Opinion | The Unsettling Truth About Trump's First Great Victory - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...cial-resentment-2016-2020.html
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The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level
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We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups
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respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views
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the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
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The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,
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Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.
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The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.
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Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.
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the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:
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election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete
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understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.
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The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”
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Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”
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Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.
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“It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”
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Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors
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The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.
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Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means
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It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.
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Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.
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It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group
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the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.
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The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe
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that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate
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Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win
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and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).
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it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation
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One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.
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the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining
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racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time
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Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower
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While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment
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Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment
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In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.
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that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment
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there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.
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my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
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Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.
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In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge