Today’s theme may be uncertainty. at Five Thirty Eight Ben Casselman notes that the best predictor of whether one is or is not a Trump voter is not poverty, racism, or sexism but anxiety:
Correctly assessing the forces that led to Trump’s victory is more than an academic exercise. It’s central to figuring out what happens next — what Trump’s supporters expect him to do, what Democratic counter-measures would be effective, what metrics we should use to gauge his success. But the recent debate has missed an important distinction: Economic anxiety is not the same thing as economic hardship. And the evidence suggests that anxiety did play a key role in Trump’s victory, though it was by no means the only factor.
What’s the difference between hardship and anxiety? Hardship, as I’m using it here, refers to a person’s present-day economic struggles: poverty, joblessness, falling wages, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Anxiety is all about what lies ahead — concerns about saving for retirement or college, worry of a potential layoff, fears that your children’s prospects aren’t as bright as your own were.
Economic hardship doesn’t explain Trump’s support. In fact, quite the opposite: Clinton easily won most low-income areas. But anxiety is a different story. Trump, as FiveThirtyEight contributor Jed Kolko noted immediately after the election, won most counties — and improved on Romney’s performance — where a large share of jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing or automation. And while there is no standard measure of economic anxiety, a wide range of other plausible proxies shows the same pattern. According to my own analysis of voting data, for example, the slower a county’s job growth has been since 2007, the more it shifted toward Trump.1 (The same is true looking back to 2000.) And of course Trump performed especially strongly among voters without a college degree — an important indicator of social status but also of economic prospects, given the shrinking share of jobs (and especially well-paying jobs) available to workers without a bachelor’s degree.
The role of economic anxiety becomes even clearer in the data once you control for race. Black and Hispanic Americans tend both to be poorer and to face worse economic prospects than non-Hispanic whites, but they also had strong non-economic reasons to vote against Trump, who had a history of making racist comments. Factoring in the strong opposition to Trump among most racial and ethnic minorities, Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties where residents had lower credit scores and in counties where more men have stopped working.2
Read the whole thing.
Dismissing concerns about the economy or society aggravates that anxiety. So does every cri de coeur, sincere or not, about the horrible, deplorable people who voted for Trump who didn’t even win the popular vote, darn it.
Yet another stab at a single-bullet theory. Must be the dozenth I’ve read. Is it this single bullet or that single bullet? A or B?
Humans never, ever, ever, have just a single reason for doing anything more complicated than jumping back from a hot stove. Trying to pull human motivation apart and put it into neat boxes is the sort of thing that makes non-STEM folks laugh condescendingly at our number-loving friends.
From the 538 article:
The emphasis is mine. To my eye that doesn’t look like searching for a “magic bullet” but attempting to rank multiple possible factors in terms of relative importance.
Eight years ago, one of the most important factors determining the extent to which a state increased its votes for Obama over Kerry was exposure to Iraq/Afghanistan war casualties. Economic Crisis, Iraq, and Race:
A Study of the 2008 Presidential Election (pdf) Obviously, the dead don’t vote in most locations, nor are enlistees, injured or otherwise, significant voters in any state. What the models must be picking-up are states with (a) significant military enlistment and (b) a broad anti-war reaction among the general populace.
I shoehorn this observation in here because one factor I don’t see discussed is the extent to which war (which elevated Republican numbers in 2002 and 2004, and cost them in 2006 and 2008) has largely been neutralized as an issue and this study concludes that if there had been no casualties, all other things equal, Obama would have lost North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Iowa, plus Minnesota would have been within the study’s 95% confidence interval. (Note they only studied those states, its possible that if Minnesota was competitive, so too would Michigan and Wisconsin)
I’m not arguing for a counterfactual that if war casualties were off the table, McCain would have one. Other issues may have become important and indeed Obama and McCain may not have been their party’s candidates in 2008. I’m arguing that the war was possibly a large, very overlooked factor that crowded-out other trends.
Meh. I think there is some merit to the argument, but just one of many reasons. Now, why people who are afraid that their jobs will be shipped overseas put in office the kinds of rich folks who have been responsible for shipping those jobs overseas is a better question.
Steve
Kerry the fraud voted for the Iraq War.
There were more than enough Dems who didn’t that he would have got “cover” had he needed it.
He’s still lying. He says Israel can either be Jewish or a democracy.
He means Palestinians will eventually outnumber Jews.
In other words, he believes or pretends to that Israel is still a democracy now, for the time being.
An absolute lie. Arabs cannot marry Jews. Palestinians are restricted as to land purchases and myriad other ways.
He hopes you don’t notice.
Could the reason Trump won be simply because most tired of Obama’s policies, as well as his perspective that “things were better” than before he took office?