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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).

Generalizing about a broad group of people is almost always unwise. And I regret handing Trump a political gift with my “deplorables” comment. I know that a lot of well-intentioned people were insulted because they misunderstood me to be criticizing all Trump voters. I’m sorry about that.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

“Wait a minute,” some critics will say, “President Obama won twice. How could race be a real factor here?”

The important thing to remember is that racial attitudes aren’t static and they don’t exist in a vacuum. As Christopher Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, has explained, the Obama years produced a backlash among white voters: “Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about.” It’s like in physics—every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Cornell Belcher, a respected Democratic pollster, has studied changing racial attitudes in America extensively and documented this backlash in his book A Black Man in the White House. He described Obama’s election as setting off anxiety among many white Americans that built over time. “After a significantly brief honeymoon in November 2008, racial aversion among Republicans climbed precipitously,” Belcher wrote, “and stayed at that level until October 2014 when it again spiked—to an all-time high.” It’s not surprising that those spikes occurred around the two midterm elections, when Republican candidates were working double-time to demonize Obama and he wasn’t on the ballot and fully engaged in fighting back.

Other academic researchers have studied a phenomenon they call “racial priming.” Their findings show that when white voters are encouraged to view the world through a racial lens and to be more conscious of their own racial identity, they act and vote more conservatively. That’s exactly what happened in 2016. John McCain and Mitt Romney made principled decisions not to make their campaigns about race. McCain famously stood up to one of his own voters at a town hall in October 2008 and assured the crowd that rumors about Obama being foreign were false. By contrast, Donald Trump rose to prominence by spreading the racist “birther” lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. Trump launched his campaign for President by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. And he continued to make racially charged attacks right up until Election Day. All this happened against the backdrop of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests. It makes sense that by Election Day, more white voters may have been thinking about race and identity than in 2012, when those issues were rarely talked about on either side.

To be fair, I likely contributed to a heightened racial consciousness as well. I called out Trump’s bigotry and his appeal to white supremacists and the so-called Alt-Right. In a speech in Reno, Nevada, in August 2016, I laid out a detailed case documenting Trump’s history of racial discrimination in his business career and how he used a campaign based on prejudice and paranoia to take hate groups mainstream and help a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. I denounced his decision to hire Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart, as campaign CEO. I also spoke positively throughout the campaign about racial justice, immigration, and Muslims.

As a result, some white voters may have decided I wasn’t on their side. For example, my meeting with Black Lives Matter activists and support for the Mothers of the Movement was seen by some white police officers as presuming their guilt, in spite of my long-standing support for more police on the street, community policing, and 9/11 first responders. I always said we needed to both reform policing and support police officers. It didn’t seem to matter. But this is one issue on which I don’t second-guess myself. No parent should fear for the life of an unarmed, law-abiding child when he walks out of the house. That’s not “identity politics.” It’s simple justice.

But back to the question at hand. I find the data on all this to be compelling. Yet I believe that, in the end, the debate between “economic anxiety” and racism or “cultural anxiety” is a false choice. If you listen to many Trump voters talk, you start to see that all these different strands of anxiety and resentment are related: the decline of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest that had allowed white men without a college degree to provide their families with middle-class lives, the breakdown of traditional gender roles, anger at immigrants and other minorities for “cutting in line” and getting more than their “fair share,” discomfort with a more diverse and cosmopolitan culture, worries about Muslims and terrorism, and a general sense that things aren’t going the way they should and that life was better and easier for previous generations. In people’s lives and worldviews, concerns about economics, race, gender, class, and culture all blend together.

The academics see this, too. According to the director of the Voter Study Group, which followed thousands of voters from 2012 to 2016, “Voters who experienced increased or continued economic stress were inclined to have become more negative about immigration and terrorism, demonstrating how economic pressures coincided with cultural concerns.”

This isn’t new. Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan won by a landslide by flipping formerly Democratic blue-collar whites. The term “Reagan Democrats” came out of a series of famous focus groups conducted in Macomb County, Michigan, by Stan Greenberg, who went on to become Bill’s pollster in 1992. Stan found that many working-class white voters “interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans,” and blamed blacks “for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives.” After the 2016 election, Stan went back to Macomb County to talk to “Trump Democrats.” He found pretty much all the sentiments you would expect—frustration with elites and a rigged political system, and a desire for fundamental change, but also anger at immigrants who compete with them for jobs and don’t speak English, fear of Muslims, and resentment of minorities who are seen as collecting more than their fair share of government benefits. Some of the comments sounded like they were ripped straight from the 1984 focus groups.

Stan largely blames President Obama for turning working-class voters away from the Democratic Party by embracing free trade and “heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially.” That’s another reminder that, despite the heroic work President Obama did to get our economy back on the right track after the financial crisis, many Americans didn’t feel the recovery in their own lives and didn’t give Democrats credit. Stan also thought my campaign was too upbeat on the economy, too liberal on immigration, and not vocal enough about trade. Still, he notes that coming out of the third debate, I was poised to overperform with white working-class women compared with Obama in 2012 and perhaps achieve “historic numbers,” until those voters broke away in the final week and went to Trump.

Stan thinks this happened because I “went silent on the economy and change.” But that’s baloney. I went back to look at what I said in my final rallies across the battlegrounds. The day before the election, I told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “We’ve got to get the economy working for everybody, not just those at the top. If you believe, as I do, that America thrives when the middle class thrives, then you have to vote tomorrow!” I went on to pledge “the biggest investment in good paying jobs since World War Two,” with an emphasis on infrastructure jobs that can’t be outsourced, advanced manufacturing that pays high wages, stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, and equal pay for women. I also hit Trump for buying cheap Chinese steel and aluminum for his buildings and for wanting to cut taxes for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations. I spoke directly to “people in our country who feel like they’ve been knocked down, and nobody cares.” I said, “If you give me the honor of being your President, I am going to do everything I can to get this country and everybody in it back up on our feet.” I wouldn’t call that going “silent on the economy and change.”

That said, I do sometimes lie awake at night thinking about how we closed the campaign and if there was anything different we could have done that would have made a difference. It’s true that before Comey’s letter, I had planned to close with aggressive advertising reminding working families of my plans to change our country and their lives for the better. But after Comey’s letter sent my numbers sliding, the consensus on my team was that our best strategy was to hit Trump hard and remind voters why he was an unacceptable choice. Was that a mistake? Maybe. But we were competing against wall-to-wall negative coverage of emails, plus the slime of fake news.

It’s easy to second-guess. It’s also easy to listen to the ugliest comments in Stan’s focus groups and just get furious. But I try to hold on to my empathy. I still believe what I said immediately after my ill-fated comment about the “basket of deplorables,” although this part didn’t get much attention: many Trump supporters “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change . . . Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” Those were people I intended to help.