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Both before the 2016 election and since, there have been widespread claims that support for Trump was driven by “economic anxiety,” and accompanying claims that voters’ poor and/or worsening economic conditions are what underlie that “anxiety.” This has, for instance, been a major trope among the soft-on-Trump, anti-neoliberal “left.” But ST&V summarize a large and growing body of evidence which shows that these claims are false.
First, voter-survey data on different measures of “economic anxiety” show that, in the Republican primaries, voters with more economic anxiety were either no more likely or less likely to support Trump than were voters with less economic anxiety (p. 92).
Second, in the general election, there was only a weak relationship between a voter’s expressed economic anxiety and who he or she voted for, once one controls for other influences on vote choice. And some measures of economic anxiety were more closely related to voters’ choices in 2012 than they were in 2016. In fact, the more worried a voter was about being laid off, the more likely he or she was to vote for Clinton rather than Trump (pp. 172-5).
Third, “Democrats and Republicans … had starkly different views of the economy—but which side they were on changed rapidly after Trump was elected” (p. 207). Actual economic conditions hadn’t changed much but, suddenly, the percentage of Republican voters who said that economic conditions are getting better shot up from 15% to 80%. ST&V correctly stress that this is “another reason to downplay the role of subjective economic dissatisfaction in the election: it was largely a consequence of partisan politics, not a cause of partisans’ choices (p. 208, emphases added).
Fourth, consumer sentiment was rising in 2015 and 2016. So was income—of all quintiles of the population. (In other words, the income of the bottom 20%, the income of the next-lowest 20%, the income of the middle 20%, etc., were all rising). There was “no increase in dissatisfaction or anger” (p. 18). And the authors note that almost-equal shares of Clinton and Trump voters said that they knew someone who had been addicted to alcohol, to illegal drugs, and to painkillers. Furthermore, “[a]mong whites, it was Clinton voters, not Trump voters, who were more likely to report knowing people in any of these circumstances” (p. 175). These facts likewise indicate strongly that when voters expressed “economic anxiety,” what they were actually anxious about were frequently something else entirely.
full: https://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/reviews-and-culture/the-baseness-of-trumps-base-a-review-essay-on-sides-tesler-vavrecks-identity-crisis.html
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