Jan Zilinsky: Explaining the Trump victory: An overview of an active academic literature

Economy (micro-level evidence)

The academic literature increasingly suggests that economic insecurity among white voters was not an important driver of Trump support

The latest contribution on the subject is Carnes and Lupu (2021). Using 3 sources (ANES, CCES and the VOTER Survey) they conclude that “the data does not support the simple idea that Trump himself uniquely mobilized the white working class, but the white working class’s participation in presidential elections has been slowly and steadily changing over the last two and a half decades in ways that have favored Republican candidates.”
Earlier, Manza and Crowley (2017) found that “Trump’s primary support was not systematically derived from successful appeals to disadvantaged or downwardly mobile voters.”
“Trump’s rise to the GOP nomination did not draw upon a significant base of economically threatened voters. Instead, ethnonationalist views were very significant predictors of Trump support.” (Manza and Crowley 2018).

A surprising result based on a battery of personal-economic questions: Clinton voters “report[ed] more economic distress than Donald Trump voters” (Griffin and Sides 2018). They also report that “white Americans without a college degree report a lower level of [economic] distress than college-educated black and Hispanic Americans”. We also know that:

Trump lost among low-income voters according to exit polls. He probably won among middle-income and high-earning people.
“[W]hile economic considerations were an important part of the story, racial attitudes and sexism were much more strongly related to support for Trump” (Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta 2018).
On race and economics, see also:
- Green and McElwee (2019) on the evidence that economic hardship played a role in lowering turnout among voters of color.
- Baccini and Weymouth (2021): “white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers [incl. in 2016] where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats.”

The economy as a contextual variable

A negative or deteriorating state of voters’ communities, however, is associated with Trump support (among white voters):

Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) document that Trump supporters are not more likely to be unemployed but they are more likely to be “living in racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income, predicts higher levels of Trump support”.
Grimmer and Marble (2019): “voters who reside in poorer zip codes support Trump at higher rates than they supported Romney. But the substantially improved economic conditions from 2012 to 2016 imply that many fewer voters reside in economically depressed zip codes”.
Health outcomes were identified as an important contextual variable in a number of papers (Bilal, Knapp, and Cooper 2018; Monnat and Brown 2017; Rothwell and Diego-Rosell 2016).
Also, in counties where poverty or the unemployment rate increased, Trump outperformed Romney (Fan and Pena 2020; Monnat and Brown 2017).
For other claims that the class or income mattered, see:
- Ferguson et al. (2020), Morgan and Lee (2018), Morgan (2018).
- Ogorzalek, Piston, and Puig (2019): “Trump’s support was concentrated among nationally poor whites but also among locally affluent whites”.
- Cherlin (2019): argues it is a mistake to dismiss economic explanations: “They have largely focused on short-term measures such as current income and employment rather than the long-term decline of the kind of labor that provided people with a sense of pride and dignity”.
- Caution: “definitions [of the working class] in empirical literature are often wide ranging, suggesting differences in expected behavior” (Bucci 2017).
In the press, the working-class hypothesis has been discussed in:
- Porter, Eduardo. 2016. “Where were Trump’s votes? Where the jobs weren’t.” New York Times. December 13.
- Cohn, Nate. 2017. “The Obama-Trump Voters Are Real. Here’s What They Think.” New York Times. Aug. 15.

The economic populism theory: On the campaign trail, Trump sounded like an economic progressive; “[his] promises to increase employment by improving trade deals and removing unauthorized immigrants could resonate in an era when employment levels for working age white men have declined, as might his calls for massive infrastructure spending and the jobs that would create” (Manza and Crowley 2017).

A case for the importance of racial identity

Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck (2017): Voting was driven by “how [voters] felt about those who were different from them”. Moreover, it was “the centering of both campaigns on issues that tapped into Americans’ racial, ethnic, and social identities and attitudes.” They show that group attitudes predicted vote choice better in 2016 than in prior elections: “White voters’ attitudes toward African Americans were … more strongly related to their preferences in the Clinton-Trump contest than they had been to preferences in the general elections pitting Obama against McCain in 2008, and against Romney in 2012”.

Analyzing CCES data, Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta (2018) report that “moving from the most acknowledging of racism to the most denying of racism was associated with a 60-point increase in support for Trump.”

Engelhardt (2019) reports that “[i]n 2016, the most racially resentful Whites were on average about 45 percentage points more likely than the least racially resentful to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.”

But did Trump activate racial attitudes or just benefit from them?

One paper skeptical of the popular activation hypothesis is Enns (2018): “the results from May 2015 suggest that those who expressed the most racial animus in surveys were already predisposed to support any Republican candidate”. On the other hand, Trump may have encouraged anti-immigrant sentiment: “[t]hose who previously supported Trump became more likely to support building a border wall” (Enns, 2018, panel data evidence). In addition, Trump’s rhetoric appears to have moved Democrats in a pro-immigration direction (but parties were already polarizing by racial attitudes before 2016).

Partisan alignment by views on race: “While there was a time when racially resentful White partisans could be found in both parties—thereby diluting their impact by 2016, ethnonationalism had moved into partisan alignment” (Manza and Crowley, among others). See also Engelhardt (2020), Schaffner (2020 a), and Schaffner (2020 b).

Immigration attitudes predicted vote-switching:

White Obama voters with positive views of immigration almost universally supported Clinton, but about a third of white Obama voters with negative views of immigration reported voting for Trump (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2017).
Positive views of immigration among (white) Romney voters were also associated with vote-switching, i.e. voting for Clinton. However, there were fewer such voters overall: “[o]nly 14 percent of white Romney voters had attitudes that placed them on the positive side of the scale”.
(Reny, Collingwood, and Valenzuela 2019): “vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomenon occurred among both working-class and nonworking-class Whites, though many more working-class Whites switched than did nonworking-class Whites.”

See also Garand, Qi, and Magaña (2020), Wright and Esses (2018), and Hooghe and Dassonneville (2018).

Ethnocentrism

Opposition to allowing entry of Syrian refugees into the U.S. was among the best predictors of positive feelings toward Trump (Manza and Crowley 2018).
Perceptions of discrimination against high-status groups and a belief that the American way of life was treated were associated with Trump support (Mutz 2018). But Morgan (2018) counters that the same panel data “are consistent with the claim that economic interests are at least as important as status threat”.
Garand, Qi, and Magaña (2020) “those who have a strong American identity more [are] likely to translate immigrant threat perceptions into support for Trump than those with weaker levels of American identity”.

Local diversity

Newman, Shah, and Collingwood (2018): “residing in a high-Latino-growth area is predictive of support for Trump following, but not before, his utterance of inflammatory and bellicose comments about Mexican immigrants”.
Homegenous places that are spatially close to diverse counties favored Trump (Miller and Grubesic 2020).
Freund and Sidhu (2017): “the change in the Republican vote share is positively correlated with manufacturing in predominantly white counties and negatively correlated with manufacturing in ethnically diverse counties, with these effects roughly offsetting each other.”

But Hill, Hopkins, and Huber (2019) consider the possiblity that “despite its disparate local impacts, immigration may be a symbolic, nationalized issue whose effects do not depend on local experiences”. They report evidence based on precinct-level data from 7 states, including key battle-ground states, and do not find evidence that “influxes of Hispanics or noncitizen immigrants benefited Trump relative to past Republicans, instead consistently showing that such changes were associated with shifts to Trump’s opponent.”

Anti-Muslim attitudes

Negative views of Muslims were highly prognostic of the vote in 2016 (Lajevardi and Abrajano 2019; Sides 2017), including in the primaries (Tucker et al. 2019; Levchak and Levchak 2019).

Gender

Sexism and views on women’s role in society were also predictive of vote choice (Stewart, Clarke, and Borges 2019; Bracic, Israel-Trummel, and Shortle 2019; Cassese and Barnes 2018; Glick 2019; Knuckey 2018; Valentino, Wayne, and Oceno 2018).

Other work

Insights from psychology

Womick et al. (2018) find that “facets of [right-wing authoritarianism] RWA and [social dominance orientation] SDO predicted support for Trump (compared to other Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian candidates)”.
In contrast, Tucker et al. (2019) report that “populist attitudes and anti-Muslim bias were considerably more important than authoritarian dispositions, and immigration and trade policy attitudes in explaining support for Trump among Republicans”

A key paper about voter misperceptions is McDonald, Karol, and Mason (2020): “many Americans are unaware that he was born into great wealth. This misperception increases support for Trump, mediated through beliefs that he is both empathetic and good at business.”

Big-picture papers

Among some big-picture papers that I would recommend are: Jacobson (2017), Dickinson (2018), and Lewis-Beck and Quinlan (2019).

Baccini, Leonardo, and Stephen Weymouth. 2021. “Gone for Good: Deindustrialization, white voter backlash, and US presidential voting.” American Journal of Political Science 115 (2): 550–67.

Bilal, Usama, Emily A Knapp, and Richard S Cooper. 2018. “Swing voting in the 2016 presidential election in counties where midlife mortality has been rising in white non-Hispanic Americans.” Social Science & Medicine 197 (January): 33–38.

Bracic, Ana, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel, and Allyson F Shortle. 2019. “Is Sexism for White People? Gender Stereotypes, Race, and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Political Behavior 41 (2): 281–307.

Bucci, Laura C. 2017. “White working-class politics and the consequences of declining unionization in the age of Trump.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5 (2): 364–71.

Carnes, Nicholas, and Noam Lupu. 2021. “The White Working Class and the 2016 Election.” Perspectives on Politics 19 (1): 55–72.

Cassese, Erin C, and Tiffany D Barnes. 2018. “Reconciling Sexism and Women’s Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender, Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races.” Political Behavior 41 (3): 677–700.

Dickinson, Matthew J. 2018. “Explaining Trump’s Support: What We Saw and Heard At His Campaign Rallies.” The Forum 16 (2): 171–91.

Engelhardt, Andrew M. 2019. “Trumped by Race: Explanations for Race’s Influence on Whites’ Votes in 2016.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 14 (3): 313–28.

———. 2020. “Racial Attitudes Through a Partisan Lens.” British Journal of Political Science, January.

Enns, Peter K. 2018. “Clarifying the Role of Racism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Opinion Change, AntiImmigrant Sentiment, and Vote Choice.” Working Paper, no. Presented at APSA 2018 (September).

Fan, Maoyong, and Anita Alves Pena. 2020. “Decomposing US Political Ideology: Local Labor Market Polarization and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy 96 (2): 189.

Ferguson, Thomas, Benjamin I Page, Jacob Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen. 2020. “The Roots of Right-Wing Populism: Donald Trump in 2016.” International Journal of Political Economy 49 (2): 102–23.

Freund, Caroline, and Dario Sidhu. 2017. “Manufacturing and the 2016 Election: An Analysis of US Presidential Election Data.” PIIE Working Paper, May.

Garand, James C, Dan Qi, and Max Magaña. 2020. “Perceptions of Immigrant Threat, American Identity, and Vote Choice in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Political Behavior 52 (4).

Glick, Peter. 2019. “Gender, sexism, and the election: did sexism help Trump more than it hurt Clinton?” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7 (3): 713–23.

Green, J, and Sean McElwee. 2019. “The Differential Effects of Economic Conditions and Racial Attitudes in the Election of Donald Trump.” Perspectives on Politics 17 (2): 358–79.

Griffin, Robert, and John Sides. 2018. “In the Red.” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, September.

Grimmer, Justin, and William Marble. 2019. “Who Put Trump in the White House? Explaining the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Trump’s Victory.” Working Paper, December.

Hill, Seth J, Daniel J Hopkins, and Gregory A Huber. 2019. “Local demographic changes and US presidential voting, 2012 to 2016.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (50): 25023–8.

Hooghe, Marc, and Ruth Dassonneville. 2018. “Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racist Resentment and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments.” PS: Political Science & Politics 51 (03): 528–34.

Jacobson, Gary C. 2017. “The Triumph of Polarized Partisanship in 2016: Donald Trump’s Improbable Victory.” Political Science Quarterly 132 (1): 9–41.

Knuckey, Jonathan. 2018. ““I Just Don’t Think She Has a Presidential Look”: Sexism and Vote Choice in the 2016 Election*.” Social Science Quarterly 100 (1): 342–58.

Lajevardi, Nazita, and Marisa Abrajano. 2019. “How Negative Sentiment toward Muslim Americans Predicts Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The Journal of Politics 81 (1): 296–302.

Levchak, Philip J, and Charisse C Levchak. 2019. “Race and Politics: Predicting Support for 2016 Presidential Primary Candidates among White Americans.” Sociological Inquiry 92 (2): 423–31.

Lewis-Beck, Michael S, and Stephen Quinlan. 2019. “The Hillary Hypotheses: Testing Candidate Views of Loss.” Perspectives on Politics 17 (3): 646–65.

Manza, Jeff, and Ned Crowley. 2017. “Working Class Hero? Interrogating the Social Bases of the Rise of Donald Trump.” The Forum 15 (1): 3–28.

———. 2018. “Ethnonationalism and the Rise of Donald Trump.” Contexts 17 (1): 28–33.

McDonald, Jared, David Karol, and Lilliana Mason. 2020. ““An Inherited Money Dude from Queens County”: How Unseen Candidate Characteristics Affect Voter Perceptions.” Political Behavior 42 (January): 915–38.

Miller, Jennifer A, and Tony H Grubesic. 2020. “A Spatial Exploration of the Halo Effect in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 13.

Monnat, Shannon M, and David L Brown. 2017. “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election.” Journal of Rural Studies 55 (October): 227–36.

Morgan, Stephen L. 2018. “Status Threat, Material Interests, and the 2016 Presidential Vote.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 4 (1).

Morgan, Stephen L, and Jiwon Lee. 2018. “Trump Voters and the White Working Class.” Sociological Science 5: 234–45.

Mutz, Diana. 2018. “Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (19): E4330–E4339.

Newman, Benjamin J, Sono Shah, and Loren Collingwood. 2018. “Race, Place, and Building a Base: Latino Population Growth and the Nascent Trump Campaign for President.” Public Opinion Quarterly 82 (1): 122–34.

Ogorzalek, Thomas, Spencer Piston, and Luisa Godinez Puig. 2019. “Nationally poor, locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election.” Electoral Studies 67: 102068.

Reny, Tyler T, Loren Collingwood, and Ali A Valenzuela. 2019. “Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting.” Public Opinion Quarterly 83 (1): 91–113.

Rothwell, Jonathan, and Pablo Diego-Rosell. 2016. “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump.” Working Paper, November.

Schaffner, Brian F. 2020a. “The Heightened Importance of Racism and Sexism in the 2018 US Midterm Elections.” British Journal of Political Science 82 (September): 1–9.

———. 2020b. The Acceptance and Expression of Prejudice during the Trump Era. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press.

Schaffner, Brian F, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta. 2018. “Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism.” Political Science Quarterly 133 (1): 9–34.

Sides, John. 2017. “Race, Religion, and Immigration in 2016: How the Debate over American Identity Shaped the Election and What It Means for a Trump Presidency.” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, June, 1–23.

Sides, John, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck. 2017. “How Trump Lost and Won.” Journal of Democracy 28 (2): 34–44.

Stewart, Marianne C, Harold D Clarke, and Walter Borges. 2019. “Hillary’s hypothesis about attitudes towards women and voting in the 2016 presidential election.” Electoral Studies 61 (October).

Tucker, Patrick D, Michelle Torres, Betsy Sinclair, and Steven S Smith. 2019. “Pathways to Trump: Republican Voters in 2016.” Electoral Studies 61 (October): 102035.

Valentino, Nicholas A, Carly Wayne, and Marzia Oceno. 2018. “Mobilizing Sexism: The Interaction of Emotion and Gender Attitudes in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” Public Opinion Quarterly 82 (S1): 799–821.

Womick, Jake, Tobias Rothmund, Flavio Azevedo, Laura A King, and John T Jost. 2018. “Group-Based Dominance and Authoritarian Aggression Predict Support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 10 (5): 643–52.

Wright, Joshua D, and Victoria M Esses. 2018. “It’s security, stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 49 (1): 36–49.

Explaining the Trump victory: An overview of an active academic literature