If Donald Trump loses the Presidential election, this week may be remembered as the point in the campaign when his defeat became obvious and inevitable. The number of controversies, reckless statements, and outright lies from Trump this week was dizzying. He toyed with the idea of political assassination, declaring that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton or her judicial nominees if she were elected. He called Barack Obama “the founder” of ISIS. Trump kept the fact-checkers, the hardest-working journalists of 2016, busy. The Associated Press reported that Trump confused an expensive babysitting program for the children of guests at his exclusive hotels with a nonexistent company child-care program for workers. The Washington Post noted that a story, confirmed as true by the Trump campaign, about Trump ferrying stranded soldiers with his private plane in 1991, was untrue. And Trump once again refused to release his tax returns, a break with a tradition that goes back to the nineteen-seventies.
Despite the justifiable panic among Republicans who believe Trump’s post-Convention crater may swallow other G.O.P. candidates, Trump showed no interest in building a conventional political campaign. In an interview with CNBC, he bragged that he has spent “zero” dollars on television ads (he has actually spent some money). In an interview on Fox News, he noted, “I don’t know that we need to get out the vote.” This is the Trump we have come to know: flaunting every obvious weakness as a tremendous strength.
Unlike in the Republican primaries, when Trump’s serial untruths and shocking statements had little effect on his political standing, the damage in the general election has been swift and severe. As of Friday morning, Hillary Clinton led Trump in the last twenty-one nationals polls. New surveys in the most competitive swing states raise the possibility of a Clinton landslide. Important subgroups are repulsed by Trump. In one new poll, eighty-two per cent of Hispanics have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Number-crunchers at the Times and FiveThirtyEight put Clinton’s chances of victory at close to ninety per cent.
But even if Trump loses, Trumpism won’t necessarily lose, too. Trump makes so much news in a single week that it’s sometimes hard to know how to process it all. The last few days did offer some clarity, however, in an ongoing debate about the nature of Trump’s supporters, who make up an enormous chunk of the electorate and will have influence over American politics for years to come.
To simplify somewhat, analysts have been divided into two camps when it comes to what’s driving support for Trump. One group places a great deal of emphasis on economics as the crucial factor, while another group places more weight on racism and bigotry as the key explanation. The two are, of course, intertwined: a Trump voter who is struggling economically might like Trump’s views on trade deals and his attacks on non-whites.
This week, Trump offered up evidence for both theories. In his economic speech on Monday, and in a later interview, he outlined several policies that the econocentric analysts often point to as evidence of his appeal to the working class: protectionism, restrictionist immigration policies, a commitment not to change Social Security and Medicare benefits, huge spending on infrastructure, and a willingness to borrow more for some spending programs, rather than a guarantee to pay down the debt.
The most noteworthy aspect of Trump’s economic speech may have been that he adopted many of the tax ideas of congressional Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce wing of the G.O.P. and that he actually had surprisingly little new to say to struggling wage earners. For example, his child-care proposal is in the form of a tax deduction, which benefits well-off taxpayers, not those who need the most help paying for their kids. Still, Trump has broken enough with the Paul Ryan wing of the G.O.P. to suggest that his appeal might have something to do with his economic policies, as muddled as they may be.
In addition, Trump returned this week to the issue that first endeared him to many Republicans: he attacked Obama as somehow foreign and anti-American. Recall that Trump, a notorious conspiracy theorist, was the most prominent proponent of the idea that Obama was born in Kenya or somewhere other than the United States. Trump led the effort to delegitimize the first black President as a Muslim or a Kenyan. Trump’s birtherism and then his embrace by a loud neo-white-supremacist movement led many to argue that his appeal was not much more complicated than old-fashioned racism.
On Friday, a researcher with Gallup brought some much-needed data and clarity to this debate. Jonathan Rothwell, an economist who drew on eighty-seven thousand interviews in the organization’s polling database, expected to find that Trump’s strongest base of support existed in areas of America adversely affected by international free-trade agreements and lax immigration policy. He made a surprising discovery.
“The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support,” he writes. “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support.” Rothwell adds that his "results do not present a clear picture between social and economic hardship and support for Trump. The standard economic measures of income and employment status show that, if anything, more affluent Americans favor Trump, even among white non-Hispanics. Surprisingly, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign."
Rothwell’s finding is similar to what researchers who have studied the Tea Party movement since 2010 have found. For example, Theda Skocpol’s careful work on the Tea Party showed that it was a movement of middle-class Americans, many of whom experienced a shock to their net worth after the 2008 financial crash when the value of their retirement accounts and homes plummeted.
So if Trump supporters are not necessarily the dislocated factory workers of media lore, what is driving them? Rothwell has two explanations, each of which gives both of the sides in the long-running debate over Trumpism some evidence to support their view.
First, he finds that “more subtle measures” of “longevity and intergenerational mobility” are key to understanding Trump. In other words, Trump voters aren’t living as long as they should be, and they seem to have serious concerns about whether their children will be as prosperous as their own generation is. “Make America Great Again” is not a bad slogan for the people in this situation.
But Rothwell also found a second factor that correlates highly with Trump support:
In other words, race is important. Rothwell, discussing what is known to social scientists as “contact theory,” essentially argues that living in overwhelmingly white enclaves increases one’s chances of being a racist, as “Limited interactions with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and college graduates may contribute to prejudicial stereotypes, political and cultural misunderstandings, and a general fear of rejection and not belonging.”
If Rothwell is correct, his research complicates our understanding of why voters support the most extreme aspects of Trump’s nationalist policies. It means that simply improving economic conditions isn’t enough. The Trump voter, according to this research, is driven not by simple economic self-interest but by something deeper and more psychological. Rothwell’s view is much more in line with the argument that Trump voters are whites who feel that their privileged place in America is threatened by forces they don’t really understand. If this is true, they can’t simply be won over by getting median wages raised or by bringing the local factory back from Mexico.
This week, Trump’s immaturity and recklessness made it more likely that he will be defeated in November. But his supporters will remain, and, going forward, it will take a more sophisticated and nuanced Republican leadership to figure out an agenda that speaks to their legitimate demands without exploiting their worst fears.
