In polls throughout the campaign, we asked voters what they thought of President Obama and if they wanted to continue in the same direction or go in a fundamentally different direction. You might expect the answers to be linked. And yet, while voters consistently gave the President high marks—in fact, Obama’s popularity continued to rise throughout 2016, as did economic forecasts—they just as consistently said they were ready for a new direction. That may show the power of the impulse for change, but it also shows how complicated this is. One might also ask: Why were the vast majority of members of Congress reelected? Incumbents have advantages and gerrymandering has given many of them safe seats, but if there was a real “throw the bums out” wave in this election, we would have seen it down ballot as well.
So, yes, a desire for change was an important factor, but to understand what this was really about we have to look deeper.
Economic Anxiety or Bigotry
Most postgame analysis has weighed two competing theories: either it was economic anxiety or it was bigotry. A lot of data point toward the latter, but ultimately this is a false choice that misses the complexity of the situation.
Let’s start with this: the idea that the 2016 election was purely about economic anxiety just isn’t supported by the evidence. There’s a perception that Trump was the tribune of the working class while I was the candidate of the elites. And it’s true that there was a big divide in this election between voters with a college degree and those without. But this doesn’t line up neatly with income levels. There are a lot of middle- and upper-class people without a college degree. As the Washington Post explained in a piece titled, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working Class,” nearly 60 percent of Trump supporters without a college degree were in the top half of the income distribution. The average income of a Trump voter during the primaries was $72,000, which is higher than for most Americans. And in the general election, voters with incomes below $50,000 preferred me by 12 points.
It’s surely true that many blue-collar white voters in Rust Belt communities did like what Trump had to say on the economy. Exit polls found that voters who thought the national economy was in poor shape strongly supported Trump. But that wasn’t necessarily their most compelling concern. The same exit polls found that voters who thought the economy was the most important issue in the election (52 percent nationwide) preferred me by a margin of 11 points. This was also true in the key battlegrounds. In Michigan, voters who cared most about the economy went for me 51 to 43. In Wisconsin, it was 53 to 42. In Pennsylvania, 50 to 46. To be fair, there are other ways to look at the numbers. Many Trump supporters who told pollsters they cared most passionately about other issues—especially terrorism and immigration—almost certainly preferred Trump on the economy as well. Nonetheless, the story on the economy is a lot more nuanced than the postelection narrative would have you believe.
Some supporters of Bernie Sanders have argued that if I had veered further left and run a more populist campaign we would have done better in the Rust Belt. I don’t believe it. Russ Feingold ran a passionately populist campaign for Senate in Wisconsin and lost by much more than I did, while a champion of free trade, Senator Rob Portman, outperformed Trump in Ohio. Scott Walker, the right-wing Governor of Wisconsin, has won elections there by busting unions and catering to the resentments of conservative rural voters, not by denouncing trade deals and corporations. Sanders himself had a chance to test out his appeal during the primaries, and he ended up losing to me by nearly four million votes—including in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And that was without any pummeling by the Republican attack machine that would have savaged him in a general election.
That said, a small but still significant number of left-wing voters may well have thrown the election to Trump. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, called me and my policies “much scarier than Donald Trump” and praised his pro-Russia stance. This isn’t surprising, considering that Stein sat with Putin and Michael Flynn at the infamous Moscow dinner in 2015 celebrating the Kremlin’s propaganda network RT, and later said she and Putin agreed “on many issues.” Stein wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except for the fact that she won thirty-one thousand votes in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin was smaller than twenty-three thousand. In Michigan, she won fifty-one thousand votes, while Trump’s margin was just over ten thousand. In Pennsylvania, she won nearly fifty thousand votes, and Trump’s margin was roughly forty-four thousand. So in each state, there were more than enough Stein voters to swing the result, just like Ralph Nader did in Florida and New Hampshire in 2000. Maybe, like actress Susan Sarandon, Stein thinks electing Trump will hasten “the revolution.” Who knows? By contrast, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, a Republican who ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket topped by Gary Johnson, told his supporters toward the end that if they lived in swing states they should vote for me. If more third-party voters had listened to Bill Weld, Trump would not be President.
So, if arguments about the power of Trump’s economic appeal are overstated, what about his exploitation of racial and cultural anxiety?
Since the election, study after study has suggested that these factors are essential to understanding what happened in the election.
In June 2017, the Voter Study Group, a consortium of academic researchers, published a major new survey that tracked the same eight thousand voters from 2012 to 2016. “What stands out most,” concluded George Washington University professor John Sides, are “attitudes about immigration, feelings toward black people, and feelings toward Muslims.” Data from the gold standard American National Election Studies also showed that resentment toward these groups was a better predictor of Trump support than economic concerns. And as I previously mentioned, exit polls found that Trump’s victory depended on voters whose top concerns were immigration and terrorism, despite his lack of any national security experience and my long record. That’s a polite way of saying many of these voters were worried about people of color—especially blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims—threatening their way of life. They believed that the political, economic, and cultural elites cared more about these “others” than about them.
I’m not saying that all Trump voters are racist or xenophobic. There are plenty of good-hearted people who are uncomfortable about perceived antipolice rhetoric, undocumented immigrants, and fast-changing norms around gender and sexual orientation. But you had to be deaf to miss the coded language and racially charged resentment powering Trump’s campaign.
When I said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” I was talking about well-documented reality. For example, the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago found that in 2016, 55 percent of white Republicans believed that blacks are generally poorer than whites “because most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” In the same survey, 42 percent of white Republicans described blacks as lazier than whites and 26 percent said they were less intelligent. In all cases, the number of white Democrats who said the same thing was much lower (although still way too high).