\n

Claude S. Fischer, PhD<\/a> is\u00a0a sociologist at UC Berkeley\u00a0and\u00a0is the auth<\/em>or of\u00a0Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character<\/a>. This post<\/em> originally\u00a0appeared\u00a0at his blog,\u00a0Made in America<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Made in America. Explaining\u00a0how such an unfit candidate and such a bizarre candidacy succeeded\u00a0has\u00a0become\u00a0a critical concern\u00a0for\u00a0journalists and scholars. Through sites like Monkey Cage, Vox, and 538, as well as\u00a0academic papers, we can watch political scientists in real time try to answer the question, \u201cWhat the\u00a0Hell Happened?\u201d (There are already at least two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":69753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36392,95759,95753],"class_list":["post-69750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-trump","tag-trump-election","tag-trump-syllabi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/01\/trump-election-e1484615678505.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69750"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69752,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69750\/revisions\/69752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}