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American National Election Study: Racism motivated Trump voters

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M

Makonero

Member
During the 2016 presidential campaign, many observers wondered exactly what motivated voters most: Was it income? Authoritarianism? Racial attitudes?

Let the analyses begin. Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.

The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.
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The ANES provides us data on income and presidential vote choice going back to 1948. To remove the effects of inflation and rising prosperity, I plot the percentage voting for the Republican presidential candidate relative to the overall sample, by where they rank in U.S. income, from the top to the bottom fifth. The dashed horizontal line shows the average likelihood of voting for the GOP presidential candidate that year; a point above that means an income cohort was more likely than the other groups to vote for the Republican. To most directly test the Donald Trump income hypothesis, I've restricted this analysis to white voters.
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k9s9y3P.png
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2016 was plainly an anomaly. While the wealthy are usually most likely to vote for the Republican, they didn't this time; and while the poor are usually less likely to vote for the Republican, they were unusually supportive of Trump. And the degree to which the wealthy disdained the 2016 Republican candidate was without recent historical precedent.
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The next chart shows how white GOP presidential voters have answered these questions since 2000. As we can see, Trump's voters appear a little less authoritarian than recent white Republican voters.
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3Y1rXZq.png
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Many observers debated how important Trump's racial appeals were to his voters. During the campaign, Trump made overt racial comments, with seemingly little electoral penalty. Could the unusual 2016 race have further affected Americans' racial attitudes?

To test this, I use what is called the ”symbolic racism scale" to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican. This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it's socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — ”do you believe blacks are lazy" — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility.

[Why did Scott Pruitt refuse to ban a chemical that the EPA itself said is dangerous?]

In the chart below, you can see the scores for white voters who supported the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates between 1988 and 2016. For clarity, the second and fourth items have been reversed so that the larger values always indicate higher animosity.
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tuWARLl.jpg
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Finally, the statistical tool of regression can tease apart which had more influence on the 2016 vote: authoritarianism or symbolic racism, after controlling for education, race, ideology, and age. Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump.


Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.
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(emphasis mine)

More here
 
E

Eidan

Member
NoRéN;234106001 said:
No!


No!


No!


Way this needed a study.
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Don't worry. The usual suspects will come in this thread and dedicate a comical amount of energy denying what everyone with common sense has known for a long long time: white nationalist rhetoric is effective with white people.
 
N

Not

Banned
No no no no no, it was other economic problems that made white people mad, let's focus on those

I can really empathize with other white people not being racist but being upset for other non-racist reasons

Anyone else who doesn't share that perspective is not as smart as me
 
C

commedieu

Banned
And? Where do we go from here? No one is going to admit anything. So that leaves us with Democrats needing to get their votes.

Is it possible or do we have to just invest time into getting more Democrats to vote?

There is no progress possible with the Republican party as it currently exists. Or compromise, which they have proven isn't possible.

What did Obama do, that Hillary failed at mostly. It was the turnout. But the dems dropped the ball severely there assuming a w.
 
U

Username1198

Member
Eidan said:
Don't worry. The usual suspects will come in this thread and dedicate a comical amount of energy denying what everyone with common sense has known for a long long time: white nationalist rhetoric is effective with white people.
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But free speach

And both side are the same

Hillary is a war hawk

Drain the swamp
 
C

capitalCORN

Member
Not said:
No no no no no, it was other economic problems that made white people mad, let's focus on those

I can really empathize with other white people not being racist but being upset for other non-racist reasons

Anyone else who doesn't share that perspective is not as smart as me
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Fuck Islam though.
 
G

Garrett Hawke

Member
Well actually you see that it's not racism because really they just didn't want people of colour to be you know, they really take from the social services and the economy and don't contribute anything, also they have really high crime rates, have you heard about black on black crime? It's really bad
 
DietRob

DietRob

i've been begging for over 5 years.
Really? Wow..... Unbelievable.

By unbelievable I'm mean totally believable.
 
U

Usobuko

Banned
Economic anxiety when I'm earning much more than the next minority and is ok with electing my kind that directly harms my self-interest.
 
SlimySnake

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
See if only Hillary had campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin we could have abolished racism.

Hillary, you had one job!
 
C

Carpe Carnim

Member
B...bu...but we need to lie to these WWC Snowflakes about how their kids will have jobs inhaling coal dust, or turning a widget 1/4-degree while it makes its way down an assembly line.

They need to hear the words, because that's all it takes to make them believe Dems care. Also, not talking about, or trying to fix issues that might also benefit brown folks.

Easy Peasy
 
C

commedieu

Banned
Carpe Carnim said:
B...bu...but we need to lie to these WWC Snowflakes about how their kids will have jobs inhaling coal dust, or turning a widget 1/4-degree while it makes its way down an assembly line.

They need to hear the words, because that's all it takes to make them believe Dems care. Also, not talking about, or trying to fix issues that might also benefit brown folks.

Easy Peasy
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But she campaigned on that though.

They said no and voted for the bigot promising a coal industry and who would wreck their health care.

They hear the words. And still vote R.
 
E

Enzom21

Member
Who is this shocking to? I doubt even all of those white moderates and supposed allies really believed the bullshit about Trump voters not being the racist pieces of shit that they are.
Nothing will change after Trump's disastrous run. These people will still vote for the party of bigots and racists.
 
K

KingK

Member
On the bright side, those last graphs in the OP show that there has been some decent progress made in reducing racial animosity from whites who vote democrat.

Or is that drop off just from the Democrats who switched for Trump in the rust belt?
 
C

cameron

Member
Perhaps the only new info (to me, anyway) are Trump voters appearing a little less authoritarian, and the income stats.
 
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