Polls point to a decisive defeat for Donald Trump. But his unexpected win in 2016 still has opponents rattled, fearing the same divisive rhetoric that characterised his 2016 campaign could help him scrape home.
The US has not been so divided by
politics, religion and identity in decades. Particularly troubling are the
nation’s inflamed ethnic divisions.
Overall, polls show a majority of
voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of “race relations”.
But now, as in 2016, what matters is
the view of voters in the “rust-belt” states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio
and Pennsylvannia, which all swung to Trump in 2016 on the back of strong
support from white working-class voters.
Trump’s success depended on personal
economic concerns being pipped by “racialised economics”, argue politics
professors John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck in their influential
2018 book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the
Battle for the Meaning of America:
By racialised economics they mean the
important sentiment underlying Trump’s support was not “I might lose my job”
but “people in my group are losing jobs to that other group”. Individualised
economic anxiety was replaced by group fears and perceived grievances.
Our more recent research, using a nationally representative
sample of nearly 500,000 Americans, largely supports this contention. It also
suggests that behind the appeal of this ethnic identity politics hide deeper
issues of social disconnectedness.
With Trump’s mishandling of the
COVID-19 pandemic dominating 2020, and an opponent who isn’t Hillary Clinton,
the dog whistling to white voters looks unlikely to work as it did four years ago.
But the problems Trump has weaponised
won’t be defused merely by his defeat.
For Biden to make good on his promise
to heal the nation’s divisions, he will need to address the social
disconnection providing fertile conditions for racialised economics.
The
psychology driving racial animus
To analyse the significance of
racialised economics in the US, we combined county-level data on economic
indicators with individual-level well-being and socioeconomic data. Our primary
data source was nearly 500,000 observations from the US Gallup Daily Poll (which has polled 500
American adults every day since 2008). Our data set covered the period 2014 to
2018.
The key things we wanted to analyse
from this information were measures of “relatedness”, “social capital” and
“worry”, cross-relating these with “racial animus” and voting preference.
Relatedness reflects personal
security and fulfilment from social connection. It is measured through
responses to questions such as “I cannot imagine living in a better community”,
“The area where I live is perfect for me” and “my friends and family give me
energy every day”.
Social capital is also about
connectedness, but to do with community cohesion rather than the personal
experience of relationships. It is measured through things like the extent to
which people know their neighbours and participate in community activities.
Such connections have declined precipitously over the past 50
years. In particular, the share of adults who say most people can be trusted
has fallen from 46% in the 1970s to 31%.
Worry is measured by a simple
question of whether people experienced worry yesterday.
Racial animus means racial prejudice. We measure it at a county level using Google
searches involving racist key words.
High
anxiety, low relatedness
Just as other researchers have found,
our county-level results show a correlation between racial animus and Trump’s
support in both the 2016 Republican primary race and the presidential election.
More importantly, they also show
Trump’s support correlated with relatively high rates of anxiety and relatively
low levels of relatedness – and that higher relatedness would have been enough
to negate the effect of racial animus.
This suggests people lacking a sense
of relatedness in their own environment look to higher-level connections like
patriotism and ethnic identity.
That conclusion is supported by
social psychology experiments showing that stoking anxiety leads to exaggerated
loyalty to an in-group and disdain for other groups.
As cognitive scientist Colin Holbrook and his colleages explain:
Indeed, numerous studies have found
that initially conscious reminders of threats that do not subsequently arouse
conscious distress engender a form of evaluation bias termed worldview defence
– the polarisation of ratings for pleasant and against aversive cultural attitudes.
Diversity
and social capital
None of this is to suggest declining
connectedness and heightened anxiety is the only reason people voted for Trump.
The rural communities of “heartland America” that are traditionally majority
Republican typically have high social capital (through church affiliations and
the like).
But in the key swing “rust-belt”
states – constituencies to whom Trump promised to bring back manufacturing and
mining jobs – our research suggests worry and anxiety channelled into ethnic
group identification was the decisive factor. These areas showed the lowest
rates of relatedness in the US.
How anxiety and the need for
relatedness lead to racial voting
As he desperately tries to repeat his 2016 success, Trump’s “greatest hits” campaign has again sought to stoke the group fears of white voters.
His campaign has made some effort to
suggest he has ethnically diverse supporters, but this is largely seen as as
attempt to assure white women he isn’t a racist.
On the other hand, he has flubbed
repeated opportunities to condemn white nationalism, defended Confederate
statues, demonised the Black Lives Matter movement and made
unsubtle statements about protecting suburbanites from “low-income housing”.
Such rhetoric, though, has been
overtaken by events - namely Trump’s dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and
failure to deliver a health-care plan. His other key strengths in 2106 – his
appeal as an “outsider”, his promise to “drain the swamp”, his apparent
unfiltered “candour”, and his assurances he would fix everything – are no
longer so compelling.
But though Biden may well win the
rustbelt states, these communities remain economically and cultural insecure,
with thinning social capital. Their vulnerability to racial rhetoric remains.
To fulfil his promise to unite America,
therefore, a Biden administration will need to address the underlying issues of
low social capital and connectedness.
This article first appeared here, at The Conversation.
In an earlier version of this article, I made more specific predictions about Trump's electoral performance in 2020, to wit:
Will we see a repeat of these forces in 2020?
It seems unlikely that traditional Republicans will turn out for Trump as
strongly as they did in 2016. His systematic assault on liberal-democratic
institutions, unpopularity with the defence forces, and amicable relations with
traditional US foes like Putin will have undermined traditional Republican
voters identification with him. That said, they may yet turn out to ensure or
reward the appointment of a conservative supreme court justice.
Support among traditional Republican’s may matter
little to Trump’s chances as these voters are not concentrated in battleground
states. The white, working class citizens without college degrees who swung
these states for Trump in 2016 may do so again because little has changed. They
remain economically and cultural insecure, their social capital is still thin,
and Trump is even more identitarian than before.
But Biden is a very different contender to
Hillary. He is white, male, traditional, and his rhetoric heavily emphasises
American identity (and unity). This undercuts Trump’s identitarian appeal. Biden
also grew up in the rust belt state of Pennsylvania and is popular across the
region, as well as in the key swing state of Florida.
Finally, Biden is relentless in his criticism
of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. This focuses the campaign on a practical
policy issue, in contrast to the more culturally charged theatre of the 2016
election.
Overall, the factors behind Trump’s narrow 2016
win seem unlikely to repeat, at least with the same force. Traditional
Republicans like the “never Trumpers” behind the Lincoln Project
are more likely stay home. And while its psychological drivers persist, Trump’s
identitarian appeal is unlikely to work as well against Biden.
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