The White Workforce in Trump’s Correspondence: How Does the White Opposition Become More Disenfranchise than It Does in 2016?
Republicans can win if they appeal to the worst of the white Americans. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate. Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win. Racist appeal can win votes, but it is important to remember that it is smaller than the votes gained by speaking on economic concerns of moderate white voters, who voted in large numbers because of Trump’s racist rhetoric.
A group of people, mostly blacks, who are sympathetic to the challenges faced by minority groups in America. The differences between wealthier, more educated whites and less educated whites can be traced to their race.
The Federal Reserve defines the white working class as people without four-year college degrees. In the election for the House of Representatives, white working-class voters supported Republican candidates by a wide margin.
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 went for Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in the past, but the majority of support went to 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.
Is Trump Really Right? The Most White, Socially Liberal, and Most Educated Subgroups of the Democrat Coalition are Stable
Some argue that the Democratic coalition is more fragile than Wronski claims. If you are a democrat, you may want to worry that the coalition is not stable.
College-educated whites, who have higher incomes, do not necessarily support coalitional partners that favor economic policies that benefit the working class, such as increased housing supply or taxes on the rich. Many college-educated whites are motivated by issues that are not supported by the working class of any race. It is not clear if socially liberal and economically centrist or rightist college- educated whites are natural coalition partners with anyone other than themselves.
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, is an explicit critic of the left wing of the party. Begala said that the Democrats face the greatest challenge from the progressive left.
Pew Research shows they are the most liberal, most educated, and most white subgroup in the Democratic coalition. They constitute 12 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democrat — which means 88 percent of us are not on their ideological team.
Black voters are the most sensible voters and loyal to the Democrats. This is why President Biden had to move the African American-rich South Carolina primary to take on the white Iowa and New Hampshire voters.
The white wing of the party gave crucial support to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, helping them over the top in their first primaries over powerful Democratic incumbents.
Many White liberals live in enclaves of affluence, sheltered from the economic and personal insecurity of the low-income communities. They are more strongly motivated by identity issues around gender and race, but are less concerned with poverty or economic insecurity issues than liberals in the sixties.
A popular narrative about how Trump won office has been corrected by our findings. Hillary Clinton believed that Donald Trump supporters could be lumped together in the same classification as terrorists. And 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. Prior Republican candidates had higher levels of racial resentment and bigotry, but Trump supporters were less racist. Voters for prior Republican candidates were more tolerant than Trump voters.
Point to two facts. analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where support comes from. We have to know who comes to vote and how large the groups are. Voters might support a candidate despite the rhetoric, because it doesn’t mean they won’t like it.
When do most votes come from? The role of racial resentment and the Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau paper
I asked Sides, Tesler and Vavreck for their assessment of the Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau paper. They provided a one-paragraph response affirming, in the phrase “identity-inflected issues,” the crucial role of racial resentment:
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?” Along these lines, according to Engelhardt,
Understanding election outcomes necessitates more than just understanding what contributed to vote choice, but also how many of those people chose to vote and what share of the electorate they made up.
“I like this piece,” Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote. It’s nice to remind scholars and the media that it’s important to think carefully about base rates.
Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors. 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.
Sean Westwood supported the Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-lau methodology as a political scientist. Westwood argued that he was writing by email.
It’s not unusual for theoreticians to predict who will win the vote in a specific group but it’s more important for elections to understand how many voters will support their candidates. The limitation in Sides-Vavreck-Mason-Jardina is that they find a strong relationship between racial attitudes and Trump support, but while predictive of individual vote choice these results lead to relatively few total votes for Trump.
Trump had support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters decreasing, it’s clear this is not a path to victory.