Who Elected Donald Trump? [Archive.org URL]

I contributed one of four reports that were released this past week on the 2016 election. What I found is five different types of Trump voters came out to vote for him on election day, and I think that that’s really important because people keep looking for this single explanation to explain this surprise, and I think the answer is there is no simple explanation. There are certain things that make this election distinctive, and we can talk about that, but at the end of the day Trump’s voters are a typical coalition which is how it always is when it comes to politics.

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All right, so the five kinds. The first one I call the American preservationists [20%], and I think these most closely align with the media accounts of a Trump voter. They have lower levels of education and income. They’re underemployed. Among the working age group of this group, half are on Medicaid, which is quite a lot as you can imagine. You wouldn’t really think of them as Republicans. They want to raise taxes on the wealthy, they’re very concerned about Medicare, so they’re more economically progressive.

What made them vote for Donald Trump? Well, we can’t be sure but what I can tell you is that they are very, very skeptical of immigration. Not just illegal immigration but legal immigration as well. About 8 in 10 want to make it much harder for people to legally immigrate and as you both know very well, the system is already very difficult to navigate. They want to make it even harder. They seem to have really been drawn to Trump on some of that. They also have less favorable attitudes towards racial minorities. That’s another kind of … You’ve seen that caricature in the media. That’s one of five.

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This group is the most likely to think of their own identity, which was mostly white, as being very important to them. … They also feel like … It’s something called linked fate in the academic literature that some people believe that what happens to their racial group will impact them, so they’re more likely to feel that way. They’re more likely to think that whites are this group, and so what happens to “other white people” will affect them. That’s I think the media caricature that we definitely saw going on.

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[The second group of Trump voters] was the most dramatically different from the American preservationists. I call them the free marketeers. They make up a slightly larger chunk, 25%. They have the highest level of education and income. They are very favorable towards immigrants and racial minorities. They look just like Democrats on those questions. They are like Democrats in terms of wanting to make it easier to legally immigrate to the United States, but they’re also very fiscally conservative.

They don’t think government should be so involved in healthcare, they don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, and they’re very supportive of free trade. Basically all the things I told you about the preservationists, the free marketeers kind of in many cases had opposite answers. Not on every single one, but had opposite answers. You think, “How on earth were these individuals all voting in the same party?” It’s not that uncommon. I mean, parties are coalitions of very different types of people. They just don’t seem to realize sometimes how different they are. What they do have in common is that they both really hated Hillary Clinton. Really.

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I call [the third group of Trump voters] the anti-elites, they make up about 19% of the coalition, half of them had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton in 2012. On economics they lean progressive. They’re pretty friendly moderate on immigration, maybe not quite as liberal as Hillary Clinton on immigration, but you think, “Why did they not vote for her?” I mean, something happened that really turned these voters against Hillary Clinton.

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As you can imagine, the preservationists … are the core set of Trump supporters. They are the ones that catapulted him through the primaries. The free marketeers, a majority of them voted for one of the other 16 candidates, primarily Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio if they voted in the primaries. The anti-elites, a lot of them also did vote for Donald Trump but if they didn’t vote him they voted for John Kasich. You can kind of see there are different flavors of Republican.

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The fourth [group of Trump voters] actually are the largest group, but they aren’t quite as distinctive. I call them the staunch conservatives. They make up 31%. They’re just conventional social and fiscal conservatives. They’re loyal Republicans. They are going to vote for the Republican candidate. They’re not as hardline on immigration as the preservationists are, but yes, they are skeptical of it. It seems like they might be skeptical of it for slightly different reasons than the preservationists. They weren’t like the preservationists in saying that you had to be white to be American, but they seemed to be a little bit more concerned about assimilation and ensuring that the community has a sense of cohesion and belongingness.

For individuals like that immigration can pose some challenges in that it first … It can be hard when you have different groups of people with different traditions, different languages kind of coming together. If you really like people to kind of be cohesive, that can be challenging. I think that’s what we saw with this group. They’re very fiscally conservative. They look a lot like the free marketeers on all of the kind of the role of government in the economy issues, but kind of in the more in between the free marketeers and the preservationists on some of that immigration issues.

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The fifth [group of Trump voters] is a small group. They’re only 5%. I call them the disengaged. Really these are the types of people when they take a survey they just say don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. They don’t really have a lot of opinions except for issues of immigration and elites. It’s like if you say I don’t know about every public policy question I ask you except for issues of immigration and distrust of elites, that tells me something about who you are and why you voted for Trump. That fits with the Trump rhetoric. They tended to be a little bit younger, have a little bit less education. They don’t pay attention to politics but they do have a skepticism about immigration. Donald Trump made it very clear where he stood on a lot of those issues and so it got their attention.

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Political scientists have these models where they’re able to predict the outcome of an election based on just economic indicators alone. That had predicted a Republican win regardless. I thought that there was some limit to the efficacy of these models but apparently they’re pretty strong. That would’ve predicted that any Republican would’ve won, regardless of if it was Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or John Kasich. Perhaps if the Democrat had a message like Obama that was more unifying and had kind of this economic element to it, they could’ve captured a lot of the preservationists and the anti-elites.

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People are pushing back now because they think the election, that the polls were so bad. They actually weren’t that bad. The election result was in the margin of error, and Hillary Clinton did get more votes than Trump.