1. REPUBLICANS WORRIED ABOUT THE ECONOMY
NEWSMAX
Republicans [who cast votes this past] Tuesday in both Michigan and Mississippi are very worried about the U.S. economy — and they believe that foreign trade deals take away American jobs, according to CNN exit poll results.
But the voters are split on whether illegal immigrants should be deported.
In Mississippi, eighty-one per cent of Republican voters said that they were “very worried” about the economy; in Michigan, the figure was sixty-three per cent. And, in each state, fifty-three per cent of Republican voters said that foreign-trade agreements take away American jobs. Among these voters, almost two-thirds went for Trump.
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| Donald Trump asking for supporters to pledge to vote for him in Concord, N.C. Travis Dove for The New York Times |
2. AUTHORITARIANS
VOX
A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.
Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior. When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.
3 POPULISTS
Authoritarianism, as understood by political psychologists, refers to a set of personality traits that seek order, clarity and stability. Authoritarians have little tolerance for deviance. They’re highly obedient to strong leaders. They scapegoat outsiders and demand conformity to traditional norms.
Populism, on the other hand, is a type of political rhetoric that casts a virtuous “people” against nefarious elites and strident outsiders. Scholars measure populism in a variety of ways, but we focus on three central elements:
- Belief that a few elites have absconded with the rightful sovereignty of the people;
- Deep mistrust of any group that claims expertise;
- Strong nationalist identity
- Of course, authoritarians and populists can overlap and share dark tendencies toward nativism, racism and conspiracism. But they do have profoundly different perceptions of authority. Populists see themselves in opposition to elites of all kinds. Authoritarians see themselves as aligned with those in charge. This difference sets the candidates’ supporters apart.
- Trump voters are the only ones to score consistently high on all three populist dimensions. Cruz and Rubio’s supporters, for example, don’t express high feelings of anti-elitism. In fact, on this scale, they are strongly anti-populist,identifying with authority rather than rejecting it.
4. AGGRIEVED WHITES WHO FEEL DISCRIMINATED AGAINST
WASHINGTON POST
White independents and Republicans who think their identity as whites is extremely important are more than 30 points more likely to support Trump than those who think their racial identity is not important.
Likewise, white Americans who perceive a great deal of discrimination against their race are almost 40 points more likely to support Trump than those who don’t think whites face any discrimination.
And whites who think it’s extremely likely that “many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead” are over 50 points more likely to support Trump than those who think it’s unlikely that many whites are losing jobs to minorities.
5. NON-URBAN, BLUE COLLAR ANGRY AMERICANS
NY TIMES
When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.”
The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest.
This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with results from past elections, with this year’s results in the 23 states that have held primaries and caucuses.
The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
6. WORKING CLASS WHITES WHO HAVE BEEN LEFT BEHIND
The Times’s model suggests he will perform strongly on Long Island when the New York primary takes place April 19 and in Ocean County, N.J., on the Jersey Shore, on June 7.
The economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
Marc Ambinder, writing for The Daily News, argued that part of the response to all this should be empathy — for working-class whites who have been left behind economically and whose resentment has been exploited politically.
Consider the most chilling correlation: that Mr. Trump is faring very well where middle-aged whites are dying fastest.
7. WHITES WITHOUT A H.S. DIPLOMA
Mr. Trump has his share of support from the affluent and the well educated, but in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country.
Mr. Trump has performed well thus far in Appalachian coal counties and in rural parts of Alabama and Mississippi, which are coping with economic and social dysfunctions like high unemployment rates and heroin addiction. But the Times analysis also shows the common thread between those places and more urban locations where Mr. Trump has either done well or is projected to.
The high proportion of whites without a high school diploma in these places — the single strongest predictor of Trump support of those we tested — has lasting consequences for incomes, for example. The education pay gap starts small when people are early in their career before widening over the decades of their working lives. College graduates are less likely to become unemployed and more likely to find a new job quickly if they do, and they are comparatively few in Trump-land.
And in places where Trump does well, relatively high proportions of workers are in fields that involve working with one’s hands, especially manufacturing. The decline in manufacturing employment is not a story of merely a rough few years for the economy; nationwide factory employment peaked in 1979, and as a proportion of total jobs has been declining almost continually since 1943. Forces including mechanization and trade have put employment prospects in the sector in an ever-worsening position.
8. NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS
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Despite Mr. Trump’s racially loaded message on the campaign trail, and evidence that some individual Trump voters are driven by racial hostility, this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.